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Love and Death
Abstract
Empirical evidence indicates that bereaved spouses are surprisingly muted in their responses to their loss, and that after a few months many of the bereaved return to their emotional baseline. Psychologists think this is good news: resilience is adaptive, and we should welcome evidence that there is less suffering in the world. I explore various reasons we might have for regretting our resilience, both because of what resilience tells us about our own significance vis-à-vis loved ones, and because resilience may render us incapable of comprehending how things really stand, value-wise. I also compare our actual dispositions to extreme alternatives ("sub-resilience" and "super-resilience"), and consider whether we might endorse (plain) resilience as a kind of mean.
... Many individuals in long-term, satisfying relationships exhibit only short-lived grief reactions that dissipate in a few months, rather than years [1]. According to Moller [3], this emotional immunity constitutes a form of epistemic blindness. Since emotions allow us to perceive values, a lack of grief "renders us unable to take in or register fully the significance of our losses" and "deprives us of insight into our condition" [3] (pp. 310-311). ...
... According to Moller [3], this emotional immunity constitutes a form of epistemic blindness. Since emotions allow us to perceive values, a lack of grief "renders us unable to take in or register fully the significance of our losses" and "deprives us of insight into our condition" [3] (pp. 310-311). ...
... Also, it is the one most discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature 2 . Second, I focus on Moller [3]'s worry from epistemic blindness and Smuts [4]' worry from the failure to care. Not only are these worries shared by prominent scholars (Nussbaum [5]; Solomon [6]; Cholbi [8,10]), but they have also sparked heated debates about the ethical aspects of resilience (Vitrano [11]; Preston-Roedder and Preston-Roedder [12]; O'Hagan [13]) 3 . ...
This paper defends resilience in bereavement by way of responding to two prominent objections in the contemporary philosophical literature. Resilience in bereavement pertains to the ability to return to one’s functional and emotional baselines in a comparatively short period after the death of a loved one. Contrary to what Moller thinks, resilience is compatible with having a deep appreciation for the deceased loved one. Appealing to the example of Zhuangzi’s grieving of his wife, I argue that the agony of grief is assuaged as one comes to terms with one’s loss through a realization of the universality and inevitability of death. This can be so even as one continues to appreciate the significance of what one has lost. Also, contrary to Smuts’ view, resilience does not indicate a failure to care. Although the resilient is free from prolonged and intense grief, she could continue to care for the deceased by constructing a new relationship with her and contributing to this relationship in ways that are appropriate to it. This view is further corroborated by empirical bereavement research. According to the continuing bonds theory, healthy grief is resolved by establishing changed ties with the deceased rather than detaching ourselves from them.
... Individu yang memiliki ketabahan dapat terhindar dari stres, frustasi ataupun hambatan-hambatan yang mereka temui pada saat hidup di kota lain dan terpisah dengan keluarga karena adanya pandangan positif terhadap berbagai macam kendala yang mereka hadapi. Individu yang memiliki kepribadian ketabahan dapat mengurangi pengaruh kejadian hidup yang mencekam dengan menggunakan sumber sosial yang ada di lingkungannya untuk dijadikan motivasi dan dukungan dalam mengatasi masalah ketegangan yang dihadapinya dan memberikan kesuksesan (Moller, 2015). ...
Widowhood is a major problem for women. This research intends to analyze phenomenologically the young widow is left behind in the perspective of Ki Ageng Suryomentaram. The aim of this study; First, deeply analyze the young widows left dead on mulur-mungkret according to Ki Ageng Suryomentaram perspective. Second, to analyze in depth tatag young widow left behind according to perspective Ki Ageng Suryomentaram. Criteria of the subject, first, women who became widows and have aged 30-45 years. Second, the subject is widow under 6 months. The results showed that, firstly, the self-regulation the developed subject is still largely on the mind and body. Both are done with the thought that his life improved, and followed by adding skills to support the independence of his life. The three subjects have not arrived at olah raos to place the problem more clearly and clearly. The three subjects have not really sumeleh (sincere). The steps taken to reduce reribet limited to out of problems, not yet to understand theirself.
