Death Eating: How Ethics Work for the Dead
The principle of "do no harm" professes not only medical ethics, but also universal ethics - in cases when it comes to privacy. However, once a person dies, the boundaries of permissible intervention in someone else’s personal begin to blur. People like to refer to the principle “About the dead, either well or nothing but the truth” (it is attributed to the ancient poet Chilo, which is ironic, also posthumous, and most importantly - erroneously). But in reality, the legacy of the deceased, whatever it is expressed, is usually treated freely, and the posthumous ethics still remains a gray area. This leads to constant disputes about how much of a person’s life after a man’s death, and how much can — and should — become public domain.
Dmitry Kurkin
Unpublished masterpieces and death revelations
Posthumous publication has long been a separate source of income for publishers. Especially in the music business, where such releases are put on stream: only one rapper Tupac Shakur, who was killed in 1996, had seven of them - more than he managed to release during his lifetime - and three of them became multi-platinum (i.e. ). Hardcore fans cannot reconcile with the fact that the new album, book, movie of the beloved creator will not wait any longer, and the seal of the “unpublished masterpiece” automatically inflates the price and the interest of the public - and the right holders play on this, not interested in the opinion of those can no longer be asked.
Heirs are not always driven by greed. Sometimes they are really convinced that they are opening up a new side of the author to the public or restoring historical injustice - and sometimes this is true: Virginia Woolf’s diaries, letters and autobiographical essays published after her death helped to better understand the personality of the writer herself and her work. Sometimes the heirs simply have no choice: Jeff Buckley's mother, who died tragically at the age of thirty, found that his son did not leave too many archives behind him, but the debts turned out to be significant.
But most often it is a banal profit. And it would be all right to talk about publishing works that the authors themselves finished shortly before their death - or at least those over whom they had complete creative control. But everything is used: drafts written by children, spouses or hired (co) authors (see the cycle of detectives "Millennium" by Stig Larsson, who managed to finish only three books out of ten planned - the rest are now written by David Lagerkranz); vocal pieces, which by the efforts of producers turn into full-fledged duets with live artists (see the recent joint recordings of Drake with Aliya and Michael Jackson or the posthumous compilation The Notorious B.I.G., where nearly two dozen such collaborations have been collected); even very raw sketches, clearly not intended for anything other than personal use.
Four years later, the letters of the poet were published, from which literary critics learned that the glorified author was a racist who loved scabby jokes.
Disappointed with one of these collections, Kurt Cobain’s "Montage of Heck" collection of home recordings, The Washington Post columnist Chris Richards even suggested working out something like a posthumous publication code for musicians: "You are mortal, which means you are responsible for will remain after you leave your physical shell. Act then. Destroy, erase, burn or bury the musical recording, if you want no one to ever hear it. Instruct your solicitors to do the destruction, if there is such an option. ah for later. If you didn’t do this, then you don’t mind that humanity handles your unfinished work as it pleases. "
Perhaps this is the only correct strategy - with the amendment that artists today need to bake not only about the records, but also about their holograms that perform and go on tour. But practice shows that even clear instructions to send everything superfluous and personal to the fireplace do not save from other people's curiosity. Wyten Hugh Auden bequeathed to his friends to burn all his letters, but many of his addressees did not fulfill the request. Philip Larkin ordered the destruction of all his diaries after his death. Adherents did this, but this did not prevent the publishers in 1988 from publishing in the posthumous poetic collection the unfinished poems of Larkin and his student pen tests, which he was hardly going to take to the public. And there were more trifles: four years later, the poet's letters were published, from which literary scholars learned that the famous author was a racist who loved scabrous jokes. The scandal has settled only many years later, and Larkin’s reputation has not recovered.
Someone may notice that Larkin suffered a well-deserved punishment, but the question remains: is it correct to publish private correspondence of famous authors after their death, if in ordinary life we consider this not to be quite decent? Is it necessary to publish their works posthumously, if they did not leave clear instructions to do it or did not express an obvious desire that others should finish the case for them?
And is it possible, for example, to sacrifice professional standards, as Russian Forbes did at the time, by publishing a conversation with Boris Berezovsky, held shortly before his death, if he himself asked to turn off the recorder during a conversation? Does a promise made to a living person nullify after his death - especially if the journalist feels “obliged to tell about the meeting”, if the information turns out to be socially important, and the interlocutor didn’t mind if his thoughts were used in the text, but didn’t manage to endorse them finally. Or is it still a violation of journalistic ethics?
