Vladimir Nabokov had requested that his last work, fragments of an unfinished novel The Original of Laura, be destroyed after his death. But it won’t be, as his son Dmitri has (after tortuous deliberation) decided to go against his father’s wishes and publish the work. Via Marginal Revolution, which has several previous discussions.
Tom Stoppard, whose opinion is worth listening to, thinks it should be destroyed:
It’s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. There is no superior imperative. The argument about saving it for the “greater good” of the literary world is null, as far as I’m concerned. There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces. But our desire to possess them all is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that’s going and it’s a tragedy if we don’t. It’s nonsense, an impossible desire for absoluteness. At best, it’s natural curiosity – personally, I’d love to read Nabokov’s last work, but since he didn’t want me to read it, I won’t – and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.
Stoppard is right about the neurosis, and ultimately I agree with his conclusion, but I can’t quite buy his reasoning. Hard-nosed, unsentimental materialist that I am, I don’t think that the wishes of dead people should carry much weight in and of themselves. They’re dead, they don’t care any more.
However, live people do count, and they are faced with subtle and competing interests (as various MR commenters have pointed out). On the one hand, sure, we might be curious about Nabokov’s last work. However, there is some degree to which the moral control over the disposition of a manuscript accrues to the family or whoever survives the author. If they felt strongly that they would be happier knowing that the author’s wishes had been respected, that would be a perfectly valid reason for carrying them out. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here; after thinking through the issues very carefully, Dmitri Nabokov came down on the side of letting it become public, even concocting a little story to excuse the apparent contravenance of his father’s instructions:
From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!’”
But there is one more set of interests to be accounted for: those of authors and creators who are not yet dead, but someday will be. (Most of us, I imagine.) If I create something right now, I certainly have the right to destroy it. But I might also want to have the confidence that, if I leave instructions that it should be destroyed, they will be carried out. Otherwise I might be tempted to destroy it ahead of time, and regret it later. More generally, if we treat the stated wishes of the deceased as strictly irrelevant in the calculation of social goods, wills and other sorts of legacies will become relatively meaningless. It’s not just about respecting the wishes of the dead; it’s about letting living people live with some confidence that their reasonable requests will be carried out once they’re gone.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:22 am
I’m glad you touched on that last point, I was worried it would be missing as I read through the post.
You’ve presented all the angles but haven’t claimed an absolute solution. Respectable!
April 25th, 2008 at 11:43 am
We owe almost all of Kafka’s work – his novels, most of his stories – to the decision of his executor Max Brod to ignore Kafka’s request that they be burned. Brod published Kafka’s unfinished works, including The Castle and The Trial, and the world is better off for it.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I see I was beat to the Kafka punch.
Old truth: “If you want a job done properly, do it yourself.” That goes here as well – don’t want people to read your slashfiction after you’re dead, then encrypt your files. And so on and so forth.
The Hat weighed in on this a while back.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
The world thinks they are better off for it, but it never mattered whether or not Kafka’s works were published. The ideas in Kafka’s (or anyone else’s) works are still present in society, and whether or not those are expressed in words, or actions, or paintings, or music is immaterial. The same is true about this. I think if anyone doesn’t want something published, burn it yourself before you croak or don’t write anything to begin with. It all becomes a whole bunch of reverse reverse psychology to satisfy some unconscious desire to actually have it published, and the sheer popularity (and likely undue popularity) ensuing from one’s apparent lack of desire or adamant disapproval for it to be published.
If you want to contribute to society by writing a piece, great. Do so. It will contribute something at the very least and that will advance society in some way. If you write something, and make a big deal about making sure that its “destroyed” after you die, you are taking some measure of creativity that began as inspiration in the bowels of the society you grew up within, and refusing that same society their own ideas (big whoopie). It’s pompous. It’s separatist. It’s delusional.
