Why We Blame the Dead

Fear not slander, censure rash;

Thou hast finished joy and moan:

All lovers young, all lovers must

Consign to thee, and come to dust.

—Shakespeare, Cymbeline

A common saying holds that we should not speak ill of the dead; we should not blame them or draw attention to their shortcomings, moral or otherwise. An underlying reason for this might well be that the dead can no longer defend themselves. In response, one might say that this does not matter, as they are dead and therefore will never know that they are being blamed. They need no longer fear “slander, censure rash.” So it might seem that the living do not wrong the dead by blaming them, but they also do not achieve anything. Blaming the dead will not engender remorse in the target of blame.

Nevertheless, people do often blame the dead for things they did when still alive. What exactly is it that people do when they blame the living or the dead? Blame, as philosophers understand it, is a very variable phenomenon; it can be expressed or silent; it can be accompanied by angry emotions or be no more than an ascription of fault. The form of blame that philosophers working on moral responsibility are particularly interested in is an attitude, often angry, of holding an action against a person. Expressions of such blame often take the form of condemnation or reproach.

In a recent paper, I consider different forms blaming the dead can take: In one, a woman blames her recently deceased husband when she finds out after his death that he has been cheating on her for several years. But it is not necessary to have had a personal relationship to the person blamed while they were still alive in order to blame the dead: Recently, people have condemned David Hume and Immanuel Kant for racism in their writings. Insofar as blame is purely a negative evaluation of the character or actions of a person, there is nothing special about blaming the dead—we evaluate their actions just as we would those of the living. In these kinds of cases, blame is just a negative moral appraisal of the deceased person’s actions or character. But in the cases described above, there is more going on. Blaming the dead is accompanied by angry emotions in the infidelity case and by a move towards reversing honors, such as constructing statues or naming buildings after famous individuals, in the other. What are people doing when they blame the dead in these ways?

Philosophers have argued that blame has the function of communicating moral commitments and engendering remorse in the person blamed. If that is indeed the function of blame, it doesn’t seem like it can be met once people are dead.

When we look more closely at the two cases, we can see that they are indeed both forms of communicative blame, but the purpose and target of that communication are very different. In the case of the cheating husband, the problem is that his wife’s reproach can no longer reach him. She still wants recognition of the harm done to her by the person who has done it. But she cannot achieve this recognition because her conversational partner no longer exists. We could say that, here, blame cannot fulfil its function of communicating hurt and demanding a recognition of wrongdoing. Arguably, these forms of blame of close friends and family members who have died strengthen the case for communicative accounts: They show that we feel a need to communicate with those we care about and call out their hurtful actions even after this is no longer practically possible. Blame then becomes part of the grieving process, where part of what we mourn is the impossibility of resolving the moral conflict with the deceased.

The other case, where we blame and condemn a historical figure, such as David Hume for racism in his writings, raises different problems. Why, one might wonder, do we condemn people who died more than a hundred years ago? In cases like this, I agree with David Shoemaker and Manuel Vargas when they claim that blaming the dead is “mostly a signal for the living.” Thinking of blaming the more distant dead, especially public acts of condemnation, as a way of signaling values to those still alive helps to make sense why these acts of blame and condemnation can suddenly arise many years after people have died. Many of the protests and condemnation of past racism happened in 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests. When the University of Edinburgh renamed the David Hume Tower to 40 George Square, they noted that, while Hume’s racism was not uncommon at the time, it is nevertheless distressing to people today. Thus, blaming the dead in many cases is a recognition of the way past wrongs extend into the present.

Here, it is instructive to compare the blame that Hume and Kant are currently often receiving for their justifications of racial injustice with reactions to Aristotle’s defense of slavery, which does not exercise people nearly as much. An obvious explanation for this difference is that problematic attitudes about race linger, as do the aftereffects of the colonial system. By contrast, most of us cannot link any present injustices to Aristotle’s writings on slavery.

Blame of the dead in these kinds of cases looks very different from the case of blame of deceased loved ones. Condemning Hume is not a doomed attempt to communicate with him; it is an attempt to signal to our current day social environment where we stand on important moral issues.

If it is true that sometimes the main purpose of blaming and condemning the dead is to signal important moral commitments to our contemporaries, two related worries arise: The first worry is that blame becomes divorced from culpability. Normally, culpability requires some kind of fault in the agent. But some question whether it is fair to blame people for writing things that were considered perfectly acceptable at the time. This is the objection we often hear when people object to blaming those long dead: “It was a different time.” A second, related worry is that the dead are being instrumentalized; they are used as a means for signaling moral commitments. In some sense, the blame isn’t really about them anymore; they become symbols for some moral problem we are trying to address.

My response to this worry is that it is true that, in these cases, blame isn’t really about the individuals being blamed and that they do become symbols. Somewhat counterintuitively, this goes some way towards addressing the first worry. If what people care about in the Hume case is repudiating racism, then the question of Hume’s personal culpability is not really what is at issue. In this respect, the wife blaming her deceased husband and students condemning Hume’s racism are very different types of activity.

The two cases highlight the different forms blaming the dead takes and the different functions blame can have. It can be driven by the desire to communicate with the wrongdoer, or we can blame the wrongdoer to signal our moral commitments to a wider moral audience. Moral questions of whether it is fair to use the deceased as an example of wrongdoing in this way only arise in the second kind of case.