piektdiena, 2012. gada 17. augusts

Briefly on Grief(ly)

I say mourning is not done for the deceased - a person's death does not hurt him in any way, so death is by no means a hurt. Some sadness is permissible if a person has had to suffer before death, which is all too common.

But mourning is legitimate nonetheless for those who remain alive for their well-being is usually lowered by someone's dying. 

The third perspective could be a rights-based one. The dead would surely mourn us, the living, should they be able to. After all, we are left with all the burdens of living and the capacity to suffer. We extend the rights of personhood to marginal cases such as infants and the demented elderly because we have been or may become these marginal cases ourselves. So mourning can be seen as extending the rights of personhood to the dead (which we will surely become some day). We like to think that we would mourn the living, were we the deceased, so we return the perceived favor by mourning the dead.

So the way around this is similar to the marginal cases' - there is no need to extend the rights of personhood to the dead, it's a figment of nonsense from superstitious metaphysics and mourning should be seen as a broken evolutionary adaptation which can only, just barely, be legitimized by appealing to negative-utilitarianism.

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