Here I go again. Rather, here I don't go -- again.

This time it's "Bodies ... The Exhibition" that I already know I'm not going to see. Once again I'm basing my decision on the authority of someone else's reporting and, more to the point, on someone else's photography.

The Carnegie Science Center will launch, come October, a 7-month-long exhibit that features 15 full-body corpses from China, skinned, preserved by a process called "plastination" and posed as though engaged in the activities of daily life. Sally Kalson's thorough exploration of the topic in the Post-Gazette on Thursday was accompanied by an official exhibit photo of a corpse posed as Rodin's "The Thinker," with the pitiable, once-living thinker's scalp peeled back and his brain revealed.

The exhibit of anonymous corpses who did not consent to their own commercial use poses profound ethical and religious concerns well worth pondering, but my decision was quick and easy, best summed up like a New York Post headline: Photo Made Corpse Show a No-Go.

It was a visceral decision, made because I don't want to get up close and personal with any viscera at all.

The last time I made such a public decision and attempted to explain my thinking, there was, in fact, rational thinking involved. It was a movie, "The Da Vinci Code," that I declined to waste my money on, and I wasn't just put off by photos of Tom Hanks' mullet.

There were big ideas at stake then, too -- the reliability of ancient "reporting," the decision of this reporter to function only as an informed reader and the difference between historical fiction and a lie. (If a "historian" wrote a romantic thriller set in a concentration camp and claimed the camps were just high-security prisons that held no more than a few thousand people, none of them Jews, which part would be historical fiction and which part a lie?)

But there's an intellectual fraud that the "Bodies" and "Da Vinci Code" controversies already share, judging from the huge Reader Forum reaction on our Web site: That is the false claim that you cannot form a respectable opinion about something unless you've experienced it for yourself.

This argument is, let me euphemize, utter malarkey. Two hundred million American adults don't have to meet and quiz every presidential candidate one-on-one in order to vote responsibly. (Thank goodness, or else the 2008 campaign would have already had to start.)

Reducing the argument to the absurd, we don't have to participate in murder to decide it's wrong. So, with the "Bodies" exhibition, must a person buy a ticket and see the show before deciding for herself whether it should be supported and seen?

No, of course not, but if one's decision is based on squeamishness, as mine is, it's important to consider the issues that others have agonized over.

"Bodies" uses corpses of unverifiable provenance whose former occupants signed no documents of permission before their deaths. Science Center staffer Elaine Catz felt strongly enough about this -- and whether such exhibits even belong in a civilized society -- that she resigned.

Another popular international exhibit, "Body Worlds," does provide such documentation, but it began at the other extreme -- death as pseudo-artistic spectacle. Each corpse is signed and provocatively posed by the scientist who invented plastination.

It's interesting to contemplate how these exhibits have been sanitized for broader public consumption, their tawdry beginnings brushed away now, with permission documents and a supposedly scientific purpose providing a moral seal of approval.

How many people who'd squirm at hyper-violent movies or real-life crime photos think nothing of the soft-core science porn of "CSI"? In television's most popular series, sexy technicians in half-lit labs slice into bodies, bullets splatter through flesh and the camera lingers on gaping wounds.

We've seen the computer-generated viscera, and we've seen a flayed and dramatically posed human in "The Silence of the Lambs." Now we're ready for the real thing.

Is a change of context alone enough to turn exploitation and entertainment into edification? Does the exhibit's value depend on the seriousness of the viewer's intentions? Does a viewer's quest for information change pornography into a legitimate form of sex education?

Maybe there are some things that should never be casually viewed. Maybe there are some things that we the living shouldn't make money from. That's the direction my mind's leaning, but my stomach decided a long time ago.

If you want to see graphic pieces of people, go in peace. I can't, because I'd go to pieces.