Death outing
In the summer of 2016, the former husband of the deceased Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, told us in an interview with Us Weekly that the singer was bisexual and confirmed a long-time rumor that she had romance with her friend and assistant Robin Crawford. For many fans of Houston, this statement was a revelation: the artist not only did not come out, but also emphasized in every possible way that she was heterosexual. According to Brown, she did this out of fear of a deeply religious mother, Sissy Houston — she, of course, immediately refuted the words of her former son-in-law. The Whitney documentary that came out this summer did not bring clarity: Crawford refused to participate in the filming, and her colleagues from Houston, on the one hand, and her family members, on the other, had diametrically opposed opinions. One way or another, the question inevitably comes up: is it ethical to talk about a person's sexuality after his death, if during his life he chose not to spread about it or, like Houston, he deliberately concealed it?
Outing as an instrument of political war and / or the struggle of activists for LGBT rights did not appear yesterday. His apologists have their own arguments, which boil down to the fact that "personal is political." According to them, with an outing they beat on homophobia, including domestic, and prevent discriminatory laws, which are often supported by secret gays who fear that coming out will ruin their career. An example is Ed Koch, who, being the mayor of New York in the eighties, ignored all the initiatives of help foundations for people diagnosed with AIDS. If this were done, critics say, the spread of HIV could be slowed down and thus save the lives of thousands of people. However, Koch, fearing that his opponents might learn about his sexuality, refused to help the activists. Rumors that the politician was gay were confirmed after his death, and although belated outing looks extremely doubtful from the point of view of respect for private life, he at least explains Koch's motivation.
Is not posthumous outing an unequivocally large offense and manipulation, because the deceased at least cannot answer the charges and the violation of personal boundaries?
But what critical knowledge does the allegedly suggested publicity of Houston, the late singer Luther Vandross, or the composer Igor Stravinsky almost half a century ago, give the public? Hiding their sexuality, they hardly hurt anyone. Is it even possible to use outing when there is an informational occasion to get even with the departed from life? What scale of misconduct does zeroing out the ethical consequences of outing? Is not posthumous outing an unequivocally large offense and manipulation, because the deceased at least cannot answer the charges and the violation of personal boundaries?
Whatever the true reasons why people choose to remain silent - the fear of aggressive homophobia or the simple desire to protect private life from outsiders - shouldn't such doubts be interpreted in favor of the departed themselves and their choice?
Life goes on (partially)
Perhaps the most famous example of the ambiguity of posthumous ethics is organ and cell donation. On a global scale, it is still not fully regulated: the organs of a person officially declared dead in different countries and under different circumstances can be considered the property of both the deceased and his relatives or doctors. In the latter, when they receive an organ for transplantation from a newly deceased person, there is usually no reason to hesitate: a transplant is necessary if it can prolong the life of another patient.
But the biological and legal boundary between life and death also turns out to be ambiguous. In August 2013, doctors at the University of California Medical Center recovered the liver and kidneys of an eight-year-old boy who fell into a coma after he nearly drowned. The brain of the child was damaged, and his parents, who did not believe that he would ever leave the coma, agreed to the donation. She did not agree with the donation of the Los Angeles police, which opened an investigation into the circumstances of the death of the child. The incident caused a large-scale discussion about how ethically it is to stop a person’s life for the sake of a good goal, even if the chances that he will come out of a coma are mathematically insignificant, and his legal guardians (parents) agree to transplantation.
It is considered that by default publicity makes a person’s life more transparent and, as it were, justifies common curiosity bordering on privacy.
Donating the dead does not always imply a matter of life and death. In 2011, an Israeli court allowed the parents of a dead seventeen-year-old girl to freeze her eggs for later fertilization. Ethical decision also caused a lot of questions.
The closer we come to immortality — physical or digital — the sharper the question becomes: do we really want to archive our whole life? And if we don’t want, then which areas of our activity and personality can and should be extended to the right to oblivion? It is considered that by default publicity makes the existence of a person more transparent and, as it were, justifies general curiosity bordering on interference with private life. But social networks and online activity make virtually every one of us public, and, almost like in the police "Miranda rule" ("You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can be used against you in court"), everything we did or said in a narrow circle, can be extracted after our death and used both for and against us. How much does ethics lag behind the technology of the media? Are we really looking for such immortality?
PHOTO: Wikiquote, Getty Images