Frankly, I’d rather not read anything someone wrote just for themselves. Who should read something like that? The person that wrote it. That’s it. Certainly won’t make a huge impact if the person created such work based on the mindset that it isn’t worthy of the public eye. If it’s released anyway, and people say “Look, what a saving grace that this work was published, it’s done so much for society,” is complete ludicrous. The issues or ideas declared in such work is still present in society, and will still impact society, with or without the two cents of a schmoe that wants to make a big deal about whether or not they will “make a difference.” The issues make the difference, the ideas make a difference and what we all do with those ideas or issues, or which of us feel strongly enough about them to stand up and spread them, not cover them up with a psychological game like an attention-starved adolescent. People wish so hard they could personalize changes in society, slap their name on the side and call the revolution their own. It’s not. Change happens anyways.
Literature is significantly important to progress, as is discovery, experimentation, and creative thought. These should be shared, for who provided you with your potential to create? The rest of the universe that isn’t you. Who decides to actually embrace that potential? You. So share it, otherwise don’t piss about it.
Wayne
April 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The world may have been marginally better off if Michael Jordan had been forced to keep playing basketball rather than spend two years as a minor-league baseball player. But I think it’s vastly better off because we allow individuals to make their own creative choices.
Not that it seems to matter; empirically, people seem reluctant to destroy manuscripts by deceased authors, no matter what they may have requested.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
To echo Sean, I think most people have trouble destroying all types of created works and records. Digital photos is a case in point. How many billions of crappy digital photos are languishing in flash memory cards and on computer disk that will never ever be of any interest to anyone, probably even the person who took them?
I may be an extreme case, but in all the thousands of photos I’ve taken since I bought my first digital camera, I must have deleted no more than a handful. Hundreds of bad photos still sit around in their original directories as they were downloaded from the camera going unviewed and unmissed for years at a time.
It’s the thought that something, no matter now unimportant in the scheme of things, is irretrievably lost when you destroy it, that makes people reluctant to pull the trigger. It may not be rational, but its human nature.
In the case of manuscripts of deceased people, the effect is magnified. Destroy their work, and you are destroying a piece of their memory, a piece of them, in effect — especially so if there is no such thing as life after death. Once a few decades have passed and first-hand memories of people fade, we are left only with the records they leave behind.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I’m not quite understanding what would motivate someone to want an artistic work that they have created to be destroyed only after they are dead… What are they doing with it until then? Is it incomplete, but actively being worked on? If so, then it leaves behind an understanding of the creative process at the very least.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that, in the world of the living, the needs of the living take precedence. If you really wish to control how your property (intellectual or material) is disposed of, disposed of it while you are still alive. Assume that once you’re dead, any instructions you’ve left behind that can be contested will be contested. Unless, of course, you’ve successfully instilled in your descendents the fear of vengeful ancestors.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
One aspect that has not been adressed in this discussion is the sons obligation to uphold his fathers wishes. It would seem to me even if the son felt society would benefit from the work, his personal loyalty to his father would outweigh his supposed social responsibility.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Wow, I thought the academic world was ruthless.
But in the literary world it’s ‘perish, and publish’.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
So does this mean that I might as well get rid of the paragraph in my will asking my executor to kill my children?
April 25th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
There are interesting aspects to this question. I think the proper course of action is for living people to behave as they would if the now dead person were living. This is not because I care about the dead, but because I care about a person’s ability to enact their will when they are alive, even if they cannot be present to witness the completion. The problem is, this doesn’t fully address the question.
The analogy I’m trying to draw above is this: we can certainly imagine two scenarios that I think should be equivalent, (1) a dead person wills money to an institution for a certain cause, (2) a live person gives money to an institution for a certain cause, but doesn’t intend to check that the money is used as she stipulates (and the institution knows this). From the institution’s point of view, the living and dead person are equivalent. Normally, we consider it dishonorable to take advantage of the trusting living, so I think the same should apply to the dead.
Let’s try to draw the analogy out. Maybe the institution doesn’t want to accept money for a certain cause. In this case, it seems the honorable thing is to refuse the payment. But, what if the institution first accepts the money for a certain cause, but later changes its mind? Then it seems the honorable thing is to give the remaining money back. These are what one would do if the donor were living. If the donor is dead, then the money goes back to the estate. The estate now belongs to someone else, and that person can do as he likes, perhaps even giving the money to the original institution but for some different cause.
