Pitcher, G. (1984). American Philosophical Quarterly, 21(2), 183–188. Reprinted in J. M. Fischer (Ed.), The Metaphysics of Death (pp. 157–168). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
The classic case for interests that reach past one’s death. If one can have interests in one’s legacy, acting for it may be self-interested without any extended self; that is an alternative to the thesis’s reading. For QUESTION-301.
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
Luper’s SEP entry (NOTE-1294) gives Pitcher’s position in two places. In §4.2 it credits him with priorism: a desire you have now can be thwarted by a death months away, so the death may make you worse off now. In §6.2 it gives his account of posthumous harm: posthumous events harm us by making true things that thwart desires we had while alive, as slander does a desire for one’s good name, or a child’s later illness one’s desire for her happy upbringing. The harm falls on the living person, indirectly, without backward causation. It reports the replies of Velleman, Partridge, Vorobej and Suits. Missing still: the ante-mortem / post-mortem person distinction that the LIT summary names, Pitcher’s own wording and argument, the broken-promise example (the entry gives the deathbed promise to Nagel), and correct page numbers (the entry’s citation of Pitcher is wrong).