Can
the dead be harmed - not by their death, but by what happens after their death? It wouldn’t appear so
since they are dead and therefore no longer around to be harmed. You cannot
harm someone who does not exist. And yet, we may feel that some things that
happen after our death are in some unspecified way bad for us. If I had spent my
life writing a book that would have been hailed by generations to come as a philosophical
masterwork if it hadn’t been destroyed shortly after my death and before anyone
could read it, it does not seem to be entirely unreasonable to think that I
have been harmed by being denied the posthumous fame that I so richly deserved.
But how is that possible if I no longer exist when the supposedly harmful
incident occurs? Or is it not possible? Should we say that there is nothing that can harm us after our
death?
In
his article “The Misfortunes of the Dead”, published in 1984, George Pitcher
defends the idea that we can indeed be harmed after our death.[1]
This is possible, he argues, because the one who is harmed is not the dead
person or “post-mortem person”, but the formerly living person or “ante-mortem person”.
Pitcher
first seeks to establish that the dead can be wronged, which appears to be less controversial than that they can
be harmed. If I promise to you that I will do a certain thing after your death
and then, once you have died, don’t do it, then I have clearly broken my
promise to you, and by breaking the promise that I gave you I have wronged you.
I would also wrong you if I, say, falsely accused you of a crime after you’re
dead. Examples such as these make it “abundantly clear” that the dead can
indeed be wronged: “they can be the victims of injustice, slander, betrayal,
and so on.” (183) However, it is not, strictly speaking, the dead that are thus being wronged, but
the once living. It is you, the
person that now exists, that I would wrong if I broke my promise to you after
your death, the ante-mortem person (who does
or did exist), not the post-mortem person (who does not exist and never did). “All wrongs committed against the dead
are committed against their ante-mortem selves.” (184)
Yet
just as we can wrong someone after
their death, we can also harm them. Pitcher
defines harm as a violation of someone’s interests. An event or state of
affairs is thought to be harmful (or a “misfortune”) to someone “when it is
contrary to one or more of his more important desires and interests.” (184) Since
we do have, or at least can have, interests and desires regarding what happens
after our death, what happens after our death can clearly be contrary to our
interests and, accordingly, harmful to us. If I now wish to be buried rather
than cremated - if this, for whatever reason, is really important to me -, then
I would suffer a harm if, after my death, my wishes were ignored. The fact that
I wouldn’t know about it is
irrelevant. It is quite obvious (Pitcher argues, as did Thomas Nagel and Joel
Feinberg before him) that we can be harmed without being aware of it. If, for
instance, I take a strong interest in my son’s existence and well-being, then
his death would harm me as soon as it occurs even if I only learn about it much
later, or not at all. Pitcher finds this example so persuasive that he feels
justified in confidently declaring that “it is just false that in order to be
harmed, the victim must be aware of the harm.” (186)
Pitcher
then invites us to consider the following case: Bishop Berkeley had a son called
William who died at the age of 14. Let us now suppose that William died of a genetic
disposition that made his early death inevitable. In other words, he was always
going to die young. If Berkeley had known this, he would have been miserable. Since
he loved his son and consequently did not want him to die young, the fact that
William was going to die young was
contrary to his interests and therefore harmful to him. However, it would also
have been harmful to him if he had not
known this. What harmed him was, after all, not his knowledge of the fact that his son was going to die young, but the
fact that he was going to die young. Now
imagine that Berkeley had died before his son. In that case he would not have
witnessed William’s death, and would forever remain unaware of both the fact
that William did die young and the
fact that he was always going to die
young. Even then, though, Berkeley would, while still alive, have suffered the
misfortune of having a son who was going to die young. In this way, Pitcher
concludes, “the shadow of harm that an event casts can reach back across the
chasm even of a person’s death and darken his ante-mortem life.” (187)
Even
though this metaphor seems to suggest some kind of backward causation, Pitcher
denies that this is the case. Believing in backward causation would be just as “absurd”
as believing that “instantaneous causation at a distance” (186) would be
required for me to be harmed when, unbeknownst to me, something just happened
that very much goes against my interests (such as the death of my son, which
Pitcher claims harms me the moment it happens, and not the moment I learn about
it). The reason why we can accept that I can be harmed by what happens after my
death without having to assume backward causation is that what harms me is not
exactly the future event itself, but rather the fact that this event is going
to take place in the future. In other words, what is going to happen in the
future may happen in the future, but it is already going to happen now. “On my view, the sense in which an ante-mortem person is
harmed by an unfortunate event after his death is this: the occurrence of the
event makes it true that during the time before the person’s death, he was
harmed – harmed in that the unfortunate event was going to happen.” (187)
And
in case there is any doubt about what “making true” means in this context,
Pitcher adds the following clarification: “If the world should be blasted to
smithereens during the next presidency after Ronald Reagan’s, this would make
it true (…) that even now, during Reagan’s term, he is the penultimate
president of the United States.” (188)
COMMENTARY:
It
seems to me that the plausibility of Pitcher’s argument depends on whether or
not he manages to safeguard his account against the rather unpalatable implication
of backward causation. I don’t think he succeeds in doing that. Why, according
to Pitcher, does my being harmed by some event occurring after my death not
involve backward causation? Because that event was already going to happen
during my life time, and it is the going-to-happen of the event (which is
co-existent with the ante-mortem me) that harms me. But consider the example
with which Pitcher concludes his paper: Reagan being the penultimate president
of the USA. Let’s update the example and use the current president, Donald
Trump, and his predecessor Barack Obama. If Trump should turn out be the last
American president, it will be true that Obama was the penultimate president. That
much is certain. However, what Pitcher is suggesting is that in that case it
would already be true now that Obama
was the penultimate president of the USA. But it cannot be true now, because if
it were, then it would not be possible
for there to be another president after Trump. It would mean that everything
that is going to happen in future is going to happen necessarily. We would have to commit to a logical determinism (first
discussed by Aristotle) that denies the openness and relative indeterminacy of the
future. If it still remains to be seen how things develop, if there is still a
chance that Trump may end up not being the last American president, then even
if he will be, it is not the case
that this is what he already is now. That
a particular event is going to happen in the future does not imply in any way
that that event’s going-to-happen must be already taking place in the present. Whatever
happens in the future, in the present it is still only a maybe. Accordingly, even
if my great book gets destroyed after my death, then it is still not true now
that it is going to be destroyed. So I can only be harmed by that event if the
future can causally affect the past, which is backward causation. The problem
with backward causation is that it makes no sense: what hasn’t happened yet
cannot influence and change what has already happened. If it could, then what
has already happened may turn out to not have happened. What I do today, I will
have done tomorrow, and if what I do today can be undone by what I do tomorrow,
then I won’t have done it, which contradicts the fact that I already have done it. As I said, it makes no
sense.
