The Interest Theory of Rights at the Margins: Posthumous Rights

This chapter takes up whether the dead are potential right-holders on the Interest Theory of rights, as well as laying clear how we should approach the question of whether other entities are potential right-holders on the Interest Theory. It argues the dead are potential right-holders on the Interest Theory, but that Matthew Kramer’s argument for this thesis is not very convincing. This is because Kramer’s argument looks in the wrong place by focusing only on the ways in which the dead figure in the lives of the living. Instead, this chapter argues we should focus on the nature of the interests of the dead themselves. It suggests that the dead have interests (and that the dead’s interests matter for rights) for much the same reason that the living have interests. Along the way, we work through several choice-points for the Interest Theory, including a taxonomy of different accounts of interests and interests’ relation to the Interest Theory.