Is it ethically OK to read letters of a dead person, that were not addressed to you?

Question

I hope, this stackexchange site, is the right one for this topic, because I have more of a morality/ethics question than plain philosophy.

I've been researching my family history for quite some time now, and recently I have been given many old letters from the front of World War 2. So I was asking myself, if it is ethically O.K. to read these letters knowing that they were initally not meant for me to read, because I am not the addressee. And am I invading the privacy of the original sender of the letters, who of course is dead for quite a while now, but still.

I mean one could argue that it doesn't matter because the sender of these letters is already dead, but I don't know. I mean the content of these letters could easily change how you're seeing that person.

I just thought this could be something interesting to discuss and to hear other opinions on it.

Greetings Simon

Answer 1

This is an intriguing question. Context is importance; scruples often ought not to prevent us from reading the private letters of public figures. But I will keep to the kind of domestic situation you evidently have in mind.

Someone might say that there cannot be a rights-based objection since the dead, qua non-existent, have no rights. Is this so, however? Is it really the case that the dead cannot be rights-holders, morally? All else equal, don't the dead have the right to dignified interment, the right against unjustified disturbance after interment, the right to bodily integrity, and (given that a will comes into effect only when the testator is dead) the right to transfer property?

It's true that reading the letters might alter your moral view of the person - might lead you to think better or worse of them - but then isn't that (or might it not be) a justifiable alteration of perspective? I don't think the dead have a moral right to have their 'memory' protected come what may.

Suppose the letters are of a particularly intimate kind (sexual or erotic, it may be) such that they were intended for one other person's eyes only. In reading them, are you showing disrespect for the dead? Do the dead have a right to privacy? I'm not sure on what basis such a posthumous right would rest. I violate your privacy if I gain unwanted access - access unwanted by you - to personal data such as a letter you have written. But the dead are not capable of wanting to control access to such data and so in reading the letters you are not interfering by gaining unwanted access to data the dead wish to protect.

Others may think differently. Here I have simply offered a response derived from considerations that seem to me relevant about rights, rights-holders, and privacy.

References

B. Rössler, The Value of Privacy, Cambridge: Polity, 2005: 8.

Fred O. Smith Jr, 'The Constitution after Death', Columbia Law Review , OCTOBER 2020, Vol. 120, No. 6 (OCTOBER 2020), pp. 1471-1548: 1475.