This volume discusses the philosophical issues connected with the nature and significance of life and death, and the ethics of killing. It will be of interest to all those taking courses on the philosophy of life and death, applied ethics covering abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, and ethics and metaphysics.

Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics offers a highly distinctive and original approach to the metaphysics of death and applies this approach to contemporary debates in bioethics that address end-of-life and post-mortem issues. Taylor defends the controversial Epicurean view that death is not a harm to the person who dies and the neo-Epicurean thesis that persons cannot be affected by events that occur after their deaths, and hence that posthumous harms (and benefits) are impossible. He then extends this argument by asserting that the dead cannot be wronged, finally presenting a defence of revisionary views concerning posthumous organ procurement.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. This book is a multidisciplinary work that investigates the notion of posthumous harm over time. The question what is and when is death, affects how we understand the possibility of posthumous harm and redemption. Whilst it is impossible to hurt the dead, it is possible to harm the wishes, beliefs and memories of persons that once lived. In this way, this book highlights the vulnerability of the dead, and makes connections to a historical oeuvre, to add critical value to similar concepts in history that are overlooked by most philosophers. There is a long historical view of case studies that illustrate the conceptual character of posthumous punishment; that is, dissection and gibbetting of the criminal corpse after the Murder Act (1752), and those shot at dawn during the First World War. A long historical view is also taken of posthumous harm; that is, body-snatching in the late Georgian period, and organ-snatching at Alder Hey in the 1990s.

It is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person is dead. David Boonin defends this view in Dead Wrong and explains the puzzle of posthumous harm. In doing so, he makes three central claims. First, that it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person while they are alive even if the act has no effect on that person's conscious experiences. Second, that if this is so, then frustrating a person's desires is one way to wrongfully harm a person. And third, that it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person even if the act takes place after the person is dead. Over the course of the book, Boonin introduces the significance of posthumous harm, deals with each of his three main claims in turn, responds to the objections that might be raised against the book's thesis, and examines some of the ethical implications for issues such as posthumous organ and gamete removal, posthumous publication of private documents, damage to graves and corpses, and posthumous punishment and restitution.

After introducing the early work of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Machiavelli, and Kant on the matter, this book critically examines the literature over the past four decades on the topic of posthumous harm.

We speak of being 'free' to speak our minds, free to go to college, free to move about; we can be cancer-free, debt-free, worry-free, or free from doubt. The concept of freedom (and relatedly the notion of liberty) is ubiquitous but not everyone agrees what the term means, and the philosophical analysis of freedom that has grown over the last two decades has revealed it to be a complex notion whose meaning is dependent on the context. The Oxford Handbook of Freedom will crystallize this work and craft the first wide-ranging analysis of freedom in all its dimensions: legal, cultural, religious, economic, political, and psychological. This volume includes 28 new essays by well regarded philosophers, as well some historians and political theorists, in order to reflect the breadth of the topic. This handbook covers both current scholarship as well as historical trends, with an overall eye to how current ideas on freedom developed. The volume is divided into six sections: conceptual frames (framing the overall debates about freedom), historical frames (freedom in key historical periods, from the ancients onward), institutional frames (freedom and the law), cultural frames (mutual expectations on our 'right' to be free), economic frames (freedom and the market), and lastly psychological frames (free will in philosophy and psychology).

The Metaphysics and Ethics of Death brings together original essays that both address the fundamental questions of the metaphysics of death and explore the relationship between those questions and some of the areas of applied ethics in which they play a central role.