1. This is not to say that all of the legal significance granted to the wishes of the dead is justified—just that the general practice of granting their wishes some contextually specified significance seems right.

2. What do I mean by “wishes” here? This term is intended to capture a broad range of pro-attitudes that the decedent may have had, including desires, intentions, evaluative beliefs, values, and so on. Any of these pro-attitudes seem to provide reason to act in certain ways on behalf of the dead. Of course, this may be disputed; one can simply use “wishes,” then, as a placeholder for your favorite, more restrictive, account of normatively significant pro-attitudes.

3. See, e.g., Hecht v. Superior Court, 20 Cal. Rptr. 2d 275 (Cal. Ct. App. 1993); Woodward v. Commissioner of Social Security, 397 U.S. 572 (1970).

4. Cf., e.g., Estate of Presley v. Russen, 513 F. Supp. 1339 (D.N.J. 1981).

5. Two clarificatory notes: this is not necessarily a comment about the weight of the associated reason, but rather about its function: such a reason seems to have the power to require assuming countervailing reasons do not outweigh it. Second, claiming that I have done something wrong in not scattering my grandfather's ashes in Baffin Bay is not necessarily to say that I have done something morally wrong, rather than, e.g., something broadly normatively wrong (or “all-things-considered” wrong). Whether the reasons on display here have particular moral significance is not within the scope of this paper, though see Dale Dorsey, The Limits of Moral Authority (2016).

6. By the phrase “reason r overrules reason s” I simply mean to indicate that r makes it the case that an act that would otherwise have been required on grounds of s—such as distributing a person's assets for the sake of the greatest benefit to the least well-off—is no longer required given r.

7. Cf. Lam, Barry, The Invisible Hand from the Grave, 15 J. Ethics & Soc. Phil. 197 (2019)Google Scholar. Notably, Lam does not dispute that there could be reason, indeed sufficient or even decisive reason, to conform to the wishes of the dead. Rather, Lam is interested in rejecting the claim that the dead's wishes constitute rights, especially property rights, which hold that the dead's wishes are always, or almost always, normatively decisive. I do not advance such a thesis here; it seems to me that even a much weaker thesis is very hard to justify.

8. Cf. Lugosi v. Universal Pictures, 603 P.2d 425 (Ca. 1979). Asserting that the “right of publicity” is a descendible property right, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court writes (in dissent) that “granting protection after death provides an increased incentive for the investment of resources in one's profession, which may augment the value of one's right to publicity. If the right is descendible, the individual is able to transfer the benefits of his labor to his immediate successors and is assured that control over the exercise of the right can be vested in a suitable beneficiary.” See also Factors Etc., Inc. v. Creative Card Co., 444 F. Supp. 279 (S.D.N.Y. 1977).

9. Note that Matthew Kramer suggests that the dead have interests also, though his solution stipulates the existence of a “presence” existing after death and that has interests, which seems to me worthy of skepticism. Cf. Kramer, Matthew H., Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?, 14 Can. J. L. & Juris. 29 (2001)Google Scholar.

10. Joel Feinberg. Harm and Self-Interest, in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty 62, 66 (1980). For another advocate of the interest theory, see Smolensky, Kirsten Rabe, Rights of the Dead, 37 Hofstra L. Rev. 763 (2009)Google Scholar.

11. Cf. David Boonin, Dead Wrong (2019), at 113–116.

12. Lam holds that, while this may be a harm, it nevertheless fails to justify granting the dead overwhelming rights to, say, property and so on. This, as I noted above, seems right. Hence it could be that justification of some stronger legal practices may be beyond the power of a welfarist interest theory, even if the dead can be harmed in this manner. Cf. Lam, supra note 7, at 216–218.

13. For an excellent rundown of puzzles that surround posthumous well-being, see Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (2009).

14. Dale Dorsey, A Theory of Prudence (2021).

15. For a spirited defense, see James Stacey Taylor, Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics (2012), at ch. 3.

16. Cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), at app. I.

17. Notice that there are many conflicting views of how to draw the distinction between welfare-relevant and non-welfare-relevant preferences. The precise account, however, makes no difference here so long as there is such a difference.

