Why do we find the mutilation of bodies, such as that recently perpetrated by the jubilant crowds in Fallujah upon the four Americans they had killed, so deeply repellent, worse even than the murder itself? A rationalist would have difficulty explaining the strength of this feeling, though he would nevertheless share it with people whom he regarded as irrational.
Murder, after all, is supposedly the worst crime you can commit: and the rationalist should argue that, having deprived a man of his life, there is no farther harm you can do him since he has ceased to exist as a possible subject of harm. It isn’t a question of upsetting the victim’s relatives, either, for the mutilation would be just as repellent if the man were entirely alone, without a friend or relative in the world to be upset by it. The mutilation of the body of a dead tramp would be just as terrible as that of a dead king. The act itself is what repels, irrespective of who, if anyone, suffers by it.
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