Feel free to leave comments here. I only turned comments off on the home page in hopes of keeping the postings tidier looking.
Feel free to leave comments here. I only turned comments off on the home page in hopes of keeping the postings tidier looking.
Regarding “Cyborgs Taste Better,” I thought there were so many good points made there. “Efficiency” is so overused and often incoherently used. I think it’s implicit in several things you say in your post, but one way to think about efficiency is that it is end dependent. That is, any time we talk about something’s being “efficient,” it’s incumbent on us to say “efficient for what end?” Several of your examples help to illustrate this.
Perhaps something to consider is the deceased’s wishes. One can assume unless otherwise stated that it’s most likely he or she would for a variety of personal reasons not like his/her body used sexually. Therefore, without consent given before death, such as organ donation bequests, there is a moral implication involved in the necrophiliac’s act. Another thing to think about is that the corpse is property, owned by the deceased’s heirs and perhaps there is legal as well as moral trespass involved.
The probable wishes of the deceased are certainly a plausible avenue for the moral judgment of necrophilia; it would be inconsistent, after all, to disregard these wishes when it comes to necrophilia, given that we respect other instructions about what to do with the body.
This raises a few other questions though. Primarily, why is it that we respect the wishes of the dead at all? If they no longer exist it can’t harm them to ignore their wishes (assuming that bodily death is quite terminal). Is it some sort of implicit contract wherein we respect the currently dead in hopes that our own wishes are respected when we die? Does the reason we respect the wishes of the deceased vary from situation to situation, as I suggested passingly in the post? On the other hand, is it a moral obligation in and of itself, in the sense that some might describe murder as “simply wrong,” for no external reason?
It strikes me that the wishes of the dead do not constitute a hard and fast rule, and there are cases where we would disregard them, just as we would disregard some wishes of the living. There are practical reasons to refrain from honoring a wish; for instance, my family could not afford to have me entombed in a gold-capped pyramid. If I requested that my friends be entombed there with me, there would be moral reasons not to honor my wishes. If I requested (provided I was not ill at death) to be eaten by my closest family and friends, it would be understandable and expected that many of them would not do so for reasons that are neither obviously moral, nor practical. I wonder, then, what the criteria are for evaluating the validity a specific request by the deceased, and to what degree the criteria differ from those used to evaluate the desires of the living.
I think your suggestion that the body belongs legally, or perhaps morally, to the family of the deceased is interesting; it is a possibility that I hadn’t considered. I wonder specifically which members of the family would have ownership of the body (in either a legal or a moral sense).