Necrophilia

[athon]

You know, rigor mortis makes me hard.

Athon
(I think that about does it, old boy. No more beers for you...off to bed...stop typing now...)

 

[ceo_esq]

There is another issue. You said that "dead people cannot consent in anything". This is true but what about mentally ill people? We know very well that there are cases of people that they cannot give their consent in anything. Why dead people don't have the same rights with them?
Why a sexual intercourse with a mentally ill person isn't considered a form of masturbation?

All I am trying to do is to define from which point a human loses his "rights".

Good point. A dead person (like a mentally incompetent person, an unconscious person or an infant) is incapable of giving consent. I didn't mean to suggest that the ability to give valid consent is a necessary prerequisite to having rights. On the other hand, being a living human being is ("animal rights" being something of a misnomer, but that's a matter for a different thread). In my view, a dead person is not really a "person" in a legal sense, although the extension of his former rights through such things as inheritance law contributes to the fiction that he is.

Thus, there are two parties to an act of sexual intercourse with a mentally incompetent person, but only one party to an act of sexual intercourse with a corpse. A corpse has no more rights than a rock. The fact that you can have sex with a rock but not a corpse is not a reflection of the corpse's rights, but of a specific duty that has been imposed on you by the legislature - the duty not to have sex with corpses. (Consider, by way of analogy, how the fact that you can pick a dandelion but not an endangered flower is not really a reflection of the endangered flower's rights.)

Of course, the technical reason sex with an unconscious person is illegal is also that it falls within the scope of a prohibition established by the legislature, but whereas the legislative rationale behind the rape statute has a great deal to do with protecting the victim's rights, the rationale behind the necrophelia statute doesn't, because there aren't any such rights.

 

[Cleopatra]

By mentioning the inheritence laws as a factor that contributes to the creation of the "fiction" regarding dead persons' rights you gave an excellent explanation without appealing to moral values although they do have a role to play in the creation of the legislation.

I should have thought about that. Arg!


edited to add: I believe though that philosophically speaking such rights do exist but I will attempt to show that later.