1 George Pitcher on the Misfortunes of the Dead Michael Hauskeller Can the dead be harmed - not by their death, but by what happens after their death? It wouldn’t appear so since they are dead and therefore no longer around to be harmed. You cannot harm someone who does not exist. And yet, we may feel that some things that happen after our death are in some unspecified way bad for us. If I had spent my life writing a book that would have been hailed by generations to come as a philosophical masterwork if it hadn’t been destroyed shortly after my death and before anyone could read it, it does not seem to be entirely unreasonable to think that I have been harmed by being denied the posthumous fame that I so richly deserved. But how is that possible if I no longer exist when the supposedly harmful incident occurs? Or is it not possible? Should we say that there is nothing that can harm us after our death? In his article “The Misfortunes of the Dead”, published in 1984, George Pitcher defends the idea that we can indeed be harmed after our death. 1 This is possible, he argues, because the one who is harmed is not the dead person or “post-mortem person”, but the formerly living person or “ante-mortem person”. Pitcher first seeks to establish that the dead can be wronged, which appears to be less controversial than that they can be harmed. If I promise to you that I will do a certain thing after your death and then, once you have died, don’t do it, then I have clearly broken my promise to you, and by breaking the promise that I gave you I have wronged you. I would also wrong you if I, say, falsely accused you of a crime after you’re dead. Examples such as these make it “abundantly clear” that the dead can indeed be wronged: “they can be the victims of injustice, slander, betrayal, and so on.” (183) However, it is not, strictly speaking, the dead that are thus being wronged, but the once living. It is you, the person that now exists, that I would wrong if I broke my promise to you after your death, the ante-mortem person (who does or did exist), not the post-mortem person (who does not exist and never did). “All wrongs committed against the dead are committed against their ante-mortem selves.” (184) 1 George Pitcher, “The Misfortunes of the Dead”, American Philosophical Quarterly 21/2 (1984): 183-188.