Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sneak 831 days ago
Dead people cannot be wronged. When someone dies, all obligations to that person are invalidated.
2 comments

Promises are promises. The only fair argument the heirs could do is to claim the father didn't understand his decision to not wanting to publish the script.
Yes, but if there’s only one party that can be wronged by breaking the promise (e.g. feeling bad you broke a promise to your dead father), it becomes a bit different.

Sure, most people would feel terrible about doing that. But you would keep that promise out of respect, not because the dead are hurt by breaking it.

Promises to non-entities aren’t promises anymore.
Uh-huh. So it might be OK to, for example, construct an animatronic human centipede out of fresh corpses? Or perhaps not?
That sounds both unsanitary and wasteful of potentially useful organs. I'd recommend against it.
I mean, it would be disrespectful, and probably make a lot of people very unhappy, but it wouldn’t be the dead whose bodies you used.