... Pourquoi cette idée nous dérange-t-elle ? Indique-t-elle que nous n'aimions pas le défunt ou que nous ne comprenons pas la perte endurée(Moller 2007) ? L'amour implique-t-il le devoir moral de souffrir la torture du deuil ?La mort nous trouble. ...
La mort nous afflige, nous angoisse, voire nous terrifie. Qu’est-ce que la mort ? La tristesse et l’angoisse face à la mort sont-elles justifiées ? La mort est-elle un mal ? Vaudrait-il mieux être immortel ? Comment comprendre le deuil ? Cette entrée propose un aperçu des questions principales de la philosophie contemporaine de la mort. Tentons de sonder l’énigme la plus tragique de la vie.
... 14 There is literature that extensively discusses love and death of beloved persons. See Moller 2007. It might therefore be hard to stop loving, but sooner or later you should realise that you have no reasons to continue to love that person. ...
This is a paper on theories that are discussed under the term quality-view of love: people have reasons for love that are beliefs and evaluations about qualities of beloved persons. Different theories propose different kinds of qualities that make love justified. In this paper I discuss the various problems of the main theories in this field and how they can cope with criticism. In chapter 5.3 I will propose a category of reasons for love that are not typically associated with positive evaluations, but that can be reasons for love anyway.
... And so the jab in the stomach and sensations of being ripped by slivers of glass at the news of her mother's impending death -like Arjuna's inner tears at the death of his relatives in the Mahābhārata -are recastable in plain-language propositional terms, i.e., resembling the structure of belief, or better value judgments. The massive ramblings of her to me apart, what Nussbaum has ended up with is rather closer to the Hybrid Cognitive theory that has been around since the late 1980s, in which perception and belief-state still maintain a hegemony, or are called the 'paradigm case', but in which non-propositional contents are not excluded, though these are viewed as the 'messier' side of emotion, linked to its own specifi c evaluative continuum and affective contents -see, for example, the works of Don Gustafson (1989), Ronald Alan Nash (1989) and Dan Moller (2007). The only exception is the perspicuous underscoring of resilience and caring by Moller. ...
PURUSHOTTAMA BILIMORIA and ALEKSANDRA WENTA (eds):
Emotions in Indian Thought-Systems.
x, 287 pp. New Delhi: Routledge, 2015. ISBN 978 1 138 85935 7.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X1600077X
Emotions have a history in South Asia, if hardly anything like an adequate historiography.
The editors of this book agree: “much more work . . . needs to be done to
improve our understanding of emotions in India, especially with regard to historicaldevelopment of emotional experience and the methods of its conceptualization” (p. 1). Any such history will have to be twinned with the history of what we, not always helpfully, call religions, tracked in this book as species of a genus the editors call “Indian thought-systems” in the title, and “pre-modern Indian traditions of knowledge” in the preface (p. ix). The vast South Asian corpus of theoretical literature affords us one of the best sources for the contested descriptions under which emotions can be seen to come into view and change. To that end, this book represents what the editors call “a modest step” (p. 1). Along with love – surely the best studied emotion in South Asia – the book includes desire, fear, heroism, awe, anger, disgust and “modern” despair. Severally, the papers address many traditions, in not a few languages, periods and places. The step may be modest but the stride is wide.
The path from conference to publication risks a book uneven in focus and unevenly successful. A collection of nine essays stemming from a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Shimla in 2012, this book does not escape the limitations of its genre. The essays that do succeed, however, recommend the book to any serious student of South Asia and emotions in general.
