It's wrong to dishonor the dead
The entertainment industry's ghoulishness remind us of the value of taboos
Stan Lee is dead but his profitability lives on thanks to the tireless efforts of Hollywood necromancers. Before the comic book icon passed away in 2018, he made regular cameos in Marvel’s superhero movies, to the delight of fans. Ghoulish CGI recreations of Lee may keep making cameos for the next 20 years. This isn’t unprecedented: Disney digitally reanimated Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher and a spectral Tupac haunted Coachella in 2012.
This isn’t just icky, it’s wrong. The ickiness may even be evidence of its wrongness, as Leon Kass wrote of human cloning. Revulsion can be a kind of moral intuition like empathy and outrage.
The source of this revulsion is the breaking of a taboo. American culture (like other WEIRD1 cultures) has few taboos left but mistreating the dead is one of them. Necrophilia and cannibalism, for example, break that taboo.
Concern over taboo-breaking may sound backwards. To the cosmopolitan-minded, moral progress means abandoning culturally specific values (like taboos) in favor of the broadest possible values. Taken to the extreme this leads to utilitarianism: there is no good but increasing the net happiness, there is no evil but decreasing it.
This is wrong. Being a respectable member of a society means respecting its taboos. Breaking them is breaking faith with your society. It’s like breaking a promise or cheating on a spouse. It’s betraying your own community. Cultures may differ on specific taboos but all condemn betrayal.
It’s like driving laws: it’s arbitrary which side of the road a country drives on but you should still drive on the same side as your countrymen. If you’re an American you have to drive on the right. If you start driving on the left because you think the European way is more sophisticated, you aren’t a worldly driver, you’re just a terrible American driver. In the words of British Prime Minister Theresa May, if “you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
There’s an unanswered question here, though: are Disney’s actions, and the actions of other digital necromancers, dishonoring the dead? There’s not an objective answer to that because taboos aren’t derived from objective principles. The ultimate test will be how Americans react.
My personal hunch is that turning the dead into marionettes to sell tickets won’t fly. It’s too cynical and macabre. That question can only really be answered by public sentiment, though.
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.