Nabokov’s book situation is interesting because, the ‘contract’ to destroy the book was apparently made with his son, who presumably is also his heir. So, the son may change his mind about destroying the book (as he is free to do, if you disagree, consider if Nabokov’s demand was for something the son came to find morally objectionable), in which case by ‘breach of contract’ the son should no longer be in charge of the book. But then the book returns to the ‘estate’, and now the son inherits it and is free to do what he likes.
This is the way I view this, assuming the facts are straight (about who’s the beneficiary etc). It certainly doesn’t fit with Nabokov’s original wishes, but I would say the problem here is that Nabokov did not plan carefully. He should have charged someone other than an heir to destroy the book (like a lawyer) or done a better job convincing his son of the importance of destroying the book. I view this as like if I gave money to an institution, with no (or few) stipulations, and later learned that the money was being used for something I found objectionable. I don’t think that I then have a right to demand the money back, or to ask that it not be used as such. This is unfortunate for me, but it’s my fault for not being more careful in drawing up the contract.
April 25th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Does anyone know if Dimitri is keeping the rights and potential royalties from this book? Because if he inherited the estate, he has 75 years from the death of the author to profit from the works before copyright lapses. So there is a potential conflict of interest there. It could be solved by an entrepreneur setting up a company whose sole purpose is to burn books; authors wishing to have their works destroyed could bequeath their material (plus the handling fee) to said company in their wills.
I reckon that barring instant premature death, an author who doesn’t have the balls to destroy his own work while he can has no right to complain that others are unwilling to do his dirty work. Such folks seem to be the literary equivalents of people who commit suicide by cop.
And Lee, I see your Kafka and raise you an Emily Dickinson.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
1. Sure makes one suspect a failed fatherhood though. Didn’t raise a boy with much of a sense of ethics, did he?
2. “…my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!’”. Just like the Virgin Mary appears before priests to say it’s OK to butt-foop the altar boys, God told George Bush it was OK to occupy Iraq, and Katrina was God’s punishment of New Orleans for scheduling a gay-support march.
3. I believe we should publish whatever equation Sean has begun to write on the whiteboard at the time of his fatal heart attack. We can call it his explanation of the Big Bang origin, or his refutation of string theory. Then we can all laugh about how stupid it is, and write reviews about how stupid his cosmology was because, boy, he really screwed up on that equation, didn’t he? After all, he’ll be dead, and it doesn’t matter to him any more what people think about him or his ideas.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I think that following the wishes of a person who is now dead is a matter of respect. (If there’s some urgency to do it anyway, OK, but they shouldn’t matter less for that than the wishes of a now living person.) That “They’re dead, they don’t care any more” is beside the point of this key ethical notion, I guess you either get it or you don’t.
I dig this quote: “There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces.”
Wow, let’s start wrangling over “modal realism” and the reality of Platonic model universes again!
April 25th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
What if Nabokov briefly reappears as a Boltzmann Brain and sees what has happened?
April 25th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Suppose the son publishes the manuscript. Who exactly would seek redress in court? No one.
If Nabokov really wanted the manuscript to be burned, he could have willed it to someone who he would have had great confidence would have followed his wishes, like a law firm. The law firm, had he picked wisely, would have a reputation to uphold and would have a strong incentive to do what it was told. The son apparently thinks any damage to his reputation is worth it, which is a choice the state should not prevent him from making. I mean, we are all free to judge him, but I do not want to live in a world where other people’s judgments on trivial matters like this can cause the state to intervene in what is really just a family matter.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Many great artists have destroyed works both complete and incomplete as they neared death. (Beethoven, on the other hand, deliberately left his piano sonata op. 111 incomplete to simulate his mortal incompletion.) Having pride in their oeuvre, they do not want to dilute its value with accompanying work deemed imperfect. Was Nabokov merely being coy, as Max Brod, Kafka’s pal, unilaterally decided the celestrial Czech had been with his dying insntructions, undertaking, in a perhaps self-serving way as his deviant executor and literary amanuensis, to publish the entire remaining material, including love letters to and from various women, as only a few stories had been published till then? To his credit he was one of a few associates who recognized K.’s genius. (Is there a soul who has read these works who does not believe humanity is immeasurably better for Brod’s perfidious action? The profundity of K’s tortured theism may be replicated elsewhere but I’ve yet to discover it. I imagine K. would be deeply pissed and self-lacerating for making a poor choice of posthumous surrogates.) The titanic Nabokov approaches diametric opposition to Milquetoast Franz but I suspect he might contemplate Biblical filicide, but perhaps only fictively as vis-a-vis eroticism in Lolita; who else but Joyce in recent centuries chiseled prose to the exquisite perfection of N.
