Necrophilia should be legalised because we don’t have enough organ donors. I’m serious, bear with me. Organ donation rates are abysmal in countries that require people to opt in. Most choose the default (not opting in). Not even from laziness but because people have a cognitive bias of seeing defaults as reasonable, even if they’re ridiculous. The opt-in for donations is a misguided sentiment about human worth. Hundreds die needlessly every day for the sake of human dignity.
Of course the other origin of respecting the corpse is belief in resurrection and immaterial souls (that miraculously act as puppetmasters). The only way it would be wrong for the government to make use of your body after death (if you don’t leave instructions to the contrary) is if there was a You that survived death. Otherwise using the harm principle: there’s nobody around to be harmed so it can’t be wrong. (You can even argue that people don’t have the post-mortem right to control their body at all, eg. through a living will. But let’s stick to the less radical version. For now.)
Necrophilia should be legalised (at least in principle) for the same reasons. I’m not talking about the case of the deceased’s family, which owns the body (although they should be able to sell it to a necrophiliac). And if the ownerless corpse is suitable for organ donations, the medical system should certainly get first pick. But for an unidentified corpse that’s unfit for any use, if someone was to have sex with it, the only source for objections would be moral disgust.
You might think human dignity should only be suspended for organ donations (or stem cell research) since there’s benefit to society; but not for frivolous things like necrophilia. I then recommend Stephen Pinker’s excellent debunking of dignity. Any concept of dignity that’s divorced from harm is just a fairy tale. Always.
“But what about the evolutionary origin of the necrophilia taboo? It’s a very risky activity in terms of health.” It’s interesting to note that the only strong objection is one of harm: the necrophiliac might catch a disease and infect others, or become a burden on the healthcare system. Even then, the objection is weak for legal purposes: it’s not illegal to have unprotected sex with a living person. Nor would it be a small deal to criminalise it. There’s no reason to treat unprotected necrophilia any differently.
“Even if it shouldn’t be illegal, it’s still not normal: only a mentally ill person wants to have sex with a corpse”. Perhaps. But note that mental illness is defined largely in terms of harm, not disgust. (Homosexuality was removed from the official list of psychiatric disorders in 1973 due to a lack-of-harm argument.) I’ve evolved from the same primates as everyone else, so my inborn disgust at necrophilia is about average. But I’d hesitate to label as a disease something where the only harm done to a person is me being disgusted.
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