Prenates, Postmorts, and Bell-Curve Dignity

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I'm sure that love will never beA product of plasticity.

—Frank Zappa, Plastic People

At Gunther von Hagens's "Body Worlds" and copycat shows such as "Bodies: The Exhibition," human cadavers preserved through von Hagens's patented method of "plastination" are posed in lifelike arrangements and sliced open to reveal organs and muscles. With ticket prices that commonly exceed twenty dollars, the exhibitions are quite profitable. Many visitors call them educational. Others are appalled. "Body Worlds" represents "egregiously disrespectful treatment of the dead," writes Ruth Levy Guyer of Haverford College. "Von Hagens's plastination project requires the kind of conduct condemned, often by religion, as disrespect, desecration, or defilement of the dead," maintains Anita Allen of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. "Body Worlds," in the view of a German priest, is nothing less than "Auschwitz as a theme park."

The critics focus on dignity rather than rights—an approach that leaves room for recognizing obligations to things that cannot hold rights, like cadavers, Yorkies, van Goghs, and sequoias. Our rights die with us; our dignity lives on. Still, what society owes the dead is often analyzed by comparison to what it owes the living. In a 1917 article, the legal scholar Austin Wakeman Scott wrote that a farmer "may if he chooses sow his land with salt; it is thought that self-interest will act as a sufficient curb," but after death "there is no such curb," so a judge might nullify such a provision in a will.

As a thought experiment, we can go a step beyond Scott and analyze society's obligations to those who are no longer alive by comparison to what is owed to those not yet alive—zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. The notion of at least partial symmetry in this realm isn't novel. The Catholic Church recognizes full-fledged dignity interests in embryos and fetuses by opposing abortion, as well as some dignity interests in the dead by prescribing particular burial rights.

To be sure, prenates and postmorts, as one might call them, are not wholly analogous. Prenates at a certain point experience pain; postmorts do not. We are born on nature's schedule but can, if we wish, die on our own; in Donne's words, "I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand." Fear of the dead is an ancient superstition—according to Akop P. Nazaretyan, the oldest of humans' irrational fears. And from ancient folk tales to contemporary zombie films, postmorts are usually malicious, regardless of the decedents' character during life. By contrast, prenates rarely spook us (the films Rosemary's Baby and Aliens are exceptions), and their moral slate is too blank for them to be wicked.

How can we decide where human dignity begins and leaves off? One approach would place the two ends of this continuum well before birth and well after death. Some believe that human life arises at the earliest possible moment, when sperm and egg merge. Where would the posthumous equivalent fall? The answer isn't obvious. One might posit the moment at which postmorts no longer look human, perhaps when the flesh has fallen away. But that's not parallel: zygotes, embryos, and early fetuses hardly look human, a point stressed by proponents of legalized abortion and stem cell research. (As I'll elaborate below, the human appearance of remains may prove relevant in another respect.) If dignity begins long before any trace of humanness appears, then it must continue long after the last vestige of humanness vanishes. So we're obliged to respect the posthumous dignity of dust. One problem: how can we bury it?

Another approach would hold that human dignity begins and ends with one's existence as an independent, breathing entity. If, as some maintain, life begins at birth and not a moment sooner, then perhaps dignity interests end with equal abruptness at death. Family members may honor the memory of the...