Would Leonardo wish to have Mona Lisa exhibited if he had completed all save the mouth?
April 25th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I believe Vera Nabokov once dramatically intervened to prevent Vladimir from burning the manuscript of Lolita. As someone who has spent almost as much time re-reading Nabokov as all other authors combined, I am glad she did, and I don’t think taking the burning request at face value is necessarily the way to approach this. Also, the manuscript was left to Dmitri by Vera, not VN, and she could have burned the thing, too, but thankfully had a nice habit of saving the masterpieces of her husband.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:39 am
Nabokov’s final jottings may not be much concern to a literary phillistine like me, and I dare say to many reading this. But suppose it had been a stack of notes and embryonic papers of famous scientist or mathematician, like Poincare or Einstein (at the time of their death)? Hmm, then the moral dilemma gets rather trickier, although no different in principle.
I’d say keep the papers, regardless of their creators’ former wishes. There must be some chance these may advance knowledge, even if only slightly, and the possibility of major insights being gleaned. I mean suppose someone had burned Ramanujan’s notebooks after his death, even though most of these were not in systematic form?
Also, the dead have no rights in common law, and no means of retribution unless you believe in ghosts!
A related moral question arose recently in the UK. A woman whose husband had been killed in Iraq wished to be inseminated by his preserved sperm. Although that seems a deserving case (and I’m not sure what the courts decided in the event) it seems intrinsically wrong to me – For the purpose of reproduction, a person’s DNA should die with them. Otherwise whatever next? A clone of Tutankamen, or more offspring of William the Conqueror, using DNA winkled from his thigh bone in Caen? Or hordes of new descendents of Nobel prize winners, born long after their death?
Of course moral issues are relative, and the opposite might be true of this use of post-mortem DNA after a nuclear war, say.
April 26th, 2008 at 3:51 am
Everyone who says that Dmitri is failing in his filial and ethical duty should also recognize that Vladimir bequeathed Vera and thence Dmitri a dilemma, by putting them in this position of making this decision. One cannot lay heavy, ambiguous ethical choices on persons and then be horrified if they make choices different from yours. Nabokov the elder, notoriously a perfectionist, might have wished his final book burnt if it had been in anything other than its final state. I wonder what he would have ordered if had it been set in type but he had been unable to review the galley proofs before his death.
Dmitri is under no obligation to preserve the work for the good of the world. However, neither is he under an obligation to destroy it to reassure Sean, Tom Stoppard or anyone else that every person’s posthumous orders must be respected. Nabokov’s reputation is secure; if the work is a shambles no one will think the worse of Vladimir, and probably not even of Dmitri.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I want every painting – print – watercolor – drawing – I still have destroyed at my death.
Never mind the toxic lead paint – or the income tax deductions I have claimed for supplies.
April 26th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Hey Daisy Rose, no way will we burn that lot! Some of those paintings belong in a gallery, or we could sell them on ebay, or at worst I could find room for a few on my walls
I’m not a big fan of watercolour, preferring acrylic or oil as the results are rather more vivid (if less subtle); but most of your portraits really bring out the sitter’s character, which is the main thing.
For my taste some could so with a little more crispness and sharper detail. But time is money I guess, and anyway at least all the bits and pieces are in the right places, unlike ghastly modern “art”!
