Eminem, Jonathan Haidt and the Blindspot in Liberal Morality

In the first verse of Eminem’s ‘The Real Slim Shady’, Eminem prefigured a thought experiment posed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind. Consider, he says, if this is morally wrong:

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

According to the responses in his study, most ‘well-educated’ and ‘politically liberal’ people reacted with an ‘initial flash of disgust’, but hesitated to say he did something morally wrong since he did not cause any harm.

In the Eminem verse, he (facetiously) expresses a similar sentiment:

We ain’t nothin’ but mammals —

Well, some of us cannibals who cut other people open like cantaloupes

But if we can hump dead animals and antelopes

Then there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope

Here, he reverses the slippery slope argument against gay relationships (“if we allow this, then…”), not because one necessarily…