But
isn’t it now against my interests
that I will be forgotten after my
death? Yes, in the sense that I don’t wish to be forgotten. But harm, even for
Pitcher, despite his definition, means more than just the thwarting of someone’s
interests. Pitcher claims that my life would
have been better if my aforementioned masterwork had not been destroyed after
my death (thus making sure that I will quickly be forgotten rather than be
remembered “as the greatest philosopher who ever lived”). The claim is that it
is better for me (i.e., the ante-mortem me) to be remembered as a great
philosopher than not to be remembered at all. Yet since the remembering will or
will not take place in the future, after my death, how is that not backward
causation? Certainly, I would now, while I’m still alive, prefer to be
remembered, but it won’t matter to me once I’m dead. So how can my life be made better or worse by what happens
after my death? Apart from the backward causation problem, this would mean that
my life would never be complete. I may now and right up to my death have every
reason to believe that my masterwork will secure me a place in the
philosophical pantheon. If that makes my life good, then my life is good now.
But then, after my death, the book is destroyed, so my life now has taken a
turn for the worse. What appeared to be a good life is now revealed to have
been, in fact, a bad life. Now imagine 200 years later someone discovers and
publishes a copy of my book that nobody (me included) knew existed (my wife
made it, secretly). I become famous. So now my life was a good one after all. Unfortunately,
however, even fame does not last forever, so one thousand years in the future I
will once again be forgotten, and once again my life will have been wasted
(provided I care deeply about still being remembered in a thousand years’ time).
And so on and so forth. The point is that if we take Pitcher’s claim seriously,
then there is no end to it. If we can be harmed by future events, then something
that happens in a million years may still inflict harm on me if my desires
reach that far and make my life a bad one. I find this implication very
counter-intuitive.
Note
that in this respect wronging someone
is very different from harming
someone. I can wrong you just as I can remember you, talk about you, praise
you, vilify you, or do right by you, and I can do all of these things without
affecting you in any way, and without requiring you to be there or even to still
exist. And I can, in theory, still do these things a million years from now. There
is no problem here. But I cannot kick you if you are not there, and I cannot
kiss you either. If wronging someone is, in terms of the postulated relation, like remembering them, then harming
someone is like kicking or kissing them. They need to be there in order for me
to be able to do it. They need to be affected by it. I cannot kick or kiss
someone who is dead, and neither can I harm them. (I can of course do these
things to their bodies, but that is
not the same.) It seems to me that this difference also applies in cases where
I am supposedly harmed by something that I am in no way aware of. Let’s say my wife
is cheating on me. Does she harm me? No, not if I never find out. This does not
make it okay, though, because she most certainly wrongs me. The reason I can be
wronged, but not harmed, by her actions is that wronging someone is as much a
relation to the (or a) moral law as it is a relation to that other person. I am
wronging you because I am doing what is wrong (say, breaking my promise),
whether you are aware of it or not. But I cannot harm you if what I do doesn’t
do anything to you. Harm and wrong are
separate issues. They can even diverge. You may actually benefit me by stealing
from me. It would still be wrong to do so. If my wife cheats on me she wrongs
me, but need not harm me. In fact, some of our most common moral dilemmas
concern the difficult choice we have to make between harming someone and
wronging them (or more precisely between ‘doing right by them and harming them’
or ‘protecting them from harm and wronging them’). My wife for instance may
want to spare me the misfortune that would result from telling me about it and
decide, for that reason, not to tell me. In this she might of course wrong me
even more by lying to me on top of the cheating. But at least she wouldn’t harm
me. Similarly, if I go against your wishes after your death, I may very well do
you a serious wrong, but I won’t do you any harm.
In
conclusion: it seems to me that nothing that happens after my death can make my
life better or worse than it is (or, for that matter - to finally make the
connection to the issue I am currently most interested in, namely meaning in
life -, more meaningful or less meaningful). Once my life is over it is
everything it can ever be. My life is what it is, whatever happens after I’m
gone: good or bad, meaningful or meaningless.
[1] George Pitcher, “The Misfortunes
of the Dead”, American Philosophical
Quarterly 21/2 (1984): 183-188.
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