Aristotle on Posthumous Fortune

Can a person be harmed or benefited after death, even if there is no afterlife? Bizarre as the idea may sound, there are intuitions in its support. If, for instance, events after a person’s death bring about the demise of some venture to which they devoted all their energies, or if terrible misfortunes afflict their children, we might feel that this detracts from the success of their own life; we might even feel inclined to pity them. Philosophical treatment of this issue goes back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I. I0–II, where he asks whether posthumous events can affect a person’s eudaimonia (‘happiness’). Unfortunately, his treatment of this issue has proved extremely perplexing. Some of his commentators take him to be entertaining the notion that the dead can be conscious of what happens to their reputation and to their descendants. At same time, they agree that Aristotle’s own psychology leaves no room for such post-mortem consciousness. Yet, if he is not talking about the souls of the departed in Hades and still maintains, as he seems to, that the dead can be affected posthumously, exactly what kind of effects does he have in mind? Both the question that Aristotle raises in I. I o and the answer that he gives in the subsequent chapter raise difficult problems. In this paper I wish to show how they can be resolved. In the course of doing this, we shall see how the question of posthumous effects, at first sight something of a philosophical curiosity, takes one deep into the mainstream of Aristotle’s ethics.