Ethical Structure vs. Hi-Phi Nation - Respecting the Wishes of the Dead

I have heard a bit about Hi-Phi Nation for a while, but only just recently subscribed to the podcast and started listening to their back-catalogue.  It’s really rather good and the first episode certainly got me thinking.  The key questions were what do we owe the dead, should we respect their wishes and what implication would not respecting the wishes of the dead have on the living?

An easy answer to the first question is “nothing”.  The dead are dead and if they don’t know that we are not respecting their wishes (which they can’t, due to their being dead), then our lack of compliance isn’t going to hurt them.  It’s an easy answer but it may be wrong.  You can quickly work through hypotheticals which indicate that, as a matter of fact, a person can be harmed by actions of which they are not aware and which they may never know about.

The example given was a person in a coma who is abused.  The nature of the coma (and the abuse) is that when the person awakes from the coma, they will be totally unaware of having been abused.  Our intuition is that it’s not okay to abuse such a person.  Then consider a person who is in a permanent coma.  Is it ok to abuse such a person, given that they will never awaken?  It would seem not, remembering that we stipulated that the person would never be aware of having been abused and the potential to awaken isn’t the key factor in determining whether abuse of one’s comatose body is acceptable or not.  Then consider the newly dead.  Then the recently dead.  Then the longer term dead.

There’s an element of the Sorites paradox to this sort of thinking, which might invalidate the final conclusion that the dead can in fact be harmed, but it’s certainly intuitively persuasive – as is the notion that the dead are dead and thus can’t be harmed.  They can’t both be right, can they?

Well, maybe they can.  Sort of.

It is true that the dead are dead and, for that reason, cannot be harmed.  However, a person can be considered to be more than their mere physical body and the mind generated by their brains.  In the Morality as Playing Games series of articles, I discussed Physical Survival and Legacy Survival, basically in terms of how both are important and how we might sacrifice the former for the latter.  Parents will sacrifice themselves for their offspring, people will sacrifice themselves for great causes and some would die before allowing their good name to be tarnished.  We all generate a legacy of some sort during our lives, for good or ill, and that legacy is a part of what it is to be us.  And it doesn’t necessarily disappear when our physical bodies die.  We do tend to be willing to let negative legacies lapse on death (albeit not always, which is why crowds have been known to desecrate the corpse of a tyrant from time to time) – but positive legacies are frequently maintained, often by other positive legacies … in other words the followers, friends and families of great people will keep a foundation going long after they have passed, or will maintain a mausoleum or a statue, or keep a project going, and so on and so forth.

It should be noted here that these are all the actions of the living, on behalf of the living only via veneration of the dead.  These people want to retain links to greatness, so they keep alive the legacy of the dead.  This means that those who would actually be harmed by not respecting the wishes of the dead are these followers, friends and family who are still alive.

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So, how can the Ethical Structure deal with the wishes of the dead?

Recall that an idea associated with the Ethical Structure is that our morality is built around a moral agent’s concern for self-preservation.  Each moral agent in inherently making an assessment as to whether the acts and behaviours of others are threatening to their own survival in some broader sense.  And there are layers of concern around the moral agent that indicate higher levels of threat as each layer is penetrated.

For example, there is an implicit threat when someone enacts violence against a thing – they are demonstrating a lack of control and a certain level of willingness to use violence.  There is a higher threat when the thing attacked is a living thing.  Then a higher threat when that living thing is a human being.  And an even higher threat when that human being is a human being like me in some way.  An extremely worrying threat is when that human being being harmed actually is me (because the willingness to harm is on the path towards a willingness to kill or destroy).  So, we consider the harm enacted by someone to be a moral wrong with a severity that depends on the associated threat – from petty vandalism through to murder (you might want to ignore the legal associations there).

We have a concern about our standing in our groups (ie in society), because being expelled from a group makes us vulnerable.  Harm to our status is therefore considered to be a moral wrong and we assess threats to our status in a manner quite similar to the assessment of threats to our survival.  If we see people attacking the status of other people [and maybe even things], or disrespecting them without good justification, we become concerned because we could become victims of such attacks or disrespect.

Considering other people, we need to remember that while there truly are people out there in the real world acting in accordance with motivations that we can only guess at, we do not interact directly with those people.  Instead we interact with the representations of these people that we have generated in our own heads and, as a consequence, it is these representations that are the most immediate to us rather than the people they are based on.  Representations are not necessarily discarded as soon as the represented person dies and so, in our heads, the dead live on as salient, abidingly relevant representations, together with their wishes and their legacies.  And when we see someone acting against the interests of a representation of a person, even if that person is no longer alive, we interpret that as a potential threat to our own interests because we could be next.

So, while on an intellectual level we can know with great certainty that the dead are not harmed by disrespect, we can still consider representations of the dead to be vulnerable and since there is an emergent moral injunction against harm, we can interpret harming of the dead as a moral wrong.

Note that we must of course be aware of something meaningful associated with the dead that can be harmed.  For example, a statue to war a hero or supposed discoverer of a land (ignoring the natives already in residence), or a legally established foundation that hands out money for various reasons (Hershey or Nobel or Pulitzer).  If an individual person is dead long enough, their desires and wishes and their legacy evaporate and we need no longer worry about them.  We do however feel a moral obligation to respect the wishes of groups of people, namely the people who make up our history and who established the mores and standards of our society – although in this case I would place this, at least in part, in the lowest tier of the Ethical Structure “obey my rules”.  Whose rules are respected relates to who is respected, which usually relates to respect of people and organisations long dead, but obeying rules without knowing specifically who established them is a fundamental (low-level but nevertheless important) method for signalling that you are not a threat.

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Should we respect the wishes of the dead?  It depends.  Are we at all invested in the legacy of the dead in question (even if we might not know who they are specifically)?  Are the wishes of the dead consistent with our current mores and standards?  If yes to these, then yes, probably.

If, as in the case of Hershey, the law is entangled with the wishes of the dead via a legal charitable foundation, then morality may no longer be operative because the law itself is not moral.  Morality only comes into sight when one is deciding whether to obey the law or not, or whether the law itself (in this case with regard to obligations with respect to foundations and trusts) ought to be changed.