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    Posthumous harm is doubtful or impossible. — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Posthumous harm is doubtful or impossible.

    Afterlife & Death
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Posthumous harm presupposes the possibility of backwards causation.
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    • 2.Backwards causation is dubious.
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    • 3.After death no events can alter a moment of a person's life.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.A person's interests can be thwarted after death without requiring backwards causation, if those interests were formed ante-mortem.
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    • 2.Joel Feinberg's 'ante-mortem interest' view holds that harm consists in the setback of interests, not in the experiencing of a bad state.
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    • 3.The harm is located in the period when the interest existed, not in the posthumous event that defeats it.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The argument conflates harm with the subjective experience of harm, but harm can be understood relationally and counterfactually.
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    • 2.If a person would have been worse off in a relevant counterfactual world due to posthumous events, the concept of harm applies without presupposing backwards causation.
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    Topics

    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A person's interests can be thwarted after death without requiring backwards cau...After death no events can alter a moment of a person's life.Backwards causation is dubious.If a person would have been worse off in a relevant counterfactual world due to ...
    +4 moreShow less
    Joel Feinberg's 'ante-mortem interest' view holds that harm consists in the setb...Posthumous harm presupposes the possibility of backwards causation.The argument conflates harm with the subjective experience of harm, but harm can...The harm is located in the period when the interest existed, not in the posthumo...

    Similar

    Harm that no human being can repair may nonetheless be harm that God c...77%Harm that no human being can repair may nonetheless be harm that God c...77%Neither suicide nor murder is necessarily an instance of harm that not...74%Posthumous harm presupposes the possibility of backwards causation.74%

    Source

    AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    Ernest Partridge (1981)
    View source passageHide 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 passage explicitly presents the argument that the main reason to doubt posthumous harm is the assumption that it presupposes backwards causation, which is dubious, and supports this with Partridge's claim that after death no events can alter a moment of a person's life.

    Confidence: The main argument against posthumous harm is clearly stated in the text.

    Details

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