Yes the man is long dead and yes the bones are no doubt medically interesting. But they've had them for two centuries. Why not one final positive gesture to end the chapter?
If we were to let society be beholden to the wishes of the deceased indefinitely, then by now you wouldn't be able to turn a corner without running into some permanent grave or memorial. The point is that there are no relevant stakeholders remaining for these bones to be put out to sea; just a romantic notion of 'fulfilling his wishes'.
That man saw the writing on the wall and it turns out he was right. So we have to think about people in the same situation today, or other people. How do we respect them and their wishes when they are gone? Those who live now they see how we treat those who pass, and act and feel accordingly. A little bit of respect might go some way towards a more peaceful coexistance and a happier life while we are alive.
We will use our current values to define taste, justice, and cultural behaviour. We will try to look at the actions of the past with understanding and we will try to think what people in the future might think as a lens to consider our own current situation.
And we'll laugh at anyone who tries to argue philosophically about definitions of right and wrong.
Personally I find the first part, ie respecting peoples remains, as being the critical thing.
Saints also implies catholic who feel a certain type of way about how remains should be dealt with.
Dead people don't care what happens to their remains. Any offended relatives are likely long dead. BUT there are plenty of people alive today who'd want to know the state can be relied upon to uphold the law about what happens with their body.
This is not how society works. See wills.
It was stolen.
"Before Byrne could be buried, Hunter reportedly bribed one of his friends to secretly swap the corpse for dead weight and bring the body to him. Four years later Hunter put Byrne’s skeleton on display."
So a great, illegal, injustice was done and you're defending it because you didn't read the article.
What the museum should do is get a legal ruling that the remains were not legally Hunter's property so cannot be part of the collection and follow the wishes of the dead man AND what should have happened at the time.
If so, we should defy John Hunter's wishes first. Why should his property claim to stolen bones, and contracts regarding their use, matter more than Byrne's wishes? Because he was rich?
I guess, he was another great example of somone, whos living rights got trumped by experimental sciences and societies interest. Never let a peaceful death deter science.
>But at his family’s insistence, the doctors continued their experimental >treatments even as his skin began to melt from his body. Then, on Ouchi’s 59th >day in the hospital, he had a heart attack. But his family agreed that he should >be resuscitated in case of death, so the doctors revived him.
While the doctors and scientists were doing experimental things to keep him alive, it was at the instance of his family.
Consider that Muslims need to have an everlasting gravesite!
Because like almost everything else, medicine has been exponentially improving in the past ~two centuries - meaning the next decade will be much better suited to do something useful with those bones than any that came before.
It would be a shame to destroy those bones, only to regret it 20 years later, as some new imaging or sequencing technique is developed that could be applied to those bones to benefit the living who suffer from related ailments.