The contributions by Rafaele Torella, Bettina Sharada Bäumer and Aleksandra Wenta are uniformly rewarding, combining exacting philological rigour with sophisticated interpretations. In these essays tantra is revealed to be something of a new paradigm for religious praxis and sensibility, with the trans-valuation of emotion in general, and the revaluation of particular emotions, partly constitutive of that paradigm. These essays are profitably read together with Andrea Acri’s excellent “Between impetus, fear and disgust”, where the familiar yet difficult word saṃvega is tracked across Buddhist, Yoga and Śaiva traditions for the subtle nuances in the meanings the word comes to express and the increasingly prominent role of theology in reframing the meanings of emotional experiences. The essay on love in Sahajiyā Vaisṇạvism in colonial Bengal by Delmonico and Sarkar is a gift of rare material (a practitioner’s notebooks!) and sensitive commentary. They valuably underscore in closing that the experience of love is here oriented towards the achievement of “becoming fully human” (p. 175). Collocate the insights of Delmonico and Sarkar with the resonating convictions the eighth-century playwright Bhavabhūti gave Rāma to express in verse 1.39 of Rāma’s Last Act for an indication of how a history of the emotions ought to include the history of literature in South Asia.
It is unfortunate that the history of aesthetics, whose long and perhaps unique investment in cataloguing the emotions as such, and whose developing concern with a hermeneutics of emotions was pivotal for many Indian scriptures and communities, is only weakly represented here. For a more balanced diet, see Sheldon Pollock’s “From Rasa seen to Rasa heard” in Caterina Guenzi and Slyvia d’Intino (eds), Aux Abords de la clarière: Études indiennes et comparées en l’honneur de Charles Malamoud (Paris: Brepols, 2012), 189–207. More generally, as the work of Lee Siegel and Daud Ali among others has shown, without the intimately related disciplines of pleasure and power, no history of Indian religions is complete.
More worryingly, “Pre-modern India” in this book, however unintentionally,
excludes Islam. One loses thereby the kind of climate of thought and feeling which informed bhakti in North and Central India, and obscures from view more finely grained stories of possible connections and continuities, such as that of the Jain layman Banarsidas of the fifteenth century, firmly in love with love as expressed by a Sūfi (Ardhakathānak 171a–b) long before he invested himself in experiments with new forms of Jaina spirituality (adhyatma). Happily, the work of many, such as Aditya Behl and Francesca Orsini, can be used to make up for such omissions. In the long run, any history of the emotions will have to be promiscuous with respect to disciplines, traditions and archives. One outstanding contribution this book makes lies in the introduction where the editors, by way of “theorizing emotions in India”, provide a veritable genealogy of what one might call the history of philosophical anthropology in India (10–47). Covering some of the same ground as Rafaele Torella’s essay in the book, the editors’ genealogy explicitly builds on Alexis Sanderson’s path-breaking “Purity and power among the Brahmans of Kashmir”, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 190–216. Together, such genealogies valuably suggest that the way in which emotions have been understood and valued in South Asia varies with the ways in which personhood has been valued and conceived. If what we call “emotions” have in South Asia at times been conceived as being more or less bound up with categories such as unconscious dispositions, experiential memory and praxis, while at other times being treated as more-or-less of a piece with what a phenomenology of consciousness might disclose, such decisions matter. Can we make sense of the possibility of being, like Bhavabhūti’s Rāma, angry, or in pain for a long time without knowing it? At least, any history of emotions in South Asia will have to consider such questions if it is to make use of the editors’ insight that the essays in this volume can show how “the emotions . . . contribute to the praxical modes of religious ‘being-in-the-world’”(p. 36).
Ironically, this book’s attempt to think with South Asia’s theoretical pasts has convinced me that a history of emotions would do well to think with a less monolithic category than the modern “emotion”. Pre-moderns, whether in Europe (as Anastasia Philippa Scrutton has long argued) or South Asia, typically had recourse to far more diverse, nuanced and flexible vocabularies. We ought to understandt hem better.
