Are there dead persons?

Abstract

Schechtman’s ‘Person Life View’ (PLV) offers an account of personal identity whereby persons are the unified loci of our practical and ethical judgment. PLV also recognises infants and permanent vegetative state patients as being persons. I argue that the way PLV handles these cases yields an unexpected result: the dead also remain persons, contrary to the widely-accepted ‘Termination Thesis.’ Even more surprisingly, this actually counts in PLV’s favor: in light of our social and ethical practices which treat the dead as moral patients, PLV gives a more plausible account of the status of the dead than its rival theories.

Relational nonhuman personhood

“…In sum, the case of socially anomalous individuals only threatens the relational account if currently occupying a position in person-space is required for personhood, but it is not (see e.g., Stokes, 2019). (Flourishing) provides us with the tools to extract what we owe such individuals beyond their basic moral status.…”

“…The developmental path of humans normally requires that we maintain our expectations even in the face of deviations from paradigms; dogs are not deviations but a different kind of being. Schechtman's view even appears to imply that it is more appropriate to treat the (human) dead as persons than living animals (Stokes, 2019). Even if we concede that it is not totally arbitrary, these are the sorts of natural attitudes we should question.…”

Value after death

“…In earlier work (Frugé, in press‐a), I suggested that we adopt a conception of the subject of wellbeing as persisting in some manner after death. There, I argued that we cannot simply shift the subject of wellbeing to something that—while lasting longer than the biological or psychological person—itself comes to an end, such as a person's life as events about them (à la Kagan, 1992, 1994) or social practices surrounding the person (à la Stokes, 2019). The same sort of considerations raised earlier also apply to such expansive, but still finite, subjects.…”

Permanent Value

“…Corpses eventually go out of existence. And we cannot simply reject it, as Patrick Stokes (2019) does, by taking a person to be a locus of social practices. Social practices eventually end.…”