It is a very old aphorism that one should not speak ill of the dead. According to Wikipedia, it dates back at least to Chilon of Sparta. To the degree that justification is given for it, it’s usually that the dead are not here to defend themselves from accusations. Like many aphorisms, it has some wisdom to it, but it can be taken too far.

The main thing to say for it is that, in the ordinary course of life, the wicked deeds of the dead are no longer relevant. The obvious practical exception are when the dead leave behind them some means to give restitution for their wickedness; if a man stole a horse and dies, the horse should be given back to its owner, and establishing this will necessarily entail some speaking of the fact that the horse was stolen. But, leaving aside this kind of restitution, whatever bad deeds a man did while alive, he no longer has the power to harm anyone, so there is no benefit to be gained.

Not often spoken about but also relevant is that anyone who valued something good about the dead man will have that tarnished by accusations against him. There is, generally, nothing gained by diminishing their ability to enjoy what good the dead man did.

The more common reason given—that a dead man is not around to defend himself—does also have some merit to it. The dead man would usually be in the position to give the strongest defense of himself, so any such accusations will have the suspicion attached to them that they could not have stood up to defense.

So much for it.

There is a place, however, where it is clearly inapplicable: when the dead man has published things which are still read/watched/have influence. A good example is Christopher Hitchens. He was an atheist popular among atheists in the first decade and a half of the third millenium. He is still often quoted, though like most people his influence has diminished after his dead. It has diminished, but it has not gone away. People still quote him, and find him inspirational in their rejection of religion. And the problem is that it his personality that attracts people, not the quality of his arguments. In fact, so far as I know, he never made arguments. All he ever made was impassioned rhetoric. (See my video, Christopher Hitchens Isn’t Serious: No, Heaven Is Not A Spiritual North Korea. In at least one place I break up his flow just to show that, absent his voice carrying one through, his conclusion in no way followed from what he said before it.)

Impassioned rhetoric is a kind of argument, though mostly an implicit argument. It rests upon the premise that the one who is impassioned has a reasonable cause for the passion in his rhetoric. That is, the man himself is one of the premises in his argument. This is not unreasonable, but it does mean that the man must be examinable if his argument is to be considered. Since Christopher Hitchens’ impassioned rhetoric had, as its premise, the correctness of his judgement, we must be free to examine whether his judgment actually was correct. And there we get to the fact that it was not. Hitchens was, in fact, a habitual drunkard who didn’t think that anything he talked about so passionately when drunk was worth bothering about when he was sober. That is, the passion in his rhetoric came not from his own good judgement, but from a bottle.

The reasons why one should not speak ill of the dead do not apply here, for several reasons. In the first case, the man is still doing damage, so it is relevant to work to end that damage. In the second case, this is counteracting the man’s bad work, which itself gets in the way of people privately remembering him for whatever virtues he might have had. In the third case, death is not a free pass to cause as much harm as one can, and in the special case of Christopher Hitchens he very candidly admitted to being a drunk, so there’s no question of defending himself anyway.

The inexpensive written word (since publishing, and especially since digital distribution) and even more so video have created a new context which requires some revision to this ancient heuristic.