Sonam Kachru
University of Virginia
... And so the jab in the stomach and sensations of being ripped by slivers of glass at the news of her mother's impending death -like Arjuna's inner tears at the death of his relatives in the Mahābhārata -are recastable in plain-language propositional terms, i.e., resembling the structure of belief, or better value judgments. The massive ramblings of her to me apart, what Nussbaum has ended up with is rather closer to the Hybrid Cognitive theory that has been around since the late 1980s, in which perception and belief-state still maintain a hegemony, or are called the 'paradigm case', but in which non-propositional contents are not excluded, though these are viewed as the 'messier' side of emotion, linked to its own specifi c evaluative continuum and affective contents -see, for example, the works of Don Gustafson (1989), Ronald Alan Nash (1989) and Dan Moller (2007). The only exception is the perspicuous underscoring of resilience and caring by Moller. ...
... And so the jab in the stomach and sensations of being ripped by slivers of glass at the news of her mother's impending death -like Arjuna's inner tears at the death of his relatives in the Mahābhārata -are recastable in plain-language propositional terms, i.e., resembling the structure of belief, or better value judgments. The massive ramblings of her to me apart, what Nussbaum has ended up with is rather closer to the Hybrid Cognitive theory that has been around since the late 1980s, in which perception and belief-state still maintain a hegemony, or are called the 'paradigm case', but in which non-propositional contents are not excluded, though these are viewed as the 'messier' side of emotion, linked to its own specifi c evaluative continuum and affective contents -see, for example, the works of Don Gustafson (1989), Ronald Alan Nash (1989) and Dan Moller (2007). The only exception is the perspicuous underscoring of resilience and caring by Moller. ...
There has been recent discussion of a puzzle posed by emotions that are backward looking. Though our emotions commonly diminish over time, how can they diminish fittingly if they are an accurate appraisal of an event that is situated in the past? Agnes Callard (2017) has offered a solution by providing an account of anger in which anger is both backwards looking and resolvable, yet her account depends upon contrition to explain anger's fitting diminishment. My aim is to explain how anger can fittingly diminish even when there is lack of contrition. I propose a permissivism about fittingness by showing that both anger and compassion are fitting responses to blameworthy behaviour. I argue that anger is rendered fitting because it accurately appraises the behaviour, whereas compassion becomes fitting as a valuational response to what the behaviour reveals about the lived experience of the offender. I then respond to some worries my account raises, and I clarify details of my account to show that it is not unrealistic to the way some of our anger actually does diminish. I end with a proposal that our anger can fittingly diminish through the act of forgiveness when compassion is not a forthcoming affective response.
This paper argues that grieving a profound loss is a transformative experience, specifically an unchosen transformative experience, understood as an event‐based transformation not chosen by the agent. Grief transforms the self (i) cognitively, by forcing the agent to alter a large set of beliefs and desires, (ii) phenomenologically, by altering their experience in a diffuse or global manner, (iii) normatively, by requiring the agent to revise their practical identity, and (iv) existentially, by confronting the agent with a structuring condition of their life. Grief is a disruption to one's identity that an agent addresses by making sense of the world after the loss, remaking the practical significance of various situations in their lives through their activity. Transformative grief is both an “activity” and a “revelation” (Callard, 2020): Some parts of the grieving process are active (the agent must actively work to become a new kind of person), while others are irreducibly passive (the agent passively undergoes them).
Grief seems difficult to locate within familiar emotion taxonomies, as it is not a basic emotion nor a hybrid thereof. Here I propose that grief is better conceptualized as an emotionally rich attentional phenomenon rather than an emotion or sequence of emotions. In grieving that another person has died, the loss incurred by the grieving, etc. occupies the forefront of the grieving subject's consciousness while other candidate facts for their attention recede into the background. The former set of facts thus sit near the top of their mental 'priority structures' throughout a grief event. The hypothesis that grief is attentional helps to explain several common phenomenological features of grief experience, underpins a credible 'metaphysics' of grief, accounts for the extent to which grief is susceptible to choice and agency, and addresses a recent puzzle regarding our reasons to grieve and our apparent proclivity toward 'resilience' in the face of grief.
Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that “the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted”. I elaborate on King’s claim by focusing on the way in which we treat and understand ‘maladjustment’ that is responsive to severe trauma (e.g. PTSD that is a result of military combat or rape). Mental healthcare and our social attitudes about mental illness and disorder will prevent us from recognizing real injustice that symptoms of mental illness can be appropriately responding to, unless we recognize that many emotional states (and not just beliefs!) that constitute those symptoms are warranted by the circumstances they are responsive to. I argue that there is a failure to distinguish between PTSD symptoms that are warranted emotional responses to trauma and those that are not. This results in us focusing our attention on “fixing” the agent internally, but not on fixing the world. It is only by centering questions of warrant that we will be able to understand and expose the relationship between agents’ internal mental states and their oppression. But we also need to ask when someone’s emotional response is unwarranted by their experience (as in the case of someone who develops PTSD after a non-traumatic event). If we fail to do this—as, I claim, both our mental healthcare and the broader social world fail to do—we treat warranted and unwarranted emotions as on a par. This undermines the epistemic judgment of the agent who has warranted PTSD symptoms, resulting in her failing to trust her evaluation of whether her emotional response to her own trauma is warranted by that trauma, and thus failing to recognize her own oppression.
El duelo anticipado es un tema al que la filosofía ha prestado muy poca atención, a diferencia de lo que ocurre con el duelo que sigue a la muerte. Una peculiaridad obvia del primero es que sucede mientras todavía existe una relación interpersonal entre el doliente y aquel por quien se duele. En este artículo examino el impacto que el duelo anticipado puede tener en dicha relación, particularmente con respecto a las actitudes reactivas de sanción, propias del conflicto interpersonal.
According to what may be called PERMANENT, blameworthiness is forever: once you are blameworthy for something, you are always blameworthy for it. Here a prima facie case for this view is set out, and the view is defended from two lines of attack. On one, you are no longer blameworthy for a past offense if, despite being the person who committed it, you no longer have any of the pertinent psychological states you had at the time of the misdeed. On the other, you can cease to be blameworthy if you sufficiently experience guilt or remorse, suffer enough punishment, or are forgiven for your misdeed. Although several points made in support of the second challenge are accepted, they are entirely consistent with PERMANENT. Neither line of attack, as so far presented, undermines the plausibility of this view stemming from the prima facie case.
How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we offer an alternative account of its object, which undermines these assumptions and dissolves the apparent problems. The principal object of grief, we suggest, is a loss of life-possibilities, which is experienced, understood, and engaged with over a prolonged period. Other descriptions of grief’s object identify more specific aspects of this loss, in ways that do not respect a straightforward distinction between concrete and formal objects.
Normativists argue that the mind is essentially normative and any adequate account of our mental attitudes must involve normative terms and judgments. In particular, one brand of Normativism defends the claim that mental attitudes are defined by constitutive norms. Against this, Anti‐normativists have offered non‐normative accounts of mental states.The goal of this paper is to bolster Anti‐normativism by undermining one key argument in favor of Normativism.
Most agree that, in some special scenarios, prudence can speak against feeling a fitting emotion. Some go further, arguing that the tension between fittingness and prudence afflicts some emotions in a fairly general way. (Perhaps, for instance, it’s best for human well-being that we generally grieve much less than is fitting.) This paper goes even further: it argues that, when it comes to anxiety, the tension between fittingness and prudence is nearly inescapable. On any plausible theory, an enormous array of possible outcomes are both bad and epistemically uncertain in the right way to ground fitting anxiety. What’s more, the fittingness of an emotion is a demanding, not a permissive, normative status. So the norms of fitting emotion demand a great deal of anxiety. For almost any realistic agent, it would be deeply imprudent to feel anxiety in a way that meets the demands set by norms of fitting emotion.