April 26th, 2008 at 10:07 am
For a science blog with a lot of good atheist/agnostic readers, there is a surprising amount of concern for the wishes of decomposing corpses. The dead don’t matter, the living do. The only sensible reply to this thread has been from the poster who said “If you want the job done right, do it yourself”. Otherwise the living have no obligation from someone who simply is no longer in the conversation.
April 26th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Lee Sawyer, can we presume then you won’t be leaving a will?
April 26th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Just as no promise can survive the tricks of time – No artist can say what of there works has value for future generations -
John, Thankyou but I am a modern artist!
April 26th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I actually think there is something slightly unethical about any author destroying any work that would be of interest to the public, even if it’s an editorial decision made while the author is alive–it’s their “right” to do so, but somewhat unethical nonetheless. As an extreme analogy, imagine an inventor who invents some wonderfully beneficial new technology, or a medical researcher discovers a cure for some fatal disease–does the fact that these things are their intellectual property make it ethical for them to hide the discovery from the public, and destroy all their notes on the subject? Obviously art is not the same, but I’d tend to see it as a lesser version of the same thing. I don’t see “intellectual property” as a fundamental right, but rather something that society agrees to uphold because it’s in the public interest to encourage creators. If we lived in a post-scarcity economy where creators could live just fine without making any profit off their work, and it was shown that creators would be just as inclined to create without monetary incentives (aside from the idealistic urge to make art, fame and social status would still be incentives), I would think it would be best to treat all intellectual property as public property (maybe filesharing is a hint of things to come).
April 26th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
As far as we know, Shakespeare didn’t arrange for the publication of any of his plays. Just a thought.
April 26th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
#26 – What?!?
1) You’re two steps away from compelling intellectuals to raid their brains ‘for the public good’.
2) What is ‘beneficial’ eventually may at first be decried as ‘heresy’, ‘lunacy’ or worse. (The way around this is to publish controversial work anonymously, which has it’s own set of drawbacks.) It is in the public interest to encourage creators, but the ‘public’ doesn’t always collectively behave as though they wish to entertain new ideas which challenge their existing beliefs. Where do personal safety considerations come in?
April 26th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
J.C. Of course, I have will – I want to save my kids any legal hassles like having to go through probate. But they have no obligations to me once I am gone. Criminy, I would hate to think the opposite would even be the case! All I ask is a simple equestrian statue dedicated in my honor…
Another aspect of the Kafka case, though not necessarily of the Nabokov issue, is that Kafka was something of a borderline personality, suffering from clinical depression. Did he really want his works destroyed, or was this the result of a bout of depression talking?
April 26th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
1) You’re two steps away from compelling intellectuals to raid their brains ‘for the public good’.
Er, how so? I’m only saying that I don’t think “intellectual property” is an ethical necessity, but just something that society agrees on for the purposes of encouraging creators. And we place limits on this which don’t apply to physical property, like copyright expiring after a certain length of time. There are also certain classes of ideas which creators don’t “own” even today (except in the sense of the ideas being attributed to them), like novel mathematical theorems or theories of physics. Presumably you wouldn’t say we are therefore two steps away from compelling mathematicians and physicists to raid their brains for the public good!
2) What is ‘beneficial’ eventually may at first be decried as ‘heresy’, ‘lunacy’ or worse. (The way around this is to publish controversial work anonymously, which has it’s own set of drawbacks.) It is in the public interest to encourage creators, but the ‘public’ doesn’t always collectively behave as though they wish to entertain new ideas which challenge their existing beliefs. Where do personal safety considerations come in?
Look, if a creator would really be put in danger by expressing certain ideas, I’d sympathize with them if they kept the ideas secret, although publishing anonymously would be an option. But in countries with strong traditions of upholding free speech this sort of thing isn’t all that common, and in any case it doesn’t apply to Nabokov’s work which was under discussion here.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Tom Stoppard is wrong. In a parallel universe Nabokov could have destroyed his manuscript before dying; in this Universe he didn’t. He could also have changed his mind. The manuscript is there, Nabokov is not. It is no longer his n-years-old frozen will that should determine the outcome of this story. In fact, strictly speaking, it cannot do it directly.
