Do We Have Moral Duties to Past People?

Scarre, Geoffrey

Abstract

This chapter aims, first, to investigate the metaphysical difficulties concerning the status of the dead and the basis of the obligations that the living owe to them and, second, to determine in more detail what rights the dead may have and what obligations these impose upon the living. If death marks the extinction of the personal self, then the problem is to explain how there can be any obligations to no-longer-existing people. In the earlier part of the chapter, it is argued that while many treatments of the so-called problem of the subject offered in the literature are unsatisfactory, there are nevertheless ways of buttressing the common intuition that there can be moral duties toward the dead. Putative duties to the dead may be divided into two classes, here labeled inherited and original. Inherited duties are those which devolve on living people as a consequence of historical injustices committed by their forebears (e.g., enslavement, ethnic cleansing, or theft of land). Original duties spring from one’s status as an accountable moral agent duty-bound to treat other persons as ends in themselves; plausibly, these include preserving the good name of the dead, keeping promises made to them when alive, and honoring the terms of their wills. It is argued that there are important duties of both kinds, though attention is given to the difficulties that may arise where cultural expectations clash or where tensions arise between our duties to the dead and our duties to the living.

Citation

Scarre, G. (2021). Do We Have Moral Duties to Past People?. In S. M. Gardiner (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190881931.013.34

• Online Publication Date: Apr 30, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-04
• Deposit Date: Jun 14, 2021
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics
• ISBN: 9780190881931
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190881931.013.34