A friend who knows me too well sent me this headline. I find the sub-head as fascinating as the main headline. What’s the debate over? If someone can’t even die in New York City without risking being robbed and raped by a stranger, how much more “out of control” can a city be?
Of course, the dead man may have given consent for the suspect to to take his valuable and use him as a blow-up doll as his dying wish. Ya never know…it is New York, after all.
According to the Times report, a man boarded an R train in a Manhattan subway station and at some point died, though the cause and exact time of death are unclear. Another man boarded the same train car at around 11 p.m. n the Financial District, saw the fresh corpse, and began going through the dead commuter’s pockets. Then he began to have sex with the body in, uh, various ways. The scene was captured on surveillance cameras inside the train car. After the romantic liaison was complete, the man got off the train, perhaps because it would have been illegal to enjoy a post-coital cigarette in the car. The corpse reported feeling cheap and abandoned.
Okay, I was fooling about that last part….
Hit it, Blue-Eyes!
Ethics Alarms 
Some people are thoroughly disgusting and immoral.
good grief!!!
I usually don’t approve of flat commentary on posts, but in this case I deem it most appropriate.
Guess they didn’t learn the lesson of Daniel Penny.
Or did they.
How is death defined – what if a person is not technically dead until declared by an authority?
Thus, perhaps the most active participant in this short lived romance (1) may have identified the romantic partner as alive, (2) perhaps as with cpr, there was enough activity to maintain a heart beat (3) if there was no No, could this be a romantic signal of an implicit yes, and (4) what if the active participant is a trained and certified practitionet of Facilitated Communication and used this skill to interpret consent?
Now, that is thinking outside the proverbial box. Well done. Well done, indeed.
jvb
This is just too horrible!
trying again… Perhaps the corpse identified as alive. Perhaps the romantic activity was as effective as CPR for maintaining blood flow and until authorities determined death, life was assumed.
If the other person really was dead, would this be raping a corpse?
What if the person died right after the romantic encounter, but slept through it because it was so boring? What if the active participant was trained and certified in Facilitated Communication and testifies that there was concent.?
So many questions.
I don’t understand why things like this show up here. Is there some difficult ethics issue that I’m not seeing? I like this site when there is reason to examine an ethics dilemma and try to come to a decision and then justify my decision. Those tough ones generate responses worth considering and debating.
This one seems to be a slam dunk: unethical and not worth discussing.
Oh, you’re right of course. Occasionally I am intrigued by the depth of human darkness and perversion. It keep all the other stuff in perspective. Such incidents show up here because I decided when I moved from the more formal Ethics Scoreboard to a blog format to allow EA to be more personal and to reflect more of my range of interests and quirks when I am so moved.
But I’ll take the note.
it’s “ol’ blue eyes”!
I know. His eyes are blue either way, and I’m old enough Frank doesn’t seem “ol'”.
I remember when “You’ll be robbed, raped and killed; and not necessarily in that order” was a joke.