Moosa argues that sex with dead people (necrophilia) should not be considered immoral since there's nothing special or sacred about human beings, dead or alive. Indeed, the idea that humans are special is based on the belief that we're specially created by God, a belief at which Moosa directs his scorn:
The major problem is that almost all arguments about respect for the dead tend to be extrapolations from the idea of humans as some kind of cosmic or metaphysically “special” beings: that is, humans are, by definition, sacred because of some relation to elements or entities that transcend our everyday existence. This is usually a god or something equally important to many people. There are few reasons to think such supernaturally and cosmically important entities even exist, so naturally there will be little reason to think their relations with us true.Moosa is right about this, of course. Once we no longer believe that we're created by God in His image then there's no longer any reason to declare something like necrophilia morally depraved.
Indeed, untying ideas of sanctity from assertions of divinely-ordained anthropocentrism is, I think, impossible. And there is little reason to think humans are cosmically special, since there are few arguments that are not merely circular, theological pap....
For our current purposes, denying the automatic sanctity accorded humans means we can more seriously consider whether there’s justification for thinking human bodies are automatically inviolable.
Wesley Smith perceptively points out that Moosa's argument that there's nothing special about a dead human body could be used to justify cannibalism or the portrayal of dead people in pornographic "art."
Just so. Once we cut ourselves loose from any objective moral moorings there's no behavior so vile or degrading that it merits being labelled immoral.
Smith closes with this thought:
As a book reviewer of a Darwin biography put it ..., if animals and plants are the result of impersonal, immutable forces ... then “the natural world has no moral validity or purpose.” We are all of us, dogs and barnacles, pigeons and crabgrass, the same in the eyes of nature, equally remarkable and equally dispensable.It could be added that in a society in which any sexual conduct is condoned as long as neither party objects necrophilia couldn't be wrong since dead people don't object. If Bill Cosby reads the Big Think piece he'll probably kick himself for not having his lawyers make the argument in court that his victims, since they were drugged, never objected to him molesting them.
That last word is the key. Treating the dead with respect not only values the “who” of the deceased in life, but extols the unique importance of humanity itself. We reject that fundamental insight at our own peril. For if we ever come to see ourselves as just another animal in the forest, that is precisely how we will act.
