Correct. I would understand if archaeologists two thousand years from dug me up and used me in a display about burial rituals. I don't think there's any expectation of privacy from that kind of thing.
No ancient Egyptian Pharaoh would be happy with being dug up and placed in a glass box in a museum. They didn’t build the pyramids because they were bored or wanted people to visit them as tourist attractions. To the very real human beings of ancient Egypt, becoming an anthropological exhibit would be deeply troubling, a massively negative outcome.
At some point after death we should acknowledge we no longer have moral claims on the world.
That's the Hollywood narrative. Archaeology points to them being free men. Though nobody knows for sure.
Denying the owners profits and the curious the chance to indulge their curiosity for the benefit of people a thousand years dead is a derangement of moral priorities. We should care more about the living than the long dead. We can learn from and about them.
He and I think it's also just outright wrong to hide archaeological details from future generations for the sake of the long dead. It sounds like you disagree with us, but the argument that we should respect their wishes just because they wished them is not a strong one, given that we reject some wishes on a case by case basis as morally repugnant.
What is it about this wish in particular that should be respected more than other wishes?
I feel like there’s enough massively disappointing outcomes to go around.
I mean, after all, everyone ends up dead at the end of the day and we can barely take care of the living.
No, they were prestige products.
Even if I was, I'd be dead when it actually came about. The implication of time-travelling morality is an interesting but problematic one. There's no one actually suffering from the act of desecration, since suffering requires one to be alive.