Corpses do not have rights: A response to Baglow

Abstract

John Sutton Baglow has recently argued that corpses “have limited human rights.” Baglow believes that socially imposed obligations generate rights, and so because people are socially obliged to treat corpses with respect, corpses have the right to be so treated. Against this claim we note that obligations are generally derived from rights but may not always generate them. Yet even if any obligations we may have regarding the treatment of corpses do generate certain rights, this does not show that it is the corpses that hold those rights. For corpses to possess rights on the basis of owed obligations, those obligations would have to be owed to the corpses themselves. With these points in hand we then argue that corpses do not have rights—only the living do. This is because rights function to protect persons' interests (such as freedom and possessions) and corpses have no interests to protect. Thus, the beneficiaries of obligations regarding the handling of corpses, who are also the holders of correlative rights as may exist, cannot be the corpses themselves but rather survivors who care about how corpses are treated.