This paper draws attention to a neglected aspect of grief: its “sweet” sorrow. This sorrow presents us with a formidable challenge, namely, to explain how what is bitter—the misery of loss—can be found to be sweet. Those drawn into this sorrow suspect that it is somehow too sweet. Are their suspicions well founded? Why is it and it alone sweet to those who delight in it and why is it not just sweet but companion‐like and even dear? Guided by the observations of St. Augustine and C. S. Lewis, I propose that this sorrow is a form of self‐pity that displaces the significant other from the center of one's concern and affords an enhanced intimacy with oneself. The proposal vindicates the impression that one finds in this sorrow a companion that can take the place of the significant other and also positions us to address one of the most fundamental questions that might be raised in connection with grief, namely, whether the one who has died is a proper object of concern or whether our grief is ultimately for ourselves, for a loss that is ours and ours alone.
This paper challenges an orthodoxy in recent philosophical discussions of grief, namely, that grief is essentially tied to the thought that a person of significance to oneself has died. As first‐person reports make clear, one can find oneself cut off from the significant other not simply in body but also in thought. This is not, moreover, an isolated difficulty but one that may have repercussions for one's capacity to form an outlook on the social world, the natural world, and the world viewed from one's own scheme of ends. Taking C. S. Lewis's diary of grief as a guide, I argue that our capacity to think of our significant others depends, surprisingly enough, on our capacity to acknowledge their independence from us even in death.
Recent years have seen a surge in philosophical work on the rationality of grief. Much of this research is premised on the idea that people tend to grieve much less than would be appropriate or, as it is often called, fitting. My goal in this paper is diagnostic, that is, to articulate two never properly distinguished, and indeed often conflated, arguments in favour of the purported discrepancy between experienced and fitting grief: a metaphysical and a psychological argument. According to the former, grief is rationalized entirely by facts about the past. And because the past is unchangeable, grief can be said to remain forever fitting. According to the latter argument, humans’ emotional resilience causes grief to diminish at a faster rate than would be fitting. Which of these problems we end up facing depends on relatively subtle variations in the characterization of the losses that render grief appropriate .
I argue that a practical deliberator may have good reasons not to consider some option even though that option is what there is most reason, all things considered, for her to do. The most interesting reasons not to consider an option arise in cases where an agent cannot be compensated in kind for the loss of goods that she values. Where this is the case, an attitude of conservatism is warranted: it is reasonable to begin deliberation by considering only ‘no-regrets’ options, and to proceed to considering other possibilities only when the cost of continuing to consider only no-regrets options has become intolerably high. The account that I develop illuminates intuitions that help motivate deontological moral thought, and it can shed light on the complaint that there is something wrong with the way in which schematic thought experiments are frequently used in philosophy to drive moral theorizing.
I argue that Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight are best seen as an example of memento mori art. Memento mori, the admonition to remember death, can take many forms, but the idea remains the same, namely that an awareness of our inevitable end should bear on how we live. I show how Richard Linklater’s warning works in each of the movies and argue that with the Before trilogy he makes a Frankfurt-style case that romantic love is life’s summum bonum—i.e., ‘the ultimate ground of practical rationality’.
In this essay, I consider a particular version of the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to suffer, namely, that they deserve to feel guilty to the proper degree (a thesis I call "Desert-Guilt"). Two further theses have been thought to explicate and support the thesis, one that appeals to the non-instrumental goodness of the blameworthy receiving what they deserve (in this case, the experience of guilt), and the other that appeals to the idea that being blameworthy provides reason to promote the blameworthy receiving what they deserve (again, in this case, the experience of guilt). I call the first "Good-Guilt" and the second "Reason-Guilt.” I begin by exploring what I take to be the strongest argument for Good-Guilt which gains force from a comparison of guilt and grief, and the strongest argument against. I conclude that Good-Guilt might be true, but that even if it is, the strongest argument in favor of it fails to support it in a way that provides reason for the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilty. I then consider the hypothesis that Reason-Guilt might be true and might be the more fundamental principle, supporting both Good-Guilt and Desert-Guilt. I argue that it does not succeed, however, and instead propose a different principle, according to which being blameworthy does not by itself provide reason for promoting that the blameworthy get what they deserve, but that being blameworthy systematically does so in conjunction with particular kinds of background circumstances. Finally, I conclude that Desert-Guilt might yet be true, but that it does not clearly gain support from either Good-Guilt or Reason-Guilt.
