Last Rights: the Ethics of Research on the Dead[1]

This chapter presents the idea of posthumous interests and discusses the significance of those interests for research ethics. It argues that we can be guided by a symmetry between the interests of living and dead people and uses posthumous privacy as an example. The main thesis is that dead research subjects can have posthumous interests and recognizing these would make a major difference to the duties of researchers and the permissibility of research projects. The chapter aims to show that after defending the very idea of posthumous interests, two conclusions about posthumous interests and research ethics can be drawn: that there is often a symmetry between the interests of living and dead people that can guide us in working out how to protect the interests of the dead and that their significance goes well beyond biomedical research and extends to, amongst others, archaeological, anthropological, historical, and sociological research.