Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm

by David Boonin

It is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person is dead. David Boonin defends this view in Dead Wrong and explains the puzzle of posthumous harm. In doing so, he makes three central claims. First, that it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person while they are alive even if the act has no effect on that person's conscious experiences. Second, that if this is so, then frustrating a person's desires is one way to wrongfully harm a person. And third, that it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person even if the act takes place after the person is dead. Over the course of the book, Boonin introduces the significance of posthumous harm, deals with each of his three main claims in turn, responds to the objections that might be raised against the book's thesis, and examines some of the ethical implications for issues such as posthumous organ and gamete removal, posthumous publication of private documents, damage to
graves and corpses, and posthumous punishment and restitution.

Genres: Philosophy

222 pages, Hardcover

Published December 10, 2019

Reviews

[Travis Rebello · Rating 5 out of 5]

What’s most worrying about the idea of posthumous harm is that the victim isn’t around when the events that are supposed to generate the harm happen – the victim is temporally disconnected from those events. A theme that runs throughout Dead Wrong is that being harmed by events from which one is temporally disconnected is analogous to being harmed by events from which one is spatially disconnected. The analogy suggests that if a person can be harmed by spatially distant events that never enter their awareness – say, their spouse cheating on them behind their back – it’s more likely than not that they can be harmed by temporally distant events – say, their spouse flushing their ashes down the toilet. I find this analogy compelling, despite having some nagging doubts about David Boonin’s responses to certain objections. If you aren’t on board with the idea that someone can be harmed by events they never become aware of, you won’t be convinced. But if you are on board with the idea, you’ll find Prof Boonin blocking off every possible route by which you might try to escape his conclusion. Like all of his other books, this one is astonishing thorough and highly engaging.

[K80 · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I do not share a lot of the intuitions that Boonin requires for this argument to go anywhere. I'm skeptical of unfelt harm, the desire-satisfaction-principle does not compel me, and the backward-causation expounded on in chapter 4 strikes me as totally unacceptable (the partners-in-crime argument that spacial distance is analogous to temporal distance does not sit well with me.)

That said, I'm willing to theorize! I'm not convinced posthumous harm exists, but if it did, what do I do with that? He (briefly) gets to it in chapter 5, but a great portion of this ethics book is spent doing.... very little normative legwork. Boonin is so hyperfocused on defeating potential objections that the resulting argument is rather weak, and (from my non-ethics-focused perspective,) not super interesting. I understand what he's doing here, but I just don’t see what the lasting relevance is. Outside of publishing another philosophy book, what’s the exigence? The fact that an act would harm the dead is some moral reason against doing it?

I guess my greatest objection is that Boonin's position seems to allow for posthumous harm to outweigh the pleasantness of one's life in the long-term, as one’s desires persist beyond death and are therefore vulnerable to accumulating harm ad infinitum. If someone lives a pleasant life, sees nothing wrong with their experience/legacy, and, by their estimations, had a happy existence, it seems odd to me that Boonin’s view would allow for cumulative posthumous harms to outweigh this experience. A person could, at some point after their death, have technically lived a life not worth living, even though the entirety of the harm was unfelt. This feels absurd to me, but hey, what do I know?