From an economic point of view, the cost of people generally not honoring wishes or contracts after a party has died would be that the parties would then take all sorts of economically wasteful actions to make sure those wishes were carried out.

For instance, in this case, Nabokov might have hired a sort of “book hitman” to steal and destroy his work should he die with it unfinished. That might seem silly, but that’s because we live in a world where legal standards generally respect contractual agreements even if one party to the contract dies, and wishes are generally carried out.

a will is solely about distributing your property after you’re gone. Demanding someone else to do something, be it whatever, running a marathon or destroying a work of art by a famous author, is beyond what can be reasonably demanded by a one-sided agreement. You can ask your work to be destroyed, but you can’t ask ANY person to destroy it. That’s something you’ll have to make further arrangements for by yourself.

You can’t transfer a burden of responsibility over intellectual property to your descendents without also passing on the tools that come with responsibility, the freedom of decision. If an artist is considered free to destroy hiw own art (generally we allow them that) it is because he is the beholder of all freedom and responsibility over it. As I see it, you cannot unilaterally impose on someone the responsibility to destroy the art without that freedom to do otherwise.

Beyond that it is a question of what is the nicest or most useful thing to do, and as we can see from this discussion, that can be a very multi-layered question.

James wrote:

If Nabokov really wanted the manuscript to be burned, he could have willed it to someone who he would have had great confidence would have followed his wishes, like a law firm.

Apparently he was writing until almost the last moment on his deathbed; his original title was Dying Is Fun. So, he probably wasn’t focused on legal issues.

Frankly, I’d rather not read anything someone wrote just for themselves. Who should read something like that? The person that wrote it. That’s it. Certainly won’t make a huge impact if the person created such work based on the mindset that it isn’t worthy of the public eye.

So have you not bothered to read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation?

Marcus Aurelius has been lauded for his capacity ‘to write down what was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of listeners or any striving after effect’.

A direct, original source of the stoic mind. It’s a perl left to mankind.

Aside from a general creepiness factor, hard to rationalize, one could argue that this deprives some living man of the opportunity of fatherhood at least for the duration of the pregnancy. I mean already in peacetime societies, there are more men than women; so the last thing we need is competition from those no longer with us, even if they could have been but for a premature death. I’d agree that’s a rather tenuous objection though; but it’s more substantial where quotas are introduced to curb population growth (as in China today and elsewhere soon, the way things are going).

Cloning shares this drawback in a capped population, and for an individual known to be cloned it raises to new heights the age-old problem of someone being compared with illustrious or successful relatives (or notorious villains come to that). One day in the 1840s, the 2nd Duke of Wellington was asked why he was looking a bit glum. “I was thinking”, he replied “how people will react, after my father dies, when ‘The Duke of Wellington’ is announced, and *I* walk into the room.” Whatever one thinks of nature versus nurture, a clone of someone known will face the same dilemma tenfold.

A related moral question arose recently in the UK. A woman whose husband had been killed in Iraq wished to be inseminated by his preserved sperm. Although that seems a deserving case (and I’m not sure what the courts decided in the event) it seems intrinsically wrong to me - For the purpose of reproduction, a person’s DNA should die with them.

Even if I had a strong personal “squick” response to this situation, I doubt I’d be willing to impose it upon a couple trying to have children.

It takes seven to ten days after the fertilization of a human egg for the egg to implant; until that point, hormonal measurements cannot detect a pregnancy, and the body which will be hosting the cute li’l parasite can’t tell a fertilized egg from an unfertilized one either. If the father dies in a freak accident during this interval, should the mother dose herself with emergency contraceptives to prevent implantation?

Otherwise whatever next? A clone of Tutankamen, or more offspring of William the Conqueror, using DNA winkled from his thigh bone in Caen? Or hordes of new descendents of Nobel prize winners, born long after their death?

