Maybe this is not the best time and place for this sentiment.
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They came by them somehow. If the nature of someplace’s justice system is that a death sentence comes with a “turned-to-plastic-and-paraded-around-for-selfies” enhancement, so as to trouble the offender’s eternal soul as well as their life, then just.. say that. “They’re ’bad guys’ and we as a company believe that’s what bad guys deserve.” Or even, “we weren’t involved in the circumstances of their death, but we figure if we’d had a chance to ask them they probably would be fine with it.”
As morally repugnant as I find the entire endeavor, I bet it wouldn’t even hurt ticket sales: people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions.
But like, there’s a right way to do informed consent—why not just do it and say “yeah we did it the obvious way”? Come to think of it… the ambiguity sure is a reliable path to free attention. It wouldn’t be the first marketing strategy to rely on provocation…
Perhaps we can excuse the use of bodies for collecting genetic samples and learning about the context in death. There are good reasons to even argue against that, but at the bare minimum we could preserve and store these outside the public eye in a modicum of respect for their gift to us.
Here in the US, our largest equivalent problems are the use of bodies of indigenous, enslaved, and convicted-as-criminals for merely museum display. This has no academic or scientific value; just the casual disrespect of the dead.
Even just here in Philadelphia, this problem isn't relegated to the Mütter museum. The Franklin institute regularly uses real bodies, not reproductions. It's not relegated to ancient history, either: the University of Pennsylvania managed to get their hands on the remains of victims of the 1985 police MOVE bombing. Why? How? To what end? Nobody can remember..... thankfully, the university has absolved itself as legally culpable.
Frank: International treaty, all skeletons come from India.
Freddy: No kidding, how come?
Frank: How the hell do I know how come? The important question is, where do they get all the skeletons with perfect teeth?
Apparently skeletons from India really was a big thing: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45738-6
It would make sense to both get payed immediately and have a percentage of the future revenues sent to your family.
Although this opens another can of worms, and seems in general a repulsive business to me.
Not to mention that given the risks they should produce evidence that it's not so, and that the deceased freely consented to it.
Is that unique to the West?
Which is not an invalid way of looking at it.
I'm amused by the idea of donating my body to science, especially to medical colleges for teaching purposes, but I would want to make some kind of connection with that future. I would want people to at least know my name, see my face, have some idea that I am a person, that I want them to use what's left of me to go out and do some good in the world with it.
We're all just made out of meat, but that shouldn't dehumanize us. On the contrary. And running roughshod over human rights to put on a show does not treat its subjects humanely. Worse, that harms the audience, who gets inured to that inhumanity.
Maybe if any evidence ever existed of such a thing. But since there is none, I say people spend far too much time and effort worrying about the dignity of dead bodies that have no feelings.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/13/medicineandh...
https://archive.ph/2025.06.23-112139/https://www.newyorker.c...
There are bigger problems than that, though, with bigger incentives to kill someone (in addition to those that the people involved with the exhibition have).
So, if they really think that exhibition has educational value (and enough of that to justify it), they should operate as a non-profit, with no revenue out of it, and with at most modest compensations to everyone involved.
You can simultaneously ask permission in cases where you don't actually need the body for anything meaningfully useful (displaying them this way is extremely frivolous) and also think it's dumb and paleolithic for them to object on such grounds and also tell them to grow up in cases where their mysticism necessarily obstructs societal growth.
If someone believes the earth is flat, how far do you go to humor them? If someone believes lizard people control the Vatican, do we put that belief on equal footing? If someone's perception of god tells them that poor people don't deserve healthcare if they can't pay for it, is that good, or am I allowed to say "what the fuck, that's fucked up"?
Not just human bodies, but living animals as well, and until relatively recently living humans also. Western scientific culture has a utilitarian "ends-justify-the-means" problem, even when the ends are as dubious as testing a new kind of lipstick that is one cent cheaper to produce.
I don’t know how the exhibition is received in other territories, but I feel like it’s Americans, Brits, and Europeans who I hear raise this specific set of concerns that plastinated Bodies exhibitions display executed prisoners. Often mixed in with some degree of insinuation about Chinese justice systems and political practices.
Whereas it seems to me that dark delight in bodily violence is a much more essential aspect of the human condition—Rene Girard’s notion of a scapegoat mechanism comes to mind—and that for all the pearl-clutching, the event promoter probably would still sell tickets if they catered to it upfront.
I can see how it would be easier to skip that conversation and those years (hopefully) waiting for me to expire of natural causes… and how, from a curatorial perspective, it might be easier to acquire the full variety of human bodies if you can effectively just go shopping for them.
It does seem like one framing that comes up a lot when people try to explain why they support capital punishment.
But I’m more or less with lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, who likes to phrase it “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” (Come to think of it I believe noted nightclub philosophers Sofi Tukker went on to borrow that formulation too...)
"A body donated to science - but used to test bombs" 6 August 2019
All the drama/allegations around executed bodies started popping up during transition period. Mostly around Dalian which became hub of plastination. I think collection went from like 20-200+ bodies over that period. IIRC von Hagen had to return a few bodies he thought was sus. Falungong made claims these were prisoner bodies - there was big FLG round up in late 90s.
Personally, I would consider donating my body to an exhibit in consideration of being exhibited; although I'm not much of an exhibitionist, so I'd still have to think about it. Similarly, I think I'd like to be respectfully dumped in a body farm, so forensic scientists can get more data about bodies that are less respectfully dumped in various places; that's an experience my body wouldn't be able to have except through donation or murder, and I'd rather not be murdered.
When donor bodies get used in ways that weren't generally practiced when donated and weren't specifically consented to, that's almost certainly not informed consent, even if there is a blanket consent 'to science'. IMHO, being exhibited in novel ways is fine if it's specifically consented to, but not otherwise. Especially in cases where the body was preserved for many years and then a novel use is made, it seems like you'd need new and specific consent, which maybe you can obtain from the estate, but certainly not from the donor.