Of course from a concequentialist perspective Richard is right – in fact the harm done to the artist is likely to be outweighed by the value of the art to others if it was an art of the sort of significance where you stopped to think about before destroying it.

But harm is not the issue, for even if we suppose that it really would be a harm to VN, this might be outweighed by the benefits to others, or even by the aesthetic value of the art. It’s an open question to a consequentialist.

Instead, you propose a deontological constraint: even if it would make the world better to preserve the artwork, nonetheless we are obliged to respect an artist’s wishes regarding the disposal of their artistic property.

I would grant this as a prima facie duty, since such liberties will generally serve to promote the good. But any rule is subject to exceptions. On very rare occasions, if the value of the artwork is great enough, I think it could – potentially – be permissible to snatch it away from the destructive artist. It depends on the details of the situation.

Thanks for your input.

Do you really think it would be kosher to hide someone else’s artwork, with the intent of reproducing it later against their wishes, just as long as they don’t know it? Presumably it would be wrong to do so if they did know it, right? It would be wrong to steal it out of the artist’s hands and take it away to prevent it being burned, if the artist had chosen to do so – yes? (That is, you’re not making an argument for some kind of absolute moral value inherent in art, such that not even the artist has the right to destroy it.) If so, then the only point in favor of your scenario is that the person doesn’t know this is happening.

Now, unfelt harms are a traditional theoretical difficulty for strict consequentialists, but aside from that perspective – which still may not authorize what you’re suggesting – we generally hold that you may not do something to someone secretly that you may not do to them with their knowledge. That is, we hold that actions or events that would entail harm to a person, with their knowledge, entail a similar harm when they are undertaken secretly. The reason obviously presupposes that there are unfelt harms – that you can be harmed even if you’re not aware of it. And if that is so, then the same actions would seem to be harmful to a person whether they are merely unaware or dead, since the argument against their being harmful – that the person cannot know of the harm – is the same in both cases, and is mooted in both cases by the postulate of unfelt harms.

As to the question of authority over others to compel them to follow your wishes, of course there is no such authority in absolute terms. But I am inclined to suspect that if that person does have an obligation to follow your wishes for whatever reason – they are an official executor of your will; they are your son; they are your medical proxy acting under your advance directive; etc. – then they are obligated to follow those wishes whether or not they personally approve. And that compulsion flows from the obligation between the parties, not from any sort of inherent moral quality in the act being compelled. (That is, if Dimitri Nabokov is required, as son and literary executor of Vladimir Nabokov, to destroy his father’s manuscript, it is because he is obligated as son and executor and has been directed to do so, and not for any reason having to do with the literary quality of the manuscript, its scholarly importance, or what have you.)

Brooklynite:

Thanks also.

I’m sure you’re right that the dead have much less practical force to encourage compliance with their wishes: they can’t keep nagging you at the dinner table, they can’t threaten to complain to your spouse, and so on – if that’s what you meant. But that just sharpens the horns of the moral dilemma. If it’s wrong to act against another’s wishes (because they have a right to expect those wishes to be carried out), it’s in some way even more wrong, or at least more poignant, to do so when they can’t fight back. That increases the urgency of the need to get the decision whether or not to follow those wishes right – you’d not only fall into mistake, but be a right bastard in doing so, if you get it wrong.

As to the difference between a request from the dying and a request from the dead, it’s surely possible Dimitri would feel reluctant to carry out his father’s command while his father was still alive, but I’m not sure what you mean in asking if he’d be morally ambivalent about it. If that’s a question about Dimitri’s psychology or reasoning processes, I can’t know the answer. If you mean that you think it is to some degree an open question whether there is a moral obligation to carry out such requests from a living person, I don’t know why that would be. I take it as given that Vladimir has almost absolute authority to destroy the manuscript himself, if he chooses – that is, that if someone saw him doing so and tried to stop him, they would be in the wrong, and others would be morally justified in stepping in to stop the interference and help Vladimir succeed in destroying his own work. If that’s true, it seems to me he has an equal expectation that his wishes will be carried out for him, by anyone whose job it is to carry out orders for him (a servant, an employee, a son, or whoever). If you order your valet to bring you the blue trousers, there is absolutely no reason the valet should say “Oh, I just can’t stand the blue trousers! I’ll bring you the brown ones.” (This accounts for most of the humor in the Jeeves & Wooster stories.) Similarly, if you order your valet to destroy the only manuscript of your latest novel awaited by an adoring public, it matters not at all what the valet’s personal literary opinions might happen to be. It is not a valet’s job to second-guess the employer’s decisions – only to carry them out. There are limits, of course – the valet (or son, or spouse, or executor . . .) must refuse orders that are clearly immoral in themselves, but we have already stipulated that Nabokov has a right to destroy his own work if he chooses. Possibly his servants have a right not to participate in anything they consider offensive (but see below), but I can’t see how they would have a right to countervail that order entirely on their own initiative.

The conversation seems to have drifted away from organ donations and living wills, which I considered the closest medical parallels, and into the refusal by licensed pharmacists to sell birth control or “morning-after” medication to patients they disapprove of. Perhaps that is a useful analogy, at least in the “living requester” scenario.

An interesting way of putting it. It does seem to me, though, that one crucial distinction between the living and the dead is that the latter have for the most part lost their capacity to compel through non-moral mechanisms.

Imagine that VN is not dead but bedridden and terminally ill. He tells his son where his final manuscript is kept, and requests that he destroy it. Is it impossible to imagine that Dimitri might be ambivalent — morally ambivalent — about whether to carry out the request?

It’s not an easy question for me. I can imagine being torn in either case — whether the request came from someone recently dead or someone who was about to die.

That’s not to deny that “Nabokov would have had an absolute right to destroy his own manuscript“. Rather, the question is whether he has the moral authority to put others under an obligation to destroy his manuscript.