Acting as If: Weak Practical Transcendence and the Rationality of Posthumous Care

Posthumous care-honouring advance directives, keeping deathbed promises, defending deceased persons' reputations-is central to clinical ethics, yet its philosophical foundations remain contested. This paper asks whether such care can be rationally grounded without presupposing either a robust transcendent ontology (the view that persons persist after death as welfare subjects) or the Epicurean conclusion that death renders all posthumous concern irrational.

The paper proceeds by philosophical argumentation and case analysis. It first reconstructs and critically evaluates subsequentialism (the leading contemporary attempt to ground posthumous harm in antemortem interests) and identifies an internal instability: interests are not stable across death in the way subsequentialism requires. It then examines three paradigm cases of posthumous care-posthumous publication, deathbed promises and defence of memory-and draws on narrative identity theory (Ricoeur, MacIntyre) and Kant's doctrine of regulative ideas to develop an alternative account.

Subsequentialism fails because it cannot explain why interests should be 'frozen' at the moment of death rather than at any other point in a person's life, and because Parfitian accounts of personal identity undermine the interest-continuity it presupposes. The Epicurean alternative is likewise rejected: it conflates the question of whether the dead can be harmed with the distinct question of whether the living have reasons to act on behalf of the dead. The paper develops weak practical transcendence: the thesis that the living may rationally act as if a deceased person's interests remain in force, grounded in narrative coherence, relational loyalty, and a Kantian regulative idea of biographical integrity. Posthumous obligations are particular rather than universal, calibrated by the depth of relational histories and the degree to which the deceased's narrative remains alive in a community of interpreters.

Weak practical transcendence has direct implications for clinical ethics. It reframes advance directive interpretation as a task of biographical stewardship rather than preference-execution, reconceives surrogate decision-making as the exercise of practical wisdom about what a patient's life-narrative calls for, and identifies genuine posthumous obligations for clinical teams that persist after a patient's death. The account requires no posthumous welfare states and no metaphysics of personal survival; it is a normative thesis that articulates what our best clinical and moral practices already implicitly acknowledge.