Abstract
There has been increasing attention in sociology and internet studies to the topic of ‘digital remains’: the artefacts users of social network services (SNS) and other online services leave behind when they die. But these artefacts also pose philosophical questions regarding what impact, if any, these artefacts have on the ontological and ethical status of the dead. One increasingly pertinent question concerns whether these artefacts should be preserved, and whether deletion counts as a harm to the deceased user and therefore provides pro tanto reasons against deletion. In this paper, I build on previous work invoking a distinction between persons and selves to argue that SNS offer a particularly significant material instantiation of persons. The experiential transparency of the SNS medium allows for genuine co-presence of SNS users, and also assists in allowing persons (but not selves) to persist as ethical patients in our lifeworld after biological death. Using Blustein’s “rescue from insignificance” argument for duties of remembrance, I argue that this persistence function supplies a nontrivial (if defeasible) obligation not to delete these artefacts. Drawing on Luciano Floridi’s account of “constitutive” information, I further argue that the “digital remains” metaphor is surprisingly apt: these artefacts in fact enjoy a claim to moral regard akin to that of corpses.
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Notes
On Kierkegaard’s response to the Epicurean challenge, see Stokes (2006).
One can hold different views on these two questions, despite their obvious interrelation; Belshaw (2009) for instance accepts that death harms the decedent but denies the possibility of posthumous harms.
A further move here would be to specify when the decedent is harmed by the deletion of their SNS profile (not when the harming event occurs, but when it is the case that they are harmed by this). Feinberg (1993), for instance, might argue that we are harmed from the time we form such an interest in the persistence of our SNS presence.
Blustein (2008: 277-78) takes it to be generally true that people have such a desire.
While allowing for exceptions—some people simply want to be forgotten.
Thompson (1999: 508) appears to endorse such a generalised interest.
See also vii. 1240a: “one would most be thought to love a person if one wishes that he should exist, for his sake not one’s own, even if one doesn’t confer goods on him, let alone existence.”
Scarre (2007: 131) denies this possibility: “When we remember the dead we think of them as they were when alive but we do not suppose that our recollections restore them to life. […] The influence of our forebears is constantly felt, energizing and inescapable. But the dead are nonetheless dead, no matter how vibrantly they live in our imaginations.” Scarre denies imagination and memory ‘literally reanimate’ the dead, which is obviously true in important senses. And yet phenomenally, the position of the dead just is ambiguous, I would contend: the dead are absolutely gone, and yet nonetheless still with us. Cf. Stokes (2011).
Though the claim below that SNSs partially instantiate persons might be neutral with respect to narrativity, Arthur (2009: 51) argues that “the ‘natural’ fragmentation and dislocation that is part of digital textuality actually much more closely mirrors the chanciness, randomness and fluidity of memory than does traditional narrative.”
Proust’s Madeleine was a highly effective, involuntary, single-use memory prosthesis in this sense.
In most war movies, doing this is a sure way to get yourself killed, and is therefore not recommended.
Though Barthes (2010) sounds a note of warning that photographs equally displace memory. Gibson also notes that “Photographs remind us of the discontinuity of memory, the elisions and gaps, without filling these in. Indeed, photographs, like all our recording technologies, capture fragments in a continuum of oblivion and forgetting” (2008: 86).
See also Graham et al. (2013: 134): “Therefore, the reference to a virtual identity, digital effigy, or Internet doppelganger as unified, distinct bodily entity, as a kind of metaphor for the physical body, if it reflects the ontology of the physical realm, presents the readers with the fallacy of a physical construct retransferred to the digital realm in toto. We wanted to shift focus toward the idea of multiple presences (as well as their connections to the physical body) that are increasingly hybridized or spread across various dwellings, some physical and material, some digital and semiotic. This has consequences for how people are consumed, worked with, and viewed after death. It also alters people’s (ideas of) bodily being.”
Ebert (2014) does however sound an important note of caution: while the Facebook page of a decedent doesn’t change at death, it does gradually come to be overwritten, as mourners continue to leave comments long after the user’s death. One might reply however that what is being written is in fact the user’s continued presence in the social world; the user is frozen in time in many respects, but their social identity may continue to change as those who knew her change.
This does of course leave out other ways in which data can be stored, but the point is clear enough. Thanks to Jason Brown for help with getting this formulation right.
That later point might also help us work out how to approach orphaned SNS artefacts. Webpages or SNS profiles abandoned long before their owner died might be less like a corpse and more like a lock of hair: they have some residue of the aura of their owner but don’t have the same status as entire corpses do at least in part because, like a severed limb, they ceased to be linked to their owner’s lived experience of the world prior to that person’s death.
It is always open to conclude, as Belshaw notes, that there are posthumous harms but that they are simply of “vanishingly low importance” (2009:151). Belshaw himself does not accept that there are posthumous harms, but does allow for possible instrumental benefit in respecting the wishes of the dead.
Such risks are arguably inherent in any sort of memorialising activity, even if such activity is necessary to preserve the dead: “the very objectivity of these memorial tributes and their existence in the world apart from the meaning bestowed on them by the survivor may contain the seeds of a kind of forgetting: forgetting their point and the expressive meanings they once embodied. This, combined with the passage of time, can cause us to lose sight of those for whose sake we have done these things” (Blustein 2008: 275).
This paper was made possible by a grant from Deakin University for the project “Online Interactions with the Dead.” I’m grateful to Neil Henderson for his invaluable literature review for this paper, to Adam Buben for helpful comments, and to attendees at the “Living with the Digital Dead” workshop at Deakin University and the 1st International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying Conference at California State Polytechnic Ponoma, both in November 2014, for their feedback.
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Stokes, P. Deletion as second death: the moral status of digital remains. Ethics Inf Technol 17, 237–248 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9379-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-015-9379-4