What would actually be the problem with any of those? A clone is as much a person as is an identical twin; raising a cloned child wouldn’t drain the world’s resources or worsen the overpopulation problem any more than raising a child conceived by unskilled labor. If the cloning procedure were not sound — say, if the child had a considerable likelihood of congenital abnormalities due to damaged DNA — then I could see a moral objection: we’d be bringing a conscious entity into the world and subjecting it to suffering. Even in some far-fetched, Boys from Brazil scenario, it’s the nefarious scheme to flood the world with Hitler clones which is immoral; without Mengele’s efforts to shape their minds, the clones are innocent.

I may be an extreme case, but in all the thousands of photos I’ve taken since I bought my first digital camera, I must have deleted no more than a handful. Hundreds of bad photos still sit around in their original directories as they were downloaded from the camera going unviewed and unmissed for years at a time.

It’s the thought that something, no matter now unimportant in the scheme of things, is irretrievably lost when you destroy it, that makes people reluctant to pull the trigger. It may not be rational, but its human nature.

I think you’re right. But maybe it’s not so bad to keep some junk, as long as it doesn’t crowd out the stuff we really need. After all, time will destroy everything we cherish regardless of whether we do it.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/timeline_19.html

Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, 1859:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

I think it is important here to distinguish between two kinds of “should”. For instance, that everyone “should” follow the golden rule is a fine point of view to take, and we are free to pile moral condemnation on those who don’t follow it. On the other hand, I think we all agree that it’s not true that the state “should” force people to follow the golden rule. There’s a huge gap between what people ought to do and what they can be forced to do. The same principle applies with what people ought not to say and what they can be forced not to say. In this case of Nabokov, there is only one interested party, the son, so it would be very scary to force him to do something because some other people far away think good sons ought to follow their fathers’ wishes.

By suggesting the possibility that requests made while one is living can be disregarded after one’s death, we create a moral hazard.

Forget about “respect” for the time being and realize that precisely because our actions toward the dead affect the actions and fears of the now-living, we cannot afford to cavalierly disregard the wishes of the dead whenever it suits us.

In the past it was certainly commoner to consider it a matter of honor to burn a dead friend’s letters unread (unless he asked them to be preserved). At times unwritten social contracts existed that we would protect one another’s wishes and each other’s privacy. It is perhaps not a surprise that today we have created an atmosphere in which mutual trust is at historically low levels.

If you, personally, feel that your wishes ought not matter after your death, then you have every freedom to allow that principle to guide your actions. But it saddens me to think that my own preferences will be stripped away by people who purport to speak for me after I am fed to the worms.

I am twenty-four years old. I probably won’t die soon. Nabokov’s manuscript should have been burnt. Should I die tonight, I hope that those in whom I place my utmost trust will do for me as I once would have done for myself.

Er, how so? I’m only saying that I don’t think “intellectual property” is an ethical necessity, but just something that society agrees on for the purposes of encouraging creators. And we place limits on this which don’t apply to physical property, like copyright expiring after a certain length of time. There are also certain classes of ideas which creators don’t “own” even today (except in the sense of the ideas being attributed to them), like novel mathematical theorems or theories of physics. Presumably you wouldn’t say we are therefore two steps away from compelling mathematicians and physicists to raid their brains for the public good!

2) What is ‘beneficial’ eventually may at first be decried as ‘heresy’, ‘lunacy’ or worse. (The way around this is to publish controversial work anonymously, which has it’s own set of drawbacks.) It is in the public interest to encourage creators, but the ‘public’ doesn’t always collectively behave as though they wish to entertain new ideas which challenge their existing beliefs. Where do personal safety considerations come in?

Look, if a creator would really be put in danger by expressing certain ideas, I’d sympathize with them if they kept the ideas secret, although publishing anonymously would be an option. But in countries with strong traditions of upholding free speech this sort of thing isn’t all that common, and in any case it doesn’t apply to Nabokov’s work which was under discussion here.

Another aspect of the Kafka case, though not necessarily of the Nabokov issue, is that Kafka was something of a borderline personality, suffering from clinical depression. Did he really want his works destroyed, or was this the result of a bout of depression talking?