Respect, agency, and posthumous wishes

The normative significance of posthumous wishes is commonly presented as supervening upon the normative significance attributed to past people. The problem with this strategy is the lack of consensus on the normative significance (if any) of past peoples. In this paper, I sidestep this issue by casting posthumous wishes as but a type of choice people make, thereby presenting their normative significance as supervening on the normative significance we attribute to choice-making (agency) and not on the normative significance of past people. It will be my argument that so long as one’s hypothetical interlocutor assigns value to (at least their own) agency, they are categorically compelled to assign normative significance to posthumous wishes, regardless of their beliefs concerning the ethical status of past people or the nature of death. I then conclude the paper by presenting the implications of this framework in the context of archaeological practice to demonstrate this perspective’s capacity to yield intuitive, actionable guidance with firm philosophical foundations.