How Sex With Frozen Chicken Impacts Your Belief in God

Before you say I'm off my rocker, let me emphatically say that I did not make up this scenario. In actuality, this is from the taboo test I found from The Philosopher's Magazine. The scenario I lay before you is thus:

A man goes to his local grocery store once a week and buys a frozen chicken. But before cooking and eating the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. He never tells anyone about what he does, never regrets it and never shows any ill effects from behaving this way. He remains an upstanding member of his community.

Taboo 9 | The Taboo Test

Assuming you don't believe meat consumption is a problem, how do you judge this man's actions? Should this man's erotic taste for poultry be prevented or punished? Suppose in one country it is normal to have secret sex with dead frozen chickens while in another it is taboo? Are both cases okay morally speaking or is one of them morally wrong?

I asked three people today their opinions on this and two of them said it was wrong but they didn't have a coherent reason for this opinion except to say the chicken lover must be insane. The third person, upon prodding, said that while it is "humanly" wrong, it is not morally wrong. He did not go into detail about the difference between the two wrongs.

As you see, through my brief survey, believing that chicken loving is wrong seems common sense, but explaining why this is the case can prod people into vague assertions. It may seem that this social taboo is simply a nonsensical construction created because most "normal" people aren't into chickens. This is not so, says The Philosophers' Magazine:

No doubt some people will suspect that we have constructed this activity with the intention of showing that people are just mistaken if they think that things like having sex with a frozen chicken are wrong. This is not the case, since it is possible to at least make arguments that such things are wrong. Here is an example of one such argument. Human beings are God's creations. Their sexuality is a gift from God to be enjoyed only in the context of a monogamous union between one man and one woman. Chickens, frozen or otherwise, are not part of the picture. Therefore, to have sex with one is to abuse the gift of sexuality, and will necessarily harm a person's relationship with God. It follows that having sex with poultry is a moral wrong.

Taboo — The Results

Of course, The Philosopher's Magazine is not saying one can only believe that sex with chickens is wrong only if one is a theist, just that this is a consistent argument. The intention of this exercise, however, is to show that there are tensions in the way human beings perceive morality. Are actions considered wrong only if harm is being done to another? Or is morality established as a factor external to the forces of nature?

In other words, is the formation of morality a utilitarian phenomena or does it find its basis in theism? I'd definitely love to know your opinion.

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