David Boonin, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spoke at Binghamton University about the way in which humans can potentially harm each other after death.

Boonin’s work as a philosopher focuses on applied ethics. He has published several books on morality, abortion, race and identity, and working on a book studying posthumous harm. His speech at BU was a part of the philosophy department’s social, political, ethical and legal philosophy colloquium speaker series, and was attended by faculty and students.

The talk on Friday afternoon focused on the posthumous harm thesis, a famous thesis on the philosophy of death, which proposes that it is possible for an act to harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person has died. Boonin believes that the thesis is correct if the desire satisfaction principle is taken into account. This principle states that one way to make someone’s life worse is to actively frustrate their desires.

To explain this idea, Boonin used several example scenarios to build his argument. First, he used the example of a cheating spouse to put forth the idea that a person can be harmed even if they are unaware the harm is happening. Boonin proposed that if a person’s life is not as they think it is, their quality of life is being affected. This fulfills the desire satisfaction principle by taking away the monogamous relationship they hope to have.

Boonin next explained an example in which someone’s wishes after they died were not fulfilled. One character in his example had asked another to scatter her ashes at the top of her favorite mountain after she died. Instead, the ashes were poured down the drain. For Boonin, this is an example of posthumous harm, as a person’s desires were frustrated after they had passed away.

While Boonin admitted that the subject of posthumous harm could be seen as strange or unorthodox, he said it was an important field of study since much of philosophic thought focuses on the act or moment of death, rather than what can happen to an individual after it.

“It’s worth emphasizing, it’s not really bizarre or idiosyncratic to picture a case of someone who has desires about how things go after they die,” Boonin said. “Not everybody has these desires apparently, but lots of people have desires about what happens to their bodies or estates. So I’m focusing on one particular case but I think it’s a pretty wide spread phenomenon.”

While Boonin admitted that the posthumous harm thesis, true or not, does not provide any direct insight in to how the living should act toward the dead, he said that it could provide a template on how humans can act toward each other regardless of their living state.

“If you accept the posthumous harm thesis, in and of itself it doesn’t tell you what to do, but we can use it to figure out what you want to think of different cases by picturing what you would do in otherwise comparable cases that involve doing an act to harm someone while they’re still alive.” Boonin said.

Steven Moroff, a senior double-majoring in economics and philosophy, politics and law, attended Boonin’s talk to hear him speak about the posthumous harm thesis as he is writing a thesis of his own regarding Boonin’s work on abortion. He said that while his talk was interesting, it was clear that he was in the early stages of his research.

“His ideas were definitely interesting but the talk was nothing like what I thought it was going to be,” Moroff said. “He wasn’t as persuasive as I’d hoped he’d be but I definitely have a lot to think about.”