April 26th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
The last paragraph of Sean’s post says it all.
By suggesting the possibility that requests made while one is living can be disregarded after one’s death, we create a moral hazard.
Forget about “respect” for the time being and realize that precisely because our actions toward the dead affect the actions and fears of the now-living, we cannot afford to cavalierly disregard the wishes of the dead whenever it suits us.
In the past it was certainly commoner to consider it a matter of honor to burn a dead friend’s letters unread (unless he asked them to be preserved). At times unwritten social contracts existed that we would protect one another’s wishes and each other’s privacy. It is perhaps not a surprise that today we have created an atmosphere in which mutual trust is at historically low levels.
If you, personally, feel that your wishes ought not matter after your death, then you have every freedom to allow that principle to guide your actions. But it saddens me to think that my own preferences will be stripped away by people who purport to speak for me after I am fed to the worms.
I am twenty-four years old. I probably won’t die soon. Nabokov’s manuscript should have been burnt. Should I die tonight, I hope that those in whom I place my utmost trust will do for me as I once would have done for myself.
April 26th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
It seems to me that the solution here is pretty simple, and doesn’t require much discussion. If Nabokov wanted his manuscript destroyed, but was not bothered by the possibility that his son might decide otherwise, he should simply ask his son to destroy it after his death. But, if he wanted it destroyed no matter what, he should have left it in his will to someone else for the sole purpose of destroying it. He could also sign a legally binding contract with this other person that requires the manuscript be destroyed upon his death. This third party might be paid up front, in return. But it appears that Nabokov made his wishes known, but ultimately, he left the decision up to his son. If he really, really wanted it destroyed, he could have taken stronger measures to ensure that it was.
April 26th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Dave: Yes. Exactly.
I think it is important here to distinguish between two kinds of “should”. For instance, that everyone “should” follow the golden rule is a fine point of view to take, and we are free to pile moral condemnation on those who don’t follow it. On the other hand, I think we all agree that it’s not true that the state “should” force people to follow the golden rule. There’s a huge gap between what people ought to do and what they can be forced to do. The same principle applies with what people ought not to say and what they can be forced not to say. In this case of Nabokov, there is only one interested party, the son, so it would be very scary to force him to do something because some other people far away think good sons ought to follow their fathers’ wishes.
April 26th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Kafka also asked that his works be destroyed.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:51 am
What if the authors of the dead sea scrolls didn’t want them dug up and handled by infidels?
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/timeline_19.html
Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, 1859:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:47 am
If the manuscript is not to be consigned to the pale fire of the incinerator, we should hope that Dmitri can find a Kinbote to Nabokov’s Shade to provide us with the requisite enlightening commentary.
April 27th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Tacitus wrote:
I think you’re right. But maybe it’s not so bad to keep some junk, as long as it doesn’t crowd out the stuff we really need. After all, time will destroy everything we cherish regardless of whether we do it.
April 27th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Even if I had a strong personal “squick” response to this situation, I doubt I’d be willing to impose it upon a couple trying to have children.
It takes seven to ten days after the fertilization of a human egg for the egg to implant; until that point, hormonal measurements cannot detect a pregnancy, and the body which will be hosting the cute li’l parasite can’t tell a fertilized egg from an unfertilized one either. If the father dies in a freak accident during this interval, should the mother dose herself with emergency contraceptives to prevent implantation?
What would actually be the problem with any of those? A clone is as much a person as is an identical twin; raising a cloned child wouldn’t drain the world’s resources or worsen the overpopulation problem any more than raising a child conceived by unskilled labor. If the cloning procedure were not sound — say, if the child had a considerable likelihood of congenital abnormalities due to damaged DNA — then I could see a moral objection: we’d be bringing a conscious entity into the world and subjecting it to suffering. Even in some far-fetched, Boys from Brazil scenario, it’s the nefarious scheme to flood the world with Hitler clones which is immoral; without Mengele’s efforts to shape their minds, the clones are innocent.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Re #39, interesting points Blake (although we’re drifting from the original topic, and I don’t think Sean likes that). But briefly, with regard to your first point, obviously there’s a grey area, and the very situation you describe must happen often, during wartime for example. I was referring to insemination using sperm of someone known to have died already, perhaps a long time ago.
