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Being wronged posthumously is not a kind of harm.

Afterlife & Death

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1 reason for

2 reasons against

Reasons For

1 perspective

Reason for

1.The dead may be wronged.
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2.Being wronged is not a kind of harm.
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Reasons Against

2 perspectives

Reason against 1 of 2

1.Harm is best understood as a setback to interests, and the dead retain interests in reputation, legacy, and the fulfillment of their projects.
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2.If posthumous events can set back these ante-mortem interests, then posthumous wrongs constitute genuine harms to the person who once held them.
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3.Joel Feinberg's interest-based account thus collapses the distinction between being wronged and being harmed in the posthumous case.
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Reason against 2 of 2

1.A wrong that produces no harm of any kind — to the victim or anyone else — fails to satisfy the minimal conditions for moral complaint under most normative frameworks.
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2.If posthumous wronging genuinely wrongs the deceased, the most parsimonious explanation is that it damages something the person had a stake in, which just is a form of harm.
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Afterlife & Death

A wrong that produces no harm of any kind — to the victim or anyone else — fails...Being wronged is not a kind of harm.Harm is best understood as a setback to interests, and the dead retain interests...If posthumous events can set back these ante-mortem interests, then posthumous w...

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If posthumous wronging genuinely wrongs the deceased, the most parsimonious expl...Joel Feinberg's interest-based account thus collapses the distinction between be...The dead may be wronged.

Source

AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid

SEP: death

Ernest Partridge

View source passage

The main reason to doubt the possibility of posthumous harm is the assumption that it presupposes the (dubious) possibility of backwards causation. As Ernest Partridge wrote, “after death no events can alter a moment of a person's life” (1981, p. 248). The dead may be wronged, Partridge thought, but being wronged is not a kind of harm. (The claim that a person may be wronged by actions others take after she is dead is itself quite controversial. Like Partridge, some theorists think that people may be wronged but not harmed posthumously. Priorists typically argue that both are possible, while o...

Extraction notes

Validity: The argument is explicitly attributed to Partridge in the passage, and the conclusion follows logically from the two premises (premise 2 directly states that being wronged is not a kind of harm, which entails that posthumous wronging is not posthumous harm).

Confidence: Partridge's own distinction as reported in the text.

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit