Topics Ethics

Question If someone who has been a high achiever, who has earned respect for work done in, say, a creative field, most explicitly forbids the writing of a biography, is anyone entitled to ignore this stated position and write the book anyway? Assuming the subject is no longer living, should friends and associates supply what they know of the life lived and its effect on the work done? And what if someone who believes the original request should be respected, accidentally comes into possession of information which would influence ... or at least colour the finished account? Should this person, in the interest of a balanced account, divulge what has been learned? This is assuming that the second person has already argued that the biography was not wanted by its subject, which probably would anyway be well known, and had the objection waved aside.

Accepted:
May 12, 2009

Comments

Legally, sure, others are entitled to write (non-libelously) about someone regardless of the latter's wishes. Morally, they ought to take these wishes into account; but how much they count for will depend on how these wishes were motivated and -- especially -- on the relationship the potential biographer had to the subject. To illustrate, potential biographers have less moral reason to respect the subject's wishes when these were motivated by the desire to conceal the subject's frequent encounters with child prostitutes in Cambodia than if they were motivated by the subject's desire to avoid the power of his or her work being diminished by simple-minded psychologizing. And potential biographers have much stronger moral reason to respect the wishes of their subjects if the deceased was a close friend (or even spouse) rather than a stranger. An exception to the responsibilities of friendship here are cases where the potential biographers made clear to their subject all along that they intended to write a biography even against the subject's wishes. In such cases, the subject was under no misapprehension in continuing the relationship on the understanding that such a biography would or might be written.

Getting to your remaining questions, suppose a biography is being written, much against the subject's wishes, should friends and associates cooperate? Again, mere associates may owe the subject rather little, but friends may owe a lot. One reason for friends not to cooperate is that this might derail the project. But the chances of this happening may be slim. And there may be countervailing reasons: that some cooperation is necessary to prevent misrepresentations that would be damaging to the subject's reputation (though such misrepresentations might also be addressed later, in a review of the biography for example). What a friend might do here is try to decide in the way the subject wanted or would have wished for -- at least in that large majority of cases where the friend has no special reason to provide information about the subject to the biographer or to the general public. Beyond the responsibility to the subject, the friend has no moral obligation to help make the biographer's work more accurate or complete.

In conclusion, your problem of the unwanted biography is really a significant moral problem only for friends of the subject. They ought to be guided mainly by the subject's wishes and interests, especially when he or she is no longer around. This can be difficult, as illustrated by the recent controversy over the impending publication of John Rawls's undergraduate thesis -- something he certainly would have greatly disapproved of. But with pieces of the thesis appearing in academic papers, the decision to publish the whole thing can perhaps be justified as according with Rawls's own interests, at least, if not with what he would have wanted to happen under the circumstances.