Abstract
Can dead persons be harmed? Can they be said to have interests? Can any justification be made for the claim that the reputations or wills of the dead should be respected? Plausible, well-considered arguments can be presented to support either affirmative or negative answers to these questions. And yet, as we shall see, either response to each of these questions may appear, for clear and evident reasons, to be strange and outlandish; in a word, these questions seem to be such that no answer can put us fully at ease. In two recent papers, The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations (hereafter, Rights) and Harm and Self-Interest (hereafter, Harm),' Joel Feinberg has argued, carefully and persuasively, that, although death is the total and final end of the person, one may still be harmed or have his interests invaded after his death through such iniquities as the abrogation of his will, the voiding of contracts, the breaking of promises, or the spreading of false rumors. While I would not for a moment deny that it is morally wrong to do such things, I will,
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