[dustyleary]

> If is a shitty thing to publish it against the author's will when they are alive, it is equally shitty to do it when they have died.

It's definitely not _equally_ shitty. It's arguable whether it's shitty at all. For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result.

I can see a couple of ways to argue that the author's beneficiaries might suffer, and perhaps even that the author themself might suffer depending on your religious beliefs.

But surely it's not anywhere close to _equally_ shitty.

I am firmly on the side of releasing everything. Great works of art are so incredibly valuable (to the culture) that the chance of finding one that might have been missed trumps these other concerns.

GP mentioned that most of Kafka's best works would have been destroyed if his stated wishes were honored (it is debatable whether these were his actual wishes).

A web search turns up that Monet destroyed a lot of his works before he passed.

How many Aeneid's are we 'missing' because the author was successful in destroying their unfinished work?

[david-gpu]

> For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result

Does somebody suffer if you urinate on the grave of a random person who died a hundred years ago? Is it a shitty thing to do?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Does somebody suffer if you urinate on the grave of a random person who died a hundred years ago?

If the intent is to insult a group of people or that person’s descendants, yes. If not, honestly, no. Which is why we generally chase drunk teenagers out of graveyards instead of jailing them.

[djur]

Nobody suffers, but it might be indicative that somebody is a shitty _person_ who might maliciously or carelessly cause harm in other ways. (Obviously intent matters here, because would we ever consider it "shitty" to unknowingly urinate on an unmarked grave?)

[gsinclair]

Society as a whole suffers because of the disrespect shown. Every person committing the act you describe edges society marginally closer to a world in which little respect is shown at all.

(I acknowledge this is specious!)

[dustyleary]

It is a shitty thing to do, but there is nothing particularly special about the fact that it is a grave, or that there is a particular person involved.

Society suffers, because people do not wish to be subjected to the sight and smells associated with urination.

A cemetery is usually something of a public park, of sorts. Urinating on a random grave is around the same order of shittiness as urinating on any part of a public park meant to be appreciated or contemplated by people.

If the grave of the random person matters a lot to you, ask yourself, would it matter if the headstone were not there? Would it matter if you did not know there was a grave there?

Every time you urinate on the ground, you are urinating on the remains of millions of people.

With every breath you take, you are inhaling the remains of everyone who has ever been cremated longer ago than it took for their burn gases to homogeneously mix in into the atmosphere (which really does not take very long).