Summary: People bring bodies to a scammer's funeral home, and are offered free cremation (a $1000 value!) by donating some organs to a good cause. The family receives burnt-garbage ash, while the scammer secretly sells the entire body to the highest bidder.
And she would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling FBI agents.
Thanks for the summary. I appreciate the craft of this sort of long-form writing, but I also want a quick summary to know if it's worth investing the time to read.
A lot of the Body Worlds ripoff versions take "bodies of people who could not be identified" from China... the plastination process must begin within 24 hours of death... you can reason out the rest of the horror. It's just another holocaust you can see in real time but do little about as an individual. These tour the United States. I tried to protest one and could find no one else who cared. There's a persistent myth that there is some sort of "scientific" or "educational" value in seeing sleazy American business people and CCP police profit off of the cadavers of people who had illegal religions. Seems this article reveals they were only pretending to steal the bodies from China and they were stealing them from the U.S. instead. Still, not enough people care.
There's that saying that reality is what, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
I don't think the harm of grave robbing is real in this sense. It distresses people to know about the grave robbing. If they don't know about it, what damage does it actually do?
And if people are taking care that victims remain ignorant, such that no harm occurs, what is the appropriate amount to care?
Let's say someone spits (or worse) into your soup at a kitchen restaurant. You have no way of knowing if they did. There is no real damage done if they did (the soup is boiling in the pot, so there's no risk of transmitting a disease). By your logic, you're ok with it?
> I don't think the harm of grave robbing is real in this sense. It distresses people to know about the grave robbing. If they don't know about it, what damage does it actually do?
Lying or hiding truth causes harm. If grave robberies are being covered up, it means that the government or some other institution is lying or at the very least shielding the truth. If people do not have access to reliable truth, they won't be able to make reasonable decisions, which can result in real harm.
> This is an assertion. What harm is this lie causing? Anything more concrete than "it upsets the moral balance of the universe"?
There is a whole social context to it. It could teach people that it's ok to disrespect grieving people. Or a sliding scale that would eventually make lying ok in general and/or other contexts.
On a societal scale these things do have a bigger impact even when in one case itself no damage seems to have been done.
> Can you provide an example of a real harm, or of a real decision that would be affected by this?
Not exactly because they're consequences beneath people's directly observable behaviour. It's also long term.
The social the fabric in this world is actually important, even though I cannot quantify it.
So for example if the person receives false ashes, as in the article, and then the ceremony is performed in which the "dearly departed's ashes" are scattered, but it's really unmixed concrete - then does that falseness of that ceremony not count as damage to you?
I wonder how you'd feel about this then: If someone cut out your brain while you were sleeping, and put it into a sufficiently high-quality simulation world, while simultaneously doing the same to all the people in your life who would care about you and thus be aggrieved - would that be perfectly fine, as long as they pulled it off smoothly enough that no one ever noticed?
To me that would be violent; I'd prefer people not do that - to me or others - regardless of how smoothly they can pull it off.
> This is an assertion. What harm is this lie causing?
Being lied to is arguably a harm itself, regardless of any concrete damages that may arise. It's disrespecting a person's autonomy and ability to know the truth. This isn't some crazy new theory, if you haven't heard of it before, I'd suggest you read Kant.
However, on a purely utilitarian and practical level, lying also causes concrete harm. Let's go back to the original example of grave robbers. If you knew that whatever valuables you buried with the departed would just be dug up again and stolen, you probably wouldn't bury them. Thus grave robbers are stealing from you pretty directly.
It fundamentally undermines trust in society. On a primal, emotional level.
For those who remain skeptical about the intrinsic value of trust, it can be seen that trust is a foundation of economic efficiency: https://ourworldindata.org/trust
Trust in society is always 100% misplaced. If history has taught anything it’s that society is a horrible murderous monster when it’s eye turns. Trust yourself and those you love. Beyond that you will only ever be hurt.
Those you love are the same people that you’re telling other people to never trust. There’s also an intrinsic trust that we all place in people we have never met. Otherwise, you’d never be able to consume any food without wondering if either your neighbor or the random person at the bottling plant had poisoned it.
Life is rarely black and white, although it sure makes it simple to say it is. “Never say never, always avoid always”, etc.
I find this view very unsettling. Everything I have and love, and everything almost everyone has, is thanks to society. I suppose that includes the bad as well as the good, but really society has brought so much joy that the only way I can imagine someone saying it can only bring hurt is if they don't see how society has helped them. I guess if you are a hermit society doesn't do much for you, and in that case good for you.
I have to assume that what you mean by society is no the same I mean by society. Society gives such basic things as language (not any particular language, but the existence of any language).
Most of us are in perpetual debt to society, deriving from it much more value than we can ever hope to give back.
I think you misunderstand. You can get positive things from something and still not trust it. A chainsaw is very helpful, I will use a chainsaw, but I will never trust a chainsaw. I am exceedingly careful in my interactions with a chainsaw. That thing could turn on me at any moment.
You trust that a chainsaw can cut down things. You trust that it can probably be repaired if it breaks down. You trust a chainsaw to hurt you badly if misapplied or if you are exposed to the situation of a malfunction.
A significant portion of the population believes both in an afterlife and that how a person’s earthly remains are treated will materially affect that experience for the deceased. To anyone that holds such a belief, this activity is causing grievous direct harm to a person that is not in a position to defend themselves.
Just because you don’t hold this belief doesn’t make it false— it can be neither proved nor disproved by any known method (short of dying yourself). Society has generally agreed to respect each individual’s beliefs in these cases, and each person is entitled to some direction of their own affairs after they have passed; this is why wills are enforceable.
In the case of this scam, the market for cadavers incentivizes a fraud that is at least economic - the families could have been offered a higher price for the full body. Much more importantly, the Body Worlds type exhibits might actually incentivize murder and neglect, by creating a market for bodies of impovershed people in others' control. That is a very real harm even if the audience doesn't know where the bodies came from.
And she would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling FBI agents.