Can you hurt someone after they are dead?
In which we look into Harvard's skin book (Eww.) and the problem of posthumous harm.
Some of Henrietta Lacks’ Remarkable Cells
Multiphoton fluorescence image of HeLa cells stained with the actin binding toxin phalloidin (red), microtubules (cyan) and cell nuclei (blue). Credit: National Institutes of Health (Creator: Tom Deerinck, NIGMS, NIH)
Harvard's admitted that they had in their collection a book bound with human skin titled "Des destinées de l'ame" or "The Destinies of the Soul.” 19th Century French poetry. Go figure.
Harvard is really, really sorry.
Harvard Library acknowledges past failures in its stewardship of the book that further objectified and compromised the dignity of the human being whose remains were used for its binding. We apologize to those adversely affected by these actions.
Noble. Conscientous. But wait? The person whose skin was used is long dead. So are her immediate descendants whom we don’t know anyway. This is not quite like Henrietta Lacks. Samples were taken from her without her consent in 1951. These “HeLa” cells had very special properties that made them vital in medical research for everything form Co-vid to cancer research. However, Lacks and her family were never compensated for the use of her cells, nor were they even made aware of their extensive use in scientific research until decades later.
The woman whose skin was harvested was an human being but we don’t know anything about her except she may have been mentally ill and she didn’t consent to use parts of her as book decoration.
But she’s been dead for over a hundred years. She does not care about how her skin was used. So, should we? The way Harvard is going out of its way to remove the cover and binding, presents us with an interesting clash of moral intutions.
Princeton librarian Paul Needham has strong intuitions. He called the act by the medical student who harvested the skin, “Post-mortem rape.” And eludes to a clash of moral intutions when he says:
“Although preservation is a central responsibility of libraries and museums, it is not one isolated from wider questions of ethics,” Needham wrote in the New York Review of Books. “There are times with the ‘good’ of preservation must be weighed against other compelling responsibilities.”
Needham’s use of “post-mortem rape” seems to imply the med student deeply and wrongfully harmed her.Can you harm someone after they are dead? If not harm them, can you wrong them after they are dead? What’s the difference?
There could be a such thing as harmless wrongdoing. Joel Feinberg in his four volume magnum opus on the scope of Criminal Law lists exploitation where both parties are still better off, as harmless wrongdoing. Also consentual acts like prostitution are harmless wrongs.
Certainly not all harms are wrongful. I could harm you, by underselling you in business but that wouldn’t be wrongful, it would be smart. This is one reason why in Practical Bioethics I prefer Mill’s definition of harm (the intentional violation of a clear and assignable duty to another) rather than even Feinberg’s (wrongful setting back of someone’s vital interests).
But we could go on: Is there moral hierachy between inflicting physical pain (hurt) and wronging someone without hurting them ? I think intuitively that physically hurting someone wrongfully is morally worse than wronging someone without hurting or harming them.
For instance, if embryos have moral status, they can be wronged but its hard to see how they can be hurt since they feel no pain. Embryos can’t be hurt and its definitional question whether they can be harmed by wrongfully setting back their interests (i.e. Feinberg) or violating duties we have to them (i.e. Mill) or our obligations to their continued existence as Don Marquis argues.1 Even if they can’t be harmed, they can still be wronged.
Does the same apply to Needham’s charge of post-mortem rape? Rape is a definite harm but on Mill’s definition, do we have clear and assignable obligations to the dead women? On Feinberg’s definition, she doesn’t seem to have any vital interests to set back.
You might think it matters if she consented to her post-humous collection of her skin. But why? Again, I don’t dispute that what the med student did was wrongdoing but is it a post-humous harm as Needham is implying?
This is why I like Mill’s definition of harm better than Feinberg’s. Maybe we do have clear and assignable obligations to the deceased to not treat them much differently than we would be obligated to do in life.
Maybe because respectfullness is a virtue. We should want to be the kind of people who respect the bodies of dead people especially the marginalized and vulnerable. Mill would probably say because such a virtue will lead to more utility overall. Kant might say it’s for the same reason we don’t kick dogs even though they are not part of the moral community—because our calousness might bleed into how we treat those who are in the moral community. Maybe its enough to leave it at a desire for good character.
What do you think? Where do our obligations to treat corpses responsibily come from? Was the French mental patient hurt, harmed, wronged, or all three?
See chapter 9 of Practical Bioethics for discussion of Marquis’ “Future like Ours” argument against harming fetuses. See Chapter 2 for extensive discussion of Mill and Feinberg’s definition of harm.