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Speaking of the dead: a postscript

In a recent contribution to Mortality (Scarre, 2012), I argued that the reputations of the dead should be treated with the same respect that is generally accorded to those of the living, and that slandering a deceased person is morally offensive even though the subject of that slander will never be aware of it. Living people are commonly concerned that their good name will not die with them, and just as we would normally think it wrong to frustrate posthumously a decedent’s (reasonable) wishes for the disposal of her material estate, we should similarly think it wrong to abuse or damage her ‘moral estate’, which includes her reputation. In both contexts, the subject of the wrong can be identified as the ante-mortem person, whose desires or intentions are thereby set at nought. Since the publication of that essay, a great deal of interest and much outrage has been generated in the UK by the emergence of overwhelming evidence that the late popular entertainer Sir Jimmy Savile was a serial child sex-abuser, and that for a period of forty years neither the BBC (on whose premises, along with those of some hospitals and children’s centres, the abuse is said to have taken place), nor the police made any serious efforts to investigate the plentiful complaints that were made of his behaviour. Still more recently, the late Sir Cyril Smith, long-time MP for Rochdale, has been accused of physically and sexually abusing boys in council-run homes during a period in which he was officially responsible for their protection. Here, I make no assumptions about the truth or falsity of any of the specific accusations levelled at Savile and Smith. But the occurrence of these and other less high-profile cases prompts a revisiting of the ethical issues concerning the revelation of the guilty secrets of the dead, and particularly those crimes and offences which before their deaths went unknown (except to their victims) and unpunished. Much attention is currently being focused on the moral and professional shortcomings of institutions and individuals accused of being culpably inattentive to the signs that abuse was occurring, or even of wilfully turning a blind eye to misbehaviour by ‘celebrities’ and other powerful or influential people. But the questions I want to address here concern the moral rights and wrongs of revealing offences committed, or alleged to have been committed, by people who are now deceased, and who are therefore in no position to defend themselves against the charges levelled.