anonymous question

Thank you for the interesting question. Indeed, a corpse is a rather peculiar object of property.

At first glance, everything is simple. A person has property rights to their own body; therefore, it is up to them to specify into whose ownership their corpse will pass, or to give paid instructions as to who should perform which specific manipulations with the corpse. If a contract for these manipulations is concluded, the contractors are obliged to perform them. If no instructions regarding the ownership of the corpse have been given, the corpse may be claimed by the first person to express such a desire.

However, in practice, procedural difficulties arise. I will simply list a few of them to illustrate why the theoretical model might fail.

First, a corpse may appear in a closed room belonging to the former owner of the corpse. A person fell asleep in their home and did not wake up. In order to understand that the owner of the house has died, one must enter the house, but as long as there is no certainty that the owner of the house has changed due to the death of the previous owner, entering the house will be considered a violation of the owner’s property rights. The more property rights are respected, the lower the probability of discovering the corpse. In an ideal situation, where respect for property rights is infinitely great, the fact of death will never be established, and the corpse will never pass into anyone’s ownership, continuing to be erroneously recognized as the property of the deceased.

Second, claiming an ownerless corpse may be fraught with claims from those who might assume the claimer’s involvement in the fact of death itself. For example, if someone is sitting peacefully on a riverbank and suddenly sees the corpse of their enemy floating by, it may be in their interest not to claim the corpse, but to let it float peacefully away, which, of course, would spoil their pleasure.

Third, even if the person who found the corpse is obviously uninvolved in its appearance, difficulties still arise in determining the current status of the object. The corpse may already be the property of an heir, since the deceased gave a corresponding instruction in advance. This means that before claiming the corpse, a subject who respects property rights will be forced to take steps to determine the identity of the deceased and their instructions in case of death.

Also, upon discovery of a corpse, it is quite reasonable to assume that the deceased’s friends have already begun searching for them, and if the cause of death was violence, they may be interested in finding the culprit; even if they have no rights to the corpse, they may approach the finder with a request to provide the corpse for an autopsy and similar manipulations.

In short, it is not hard to guess that all these subtleties make a corpse as a commodity quite illiquid and needed by few. Therefore, the question of “who owns the corpse” will more likely arise in the context of reflections on “how to get rid of a found corpse,” rather than “how best to use it for household purposes.” Thus, even in a situation where it is god knows whose corpse it is and it’s unclear if anyone will look for it, the decision to bury it and remember the burial site will be entirely justified and, most likely, less risky than feeding it to pigs. Or one could simply hand it over to a morgue, if we are talking about a civilized area (as it is easy to see from the reasoning provided, the demand for morgues under ancap will not disappear).