Dear Jerry,
I know I’ve mentioned my concerns about necrophilia to you before. Namely, I am concerned that our finest modern moral theories (whether utilitarian or deontological) give us no good reasons to object to it.
When I asked you about this the other day, you said “I have no views on the subject,” perhaps with the implication that I should not take too much trouble to develop views myself. Would that I could not! But as a trained philosopher, you most of all must know how it is to have a moral philosophy problem: it nags you, bothers you, pains you like a rotten tooth until you extract it with the pliers of reason.
So—I have considered the problem below, in hopes that you will be able to tell me where my own attempts to solve it have gone awry.
1. Utilitarianism
The greatest good for the greatest number, the promotion of pleasure and the relief of suffering, the satisfaction of preferences and the pursuit of happiness—these are the venerable tenets of utilitarianism. I admire them all and those who live by them too.
Yet when it comes to necrophilia, it seems to me that utilitarianism, or consequentialism as it is often called, has dire consequences. It is not obvious that a corpse can suffer. I’ll go further. It can’t. The necrophiliac, however, can obviously satisfy his preferences on it. If so, then the utilitarian, instead of providing me arguments against necrophilia, must end up arguing for its allowance.
And why stop at mere toleration? How about promotion? If the act itself is net-utility-positive, shouldn’t we do our best to make it broadly accessible to those who desire it? The utilitarian seems driven to the unfortunate conclusion that we should not only allow necrophilia, but also make it a policy to routinely gather corpses and set them aside for this very purpose.
Of course, it might be a good idea to let people opt out of the program if they would prefer not to participate. Last wills and testaments could include an item along the lines of, “I’d rather my body not be outraged after my death.”
But then again, why should we heed the wishes of the dead? They can no longer suffer in body, whereas the living necrophiliacs have preferences here and now. Honoring someone’s last wishes only seems to pass utilitarian muster so long as it leads to more present or future happiness than not.
I am unhappy with this conclusion. Maybe the problem is that so far I have considered only act utilitarianism—that is, weighing the preferences and suffering attending any discrete action. How about rule utilitarianism, in which we ask what general rules, applicable to all, would lead to the greatest happiness?
This seems promising. It is easy to see how allowing necrophilia, as a rule, would lead to a net loss of utility. Knowing that this could happen to me or my loved ones after death would make me uneasy, even upset. I imagine many others would feel the same. If so, we could weigh the benefits of legalization against its harms to the national psyche. Assuming there are fewer necrophiles than vitaephiles among us, we would be justified in outlawing sex with the dead.
Have I relieved my toothache? I’m not so sure. Have I justified banning necrophilia, or only justified lying about it? Imagine, Jerry, that we are utilitarian philosopher kings, charged with setting up rules to maximize utility. It seems to me that allowing necrophilia as a rule would be worse than banning it, but even better than banning it would be saying that we had banned it, while allowing it in secret. The public would live in happy ignorance; the necrophiliac would be satisfied. Everyone would be maximally happy.
I do not mean to be perverse or outrageous. I know that necrophiliacs are exceedingly rare; in truth they are only met frequently in spooky TV shows, grisly detective novels, and Wisconsin. But how many fat men have we actually found stuck in trolley tracks? The trolley problem isn’t meant to be realistic, only to isolate certain moral issues.
So it is with my concern about necrophilia. I just don’t think the utilitarian owes anything to the dead, but I cannot shake the feeling that I do. Is this a justifiable belief? Or is it just the kind folk morality one holds before one becomes a moral philosopher?
Maybe Kant will help.
2. Deontology
Let’s see if Kant’s categorical imperative will tell us why necrophilia is wrong. Its first two formulations are:
1. “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”
2. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
If I understand these rightly, the first means that I should consider what would happen if the principle behind my action were accepted and followed by everyone. For example, I should not lie to get out of jury duty, because if it everyone lied to get out of jury duty then the justice system would collapse, blood-dimmed tides would be loosed, etc. The second means that I can’t use another human being just to get what I want. No treating other people like machines! For instance, it would be wrong for me ask a colleague to write a report and then pass it off as my own, giving her no credit. But I don’t have to credit the copy machine.
What would the necrophiliac’s maxim be? I have given this some thought, and it might be uncomfortably close to the maxim motivating many other sexual acts, if not most of them: “I ought to do x because it will feel good, to me.”
Could this maxim be a universal law for all? No! It would license us to use others as the means to our pleasure. That’s the good news. The bad news is that if Kant can object to necrophilia on these grounds, it would be because he objects to sex generally. Indeed, he was skeptical about the morality of sex. As he said rather sourly in his lectures on ethics, “Sexual love makes the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.”
It is fine to throw away a lemon rind because it is an object, whereas people should not be sucked dry and cast aside because they are all ends in themselves.
But wait. Is a corpse more like a person or a lemon? That depends on another question. What makes a person an end rather than an object?
Kant’s answer appears to be rationality. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes, “Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other hand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature marks them out as ends in themselves.”
Things made of base matter only have value relative to us and our purposes. A chair has no intrinsic value. It is only valuable because it is a comfortable place for me to sit! Other people, on the other hand, have value independent of me due to their rational faculties: their capacity for reasoning, self-direction, and moral deliberation.
I can only conclude that a corpse must be closer to a lemon than a person. After all, it can no longer reason or adopt ends of its own. If a corpse is just a material object, then its value is relative to some human purpose—why not pleasure?
Once again, I am unhappy with my conclusion. But it really seems like, within a black-letter Kantian framework, sex with a live romantic partner is more morally problematic than sex with a dead one.