The paper argues against a widely held synchronic view of emotional rationality. I begin by considering recent philosophical literature on various backward‐looking emotions, such as regret, grief, resentment, and anger. I articulate the general problem these accounts grapple with: a certain diminution in backward‐looking emotions seems fitting while the reasons for these emotions seem to persist. The problem, I argue, rests on the assumption that if the facts that give reason for an emotion remain unchanged, the emotion remains fitting. However, I argue there are rationally self‐consuming attitudes: affective attitudes that become less fitting the longer they endure while the facts that give reason for them persist. A widely held synchronic view of fitting affective attitudes denies that fittingness at a time depends on the agent's attitudes at different times and therefore denies that the fittingness of an affective attitude can depend on its duration. Once we reject the synchronic view, we may see that affective attitudes are often fitting due to the fitting processes of which they are part. These fitting processes explain the fitting diminution of backward‐looking emotions as well as other diachronic aspects of the fittingness of emotions.
In A Political Theory of Territory, Margaret Moore’s basic thesis is that peoples gain rights to territories by occupying them. The current article challenges the underpinning social ontology of this normative theory. For Moore, a people is a collective agent meeting conditions of mutual identification and shared aspirations, political capacity, and a history of political cooperation. In turn, a people so understood occupy a territory when its members reside in it and plan their lives around their relationship to it. Against these conceptions, the current article argues that both notions – peoples and occupancy – fail, and for similar reasons, namely, an underlying subjectivism that creates more conflict than it resolves.
The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close or loved one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated process of mourning. Robert C. Solomon re fl ected deeply on the ‘extreme emotion’ of grief in his extensive theorizing on the emotions, particularly in his essay ‘On Grief and Gratitude’, commenting that grief is ‘often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world’ (Solomon RC, On grief and gratitude. In: In defense of sentimentality. Oxford University Press, New York, 2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical re fl ections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere-notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva-and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom.
That human beings are mortal, social, and interdependent ensures that virtually everyone experiences grief during the course of their lives. While it is arguable that we experience grief in response to a wide array of losses or life-transforming events (e.g., divorce, loss of a job or career), this entry will focus on the paradigm cause of grief, namely, the death of a loved one. Despite the ubiquity of grief in human experience, philosophical interest in the topic has waxed and waned over the centuries. Grief was a central concern of the ancient Roman philosophical schools, serving as part of those schools’ larger project of using philosophy to investigate our own mortality and to prepare us for death. In contrast, interest in grief among contemporary ethicists has been sporadic and scant. Claims about the nature or value of grief are occasionally made, but rarely are they carefully interrogated or systematically engaged. As a result, we lack at present any developed philosophical “theories of grief.” This essay will not attempt to offer such a theory; rather, it addresses several interrelated ethical questions concerning grief, concluding by highlighting their interrelations.
The chapter considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close or loved one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated practice of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the 'extreme emotion' of grief in his extensive theorizing on the emotions, particularly in his essay 'On Grief and Gratitude', commenting that grief is 'often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world' (2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere-notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva-and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom.
It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally to deserve to feel guilty. Being blamed by someone else is not necessarily harmful to the wrongdoer. The blame might not be expressed, or the wrongdoer might not care. But to blame oneself necessarily involves suffering. This conception of blameworthiness explains why the control condition should obtain: We are morally blameworthy for A only if A was (directly or indirectly) under our control because (a) to be blameworthy is to deserve to feel guilty, (b) to feel guilty is to suffer, and (c) one deserves to suffer for A only if A was under one?s control.