Aside from a general creepiness factor, hard to rationalize, one could argue that this deprives some living man of the opportunity of fatherhood at least for the duration of the pregnancy. I mean already in peacetime societies, there are more men than women; so the last thing we need is competition from those no longer with us, even if they could have been but for a premature death. I’d agree that’s a rather tenuous objection though; but it’s more substantial where quotas are introduced to curb population growth (as in China today and elsewhere soon, the way things are going).
Cloning shares this drawback in a capped population, and for an individual known to be cloned it raises to new heights the age-old problem of someone being compared with illustrious or successful relatives (or notorious villains come to that). One day in the 1840s, the 2nd Duke of Wellington was asked why he was looking a bit glum. “I was thinking”, he replied “how people will react, after my father dies, when ‘The Duke of Wellington’ is announced, and *I* walk into the room.” Whatever one thinks of nature versus nurture, a clone of someone known will face the same dilemma tenfold.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Re # 4
Frankly, I’d rather not read anything someone wrote just for themselves. Who should read something like that? The person that wrote it. That’s it. Certainly won’t make a huge impact if the person created such work based on the mindset that it isn’t worthy of the public eye.
So have you not bothered to read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation?
Marcus Aurelius has been lauded for his capacity ‘to write down what was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of listeners or any striving after effect’.
A direct, original source of the stoic mind. It’s a perl left to mankind.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Virgil requested that the uncorrected manuscript of the Aeneid be burned, but it wasn’t, and it went on to become one of the most influential works in European literature. There’s a very long tradition of ignoring authors’ wishes on this. Are authors necessarily the best people to make this call, anyway.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:01 am
The dead should be wise enough not to trust their wishes to the living.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:44 pm
You can hear Dmitri Nabokov explain his decision here. The unfinished novel will be published in the form of 138 notecards (that’s how his father wrote), the first ones transcribed, the last ones presented in their original handwritten form.
James wrote:
Apparently he was writing until almost the last moment on his deathbed; his original title was Dying Is Fun. So, he probably wasn’t focused on legal issues.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
The plot of the novel is actually slightly relevant to the issues we’re discussing here: according to Dmitri Nabokov it’s about a neurologist who designs (for himself) a reversible form of suicide.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Reading Lolita someone said was like going to bed with a pervert and waking up with a college professor -
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:58 am
If you can forgive me repeating what everybody has said already, I’d like to state my view here that:
a will is solely about distributing your property after you’re gone. Demanding someone else to do something, be it whatever, running a marathon or destroying a work of art by a famous author, is beyond what can be reasonably demanded by a one-sided agreement. You can ask your work to be destroyed, but you can’t ask ANY person to destroy it. That’s something you’ll have to make further arrangements for by yourself.
You can’t transfer a burden of responsibility over intellectual property to your descendents without also passing on the tools that come with responsibility, the freedom of decision. If an artist is considered free to destroy hiw own art (generally we allow them that) it is because he is the beholder of all freedom and responsibility over it. As I see it, you cannot unilaterally impose on someone the responsibility to destroy the art without that freedom to do otherwise.
Beyond that it is a question of what is the nicest or most useful thing to do, and as we can see from this discussion, that can be a very multi-layered question.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:40 am
The last point is key.
From an economic point of view, the cost of people generally not honoring wishes or contracts after a party has died would be that the parties would then take all sorts of economically wasteful actions to make sure those wishes were carried out.
For instance, in this case, Nabokov might have hired a sort of “book hitman” to steal and destroy his work should he die with it unfinished. That might seem silly, but that’s because we live in a world where legal standards generally respect contractual agreements even if one party to the contract dies, and wishes are generally carried out.