Happy Halloween! In the ::spirit:: of the season I thought I’d write up a little guide to the ethical treatment of some of the creatures you may encounter tonight, including mummies, zombies and ghosts (oh my!)

First consider mummies, which are basically rich dead people with very particular wills. Should we respect the choices of people who are now dead? Loren Lomasky seems to think so. He writes:

“[It is] rational to ascribe rights to the dead on essentially the same grounds that support rights for living project pursuers…. Reverence for the final declaration of one who has died is not merely some superstitious residue of belief in spirits or shades who watch over the living, but rather rests on an accurate recognition of the injury that death does to the pursuit of value and on a concomitant unwillingness to magnify that injury through treating the dead as if they were simply moral nonentities. (pg. 218)”

Lomasky thinks our interest in pursuing projects is the basis of rights, and that an outcome in the present can be in a past-person’s interest even if the past-person is now dead. (Note that this doesn’t rely on backward-causation or anything like that. It’s not that the person’s interest are satisfied in the past if we respect their wills, it’s that the past-person’s interest are now satisfied.) So Lomasky would say you shouldn’t mess with a mummy’s stuff, at least not for a while.

I think this is a clever and interesting argument, and it does capture my intuitions that there’s something messed up about failing to respect a person’s will. Still, I think Lomasky is mistaken because I don’t agree that rights are justified by an appeal to our interests. Rather, I think that rights are justified because we have a kind of normative authority, in virtue of our autonomous capacities, to make choices for ourselves, even if our choices would undermine our interests in the long run.  Since this authority is independent of our interests, even if a mummy’s interests can persist post-mortem, in the present no person exists who has the authority to make claims on us.

Next up, Zombies. In light of the above, the rights-status of zombies will depend on whether a Zombie is more like an animal or an agent. If zombies make plans and confer value on their ends, then Lomasky and I would agree that they have rights against being killed during the zombie apocalypse, except in self-defense. If zombies are relatively unreflective beings though, as they seemingly are in most cases, then it’s open season. Of course you may think that it’s wrong to kill animals too, in which case you should weigh the zombies’ well-being against the humans’ before you decide what to do.

As an aside, I do think that some zombies could have rights. Philosophical zombies are not like the shamblers in the movies; rather, they are identical to you and me except they have no conscious experiences. I’m not sure where I stand on the question of whether zombies are even conceptually possible, but say it is possible to imagine something that is like an agent in all respects but has no experience of agency. Is the experience of agency necessary for an agent to have normative authority? If you think that experience is a necessary condition for moral status then maybe you could kill even this kind of zombie. I generally don’t give much moral weight to experiences—choice is what matters. Intuitively, I guess if I could imagine a real zombie it seems that they would be making choices, and choice-makers shouldn’t be interfered with, so they have rights (or something like that).

Last take ghosts. Define ghosts as non-physical agents who are conscious and capable of influencing the physical world to some extent. Can we even imagine a non-physical agent, on reflection? I’m not so sure, but say we can. It seems that insofar as ghosts are agents who experience well-being and have interests, then any plausible moral theory should say that ghosts, if they existed would have rights. After all, each agent’s particular physical properties seem irrelevant to her moral status. I could switch out every atom in your body or transfer your brain into another body and you would still have all the rights you have now. So changing you from a physical to non-physical being, if you retained your whole psychology, seemingly wouldn’t destroy what matters about you either.

If this is true, we should seriously rethink the moral permissibility of ghostbusters. No trial? No reasonable accommodation? It’s no wonder the ghosts are so angry!