18. For discussion of this and related points, see Overvold, Mark, Self-Interest and Getting What You Want, in The Limits of Utilitarianism 186 (Miller, Harlan B. & Williams, William H. ed., 1982)Google Scholar; Sobel, David, Well-Being as the Object of Moral Consideration, 14 Econ. & Phil. 249 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, supra note 15, at 44.

19. Smolensky, supra note 10, at 790. To take a specific case, most jurisdictions enforce a time limit on recognizing or challenging a will. If, for instance, we discovered the last will and testament of a person who died twenty years ago, those who would stand to have been benefited by it would have little legal recourse.

20. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this helpful case.

21. Cf. Dorsey, supra note 14.

22. This qualifier is meant to reflect my general ambivalence concerning the No Harm Thesis.

23. Cf. Samuel Scheffler, Families, Nations, Strangers, Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas (Oct. 17, 1994).

24. Brink, David O., Impartiality and Associative Duties, 13 Utilitas 152, 159–160 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. See also McPherson, Lionel, The Moral Insignificance of “Bare” Personal Reasons, 110 Phil. Stud. 29 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Brink, supra note 24, at 160.

27. Cf. Simon Keller, Partiality (2013), at 3.

28. Sarah Stroud, Epistemic Partiality in Friendship, 116 Ethics 498, 503 (2006).

29. Kawall, Jason, Friendship and Epistemic Norms, 165 Phil. Stud. 349 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Cf. Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty (2006), at ch. 2; Stroud, supra note 28.

31. For a developed account of this phenomenon, see Cocking, Dean & Kennett, Jeanette, Friendship and the Self, 108 Ethics 502 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 503–504.

32. Here's a quick argument for this claim: because there is no, e.g., pleasure, knowledge, achievement, and so forth to be had in playing the game, the only method by which playing the game could redound to my friend's welfare is by means of the satisfaction of a preference to play the game. But any plausible account of welfare-authoritative preferences will hold that ill-informed preferences (as on display here) are not plausibly welfare relevant. (Or, put more precisely, preferences that would be revised given further information are not welfare relevant, which is plausibly the case here.)

33. A “self-regarding but non-welfarist” end could be, for instance, that my friend wants to deliver a present to her mother; I have reason to help facilitate that if I can.

34. Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory (2008), at 260.

35. Cf. also id. at ch. 5.

36. Cf. Brink, supra note 24, at 159–160; see also Brink, David O., Self-Love and Altruism, 14 Soc. Phil. & Pol'y 122 (1997)Google Scholar.

37. Brink assimilates this to a generally welfarist concern (see above quoted passage). But it's not clear to me why this should be so. Here it is not the welfare of one's friend that matters but rather the friendship itself.

38. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer.

39. These seem to plausibly qualify as “self-regarding but non-welfarist” ends. See note 33, supra.

40. Notice that reasons to promote the ends of one's friends don't appear to work in this case. Joe's merely wanting Doris to go to Paris doesn't seem to provide reasons in this case. But her ability to, e.g., conform to the reasons of remembrance plausibly does.

41. Cf. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (1985), at 201.

42. Schwarzenbach, Sybil A., On Civic Friendship, 107 Ethics 97, 97 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Cf. Dworkin, supra note 41, at 201.

44. One might argue that while this may be true in political circumstances that are widely democratic or representative, it will not be true under particular sorts of autocratic or monarchic regimes, even (comparatively) just ones. If you and I live under a benevolent dictator, we will not bear the same degree of mutual interaction and influence via political and jurisprudential institutions that we would under a representative democracy, for instance, where we have some influence over the political institutions under which we all must live. Of course, this is correct. However, this does not entail that there are no relevant relations of civic association. Important for my purposes is not the associative relation that each person or citizen bears to each other person or citizen, but rather the relation that each person bears to the central political institutions themselves. In representative democracies these central political institutions will in part be composed of each other member of political society. But in other forms of government, they will be composed of interaction and influence between whoever happens to be in charge and the individual citizen in question. And that there is such mutual influence and interaction is clear: even in autocracies, the behavior of autocrats, their beliefs and desires, will be at least partly composed in response to prompting by subjects. Of course, there can be extreme cases in which civic association of this sort—between citizens and their political institutions—completely breaks down. But with it, or so I suspect, so does any pretense of normative justification of jurisprudential practice.

45. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.