Dead people and living interests

Abstract

Suppose that my dearest-of-all dies suddenly, and that instead of playing the piece of music she loved at her funeral, I play a song she despised. Have I wronged her and acted in contrast to her interests? In part I of this paper I criticise the prevailing attempts to prove that the dead have interests, and show that these attempts rest on a logical contradiction. I conclude that we cannot wrong the dead and that they have no interests. How then can we account for our strong feeling that we ought to respect the interests of the people who are dear to us, even when they are dead – and perhaps even more so? In part II I show that such a feeling does have a sound philosophical-moral basis, stemming from the interests of the living who remain behind. This feeling is based on our relationship with our dear ones while they were still alive and has to do with our being interested in their interests, and our obligation to represent these people when needed. When we represent them we, in a sense, re-present them.

Keywords:

• Ethics
• mortality
• interests
• harm
• inter-personal relations

Notes

1 See, for example, Wilkinson (2002) and Scarre (2003).

2 I am grateful to the anonymous reader who has brought up this issue.

3 For another argument along the same lines cf. Robert Solomon's distinction between ‘being satisfied’ and ‘feeling satisfied’ (Solomon, 1976), and Jana Thompson's notion of the difference between ‘valuing’ one's projects and thinking that they are ‘valuable’ (Thompson, 1999, p. 501).

4 Note here, again, the dictionary definition referred to earlier, which mentioned ‘physical or mental damage’. An anonymous reader has suggested, in response to an earlier version of this paper, that I might now harm future generations, who are not yet existent. I don’t think that this is quite true. Future people are not people yet, they have no physical or mental traits that might be harmed. What can be said about present-time people is that they might cause damage not to future people themselves but, for example, to the now-existing environment, which will still exist, in a worsened state, when these people are born.

5 I elaborate on this notion in Benziman (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yotam Benziman

Biographical Notes

Yotam Benziman is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at Sapir College, Israel, and teaches in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications deal mainly with aspects of the ethics of personal relations.