This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
This book is a multidisciplinary work that investigates the notion of
posthumous harm over time. The question what is and when is death,
affects how we understand the possibility of posthumous harm and
redemption. Whilst it is impossible to hurt the dead, it is possible to
harm the wishes, beliefs and memories of persons that once lived. In
this way, this book highlights the vulnerability of the dead, and makes
connections to a historical oeuvre, to add critical value to similar
concepts in history that are overlooked by most philosophers. There is a
long historical view of case studies that illustrate the conceptual
character of posthumous punishment; that is, dissection and gibbetting
of the criminal corpse after the Murder Act (1752), and those shot at
dawn during the First World War. A long historical view is also taken of
posthumous harm; that is, body-snatching in the late Georgian period,
and organ-snatching at Alder Hey in the 1990s.