3. “So Much Water, So Close to Home”
I have been thinking about this ever since I read Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water, So Close to Home.”
The story begins with a husband and wife in their living room, clearly upset with one another but not talking about why. Finally, the husband erupts:
“Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen! I wasn’t the only man there. We talked it over and we all decided. We couldn’t just turn around. We were five miles from the car. I won’t have you passing judgement do you hear?”
“You know,” I say.
He says, “What do I know, Claire? Tell me what I’m supposed to know. I don’t know anything except one thing?” He gives me what he thinks is a significant look. “She was dead,” he says. “And I’m as sorry as anyone else. But she was dead.”
“That’s the point,” I say.
Claire’s husband and his friends had been on a fishing trip when they found a woman’s body floating in a river. After deliberating, they decided against alerting the police right away. They preferred not to ruin their outing (“They didn’t feel inclined that way”), and besides it wasn’t like they were violating her autonomy; she was in no position to ask them otherwise.
What do I know, Claire? Tell me what I’m supposed to know.
Claire can’t tell him. Neither could I when I first read the story.
Claire goes on with her daily life, though she distances herself from her husband. She recalls a woman who was murdered and thrown into a creek in her hometown. She gets her hair done and attends the funeral. None of it makes her feel better.
The story ends back in the kitchen, where her husband tries to comfort her. “He drains the glass and stands up. He says, ‘I think I know what you need.’ He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other hand he begins to unbutton my jacket and then he goes on to the buttons of my blouse.”
Reading the story again, I was struck by a moment right after the initial fight, when Claire’s husband goes outside to the backyard and sits down in a lawn chair to drink beer and smoke cigarettes.
“I close my eyes and hold on to the sink. Then I rake my arm across the drainboard and send the dishes to the floor. He doesn’t move. I know he’s heard.”
What is Claire trying to tell him with this gesture? Theoretically, the shattered dishes could be glued back together, but she sweeps up the pieces and throws them all away. Something irrevocable has happened. Something has broken and it’s not coming back together.
It reminds me of the old Greek myth of the fates, the three women who measure a man’s life on a piece of string and, when it’s over, cut it. In the myth, death is not just one among other possible bad things, but the end of all moral measuring and reckoning altogether. As such it is qualitatively different. A catastrophe. A catyclysm. The loss of a unique and irreplaceable life-world.
Yes, today we can price death in an actuarial sense and weigh it against future suffering in debates over assisted suicide and the like, but I think the myth is on to something. Even if death is a release from suffering, it remains a tragedy in the sense of an irrevocable loss. (Sometimes I think about how much of it must be going on around me every day, and quickly need to think of something else.)
One of the ways to deal with all of this is through ritual. Whether by cleaning, washing, embalming, burning, or burying, the living care for the dead in special ways. Even sky burials, which look like neglect, are carefully done. In every culture I’m aware of, rituals attending the end of life generally mark the dead as sacred, meaning they are now set apart, no longer to be touched. Sacred also carries the connotation of cursed, so although many burials look forward to some sort of afterlife, I suspect they are also bare ways of recognizing and acknowledging the horrible gravity of what has taken place.
Have I drifted from my purpose in this letter? Maybe this all looks more like literary criticism and armchair anthropology than moral philosophy.
But this sort of issue has caught the attention of at least one of your peers, Cora Diamond. In her article “Eating Meat and Eating People,” she considers the importance of common cultural practices such as giving children names, or not eating our dead. These activities hold more than anthropological interest.
“We can most naturally speak of a kind of action as morally wrong,” she writes, “when we have some firm grasp of what kind of beings are involved. But there are some actions, like giving people names, that are part of the way we come to understand and indicate our recognition of what kind it is with which we are concerned.”
I think that Diamond means to say that certain actions—giving names, giving burials—go beyond teaching us what we ought or ought not to do to people. And by “go beyond” I guess I mean “precede.” They establish people as “the kind of beings” we would care about treating well or poorly in the first place.
Funeral rites are perfect examples. The deceased is beyond earthly help or harm, which utilitarianism and deontological ethics deal with so well, but even so we still do so much for them. Why? Perhaps because by marking the loss of life as a loss, the death rites indirectly affirm the value of a human life simpliciter, apart from any contingent or particular concern or case.
If so, then Claire is right to be upset. The men’s indifference to the dead woman suggests a deeper indifference as well, and the ending of the story confirms her fears. How could Claire’s husband look at her across the kitchen and think she needed that of all things, at that time? He isn’t “violating her autonomy”; in fact, in the last line of the story, she accepts his advances (“That’s right,” I say, finishing the buttons myself, “Before Dean [their son] comes. Hurry?”) But her agreeing doesn’t make it ok. Undressing his wife, he seems to be putting her in the dead woman’s place. He is mortifying her.
One of Diamond’s conclusions is that “The ways in which we mark what human life is belong to the source of moral life,” and no act or argument “blind to this can in the end be anything but self-destructive.” Burial rites mark a human life as valuable, worth caring about even after it has no rationality to speak of and can no longer suffer. It’s this bare affirmation moral value (which Diamond suggests may be the very “source of moral life”), that the necrophile contravenes, or desecrates. The burial marks the value of human life; the necrophiliac expunges it. Even if no one is suffering or having their autonomy violated, how can that be anything other than destructive of morality in general, full stop?
That, is why necrophilia is abhorrent, at least as far as I can tell. Have I convinced you? Even if I have not, I hope this letter has been useful. You once told me that the best philosophy papers are “interestingly wrong,” and I can think of no better aspiration for mine.
Take care,
Paul