One strand of recent philosophical attention to Marcel Proust's novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum and Rae Langton, claims that romantic love is depicted in the text as self-regarding and solipsistic. I aim to challenge this reading. First, I demonstrate that the text contains a different view, overlooked by these recent interpreters, according to which love is directed at the partially knowable reality of another. Second, I argue that a better explanation for Proust's narrator's ultimate renunciation of romantic love appeals not to his impossible epistemic standard for knowledge of another person, but to his demanding evaluative standard for the permanence of love. This interpretation takes into account the broader scope of the novel, connecting with its larger themes of lost time and the desire for stability, and is more charitable, connecting to familiar worries about transience and constancy in loving relationships.
We live in times where it is possible to control our emotions using biomedical means – for example by taking pills that make us feel better. This chapter discusses one worry about the biomedical enhancement of mood. It is a worry that seems to play an important role in more familiar objections to biomedical enhancement of mood, such as the objection that it would lead to inauthenticity. The worry is that the use of positive mood enhancers will corrupt emotional lives. Ethical questions about the biomedical enhancement of mood are often really questions about our affective reasons. Negative emotions typically feel bad, positive ones typically feel good. Here our hedonic reasons come into direct competition with affective reasons. Those who entirely dismiss affective reasons, or at least think that negative affective reasons are extremely weak, are likely to see little problem with positive mood enhancers.
Rabbi Soloveitchik (the "Rav") wonders why mourning is prohibited on a festival. His response, that the essence of mourning is the heart's inner grief, and that such grief is incompatible with the joy of festivals, utilizes his famous distinction between the ma'aseh of a mitsva and its kiyyum. There may be acts (ma'asitn) required by the commandments to mourn and to rejoice, but the real fulfillment (ki- yyumim) of those commandments lies inside the heart. So according to the Rav, the Gemara forbids mourning on a festival because the essence of the commandments to mourn and to rejoice on a festival relates to one's inner state, and the inner grief of mourning is incompatible with the inner joy of festivals. Contradictory emotional states cannot co-exist.
This book takes a fresh look at happiness from a practical perspective: the perspective of someone trying to solve the wonderful problem of how to give himself a good life. From this perspective, "happiness" is the name of a solution to that problem for practical deliberation. The book's approach to happiness falls within a tradition going back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, a tradition now called "eudaimonism." Beginning with Aristotle's seminal discussion of the role of happiness in practical reasoning, the book asks what sort of good happiness would have to be in order to play the role in our practical economies that it actually does play. Looking at happiness from this perspective, this book argues that happiness is a life of activity, with three main features: it is acting for the sake of ends we can live for, and living for them wisely; it is fulfilling for us, both as humans and as unique individuals; and it is inextricable from our connections with the particular persons, pursuits, and places that make us who we are. By returning to this ancient perspective on happiness, the book finds new directions for contemporary thought about the good lives we want for ourselves.
Many people have claimed that integrity requires sticking to one's convictions come what may. Greg Scherkoske challenges this claim, arguing that it creates problems in distinguishing integrity from fanaticism, close-mindedness or mere inertia. Rather, integrity requires sticking to one's convictions to the extent that they are justifiable and likely to be correct. In contrast to traditional views of integrity, Scherkoske contends that it is an epistemic virtue intimately connected to what we know and have reason to believe, rather than an essentially moral virtue connected to our values. He situates integrity in the context of shared cognitive and practical agency, and shows that the relationship between integrity and impartial morality is not as antagonistic as many have thought – which has important implications for the 'integrity objection' to impartial moral theories. This original and provocative study will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of ethics.
Recent work in the psychology of happiness has led some to conclude that we are unreliable assessors of our lives and that skepticism about whether we are happy is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. I argue that such claims, if true, have worrisome implications for procreation. In particular, they show that skepticism about whether many if not most people are well positioned to create persons is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. This skeptical worry should not be confused with a related but much stronger version of the argument, which says that all human lives are very bad and not worth starting. I criticize the latter stance, but take seriously the former stance and hope it can be answered in future work.
It is often assumed that there is a necessary relationship between historical value and irreplaceability, and that this is an essential feature of historical value’s distinctive character. Contrary to this assumption, I argue that it is a merely contingent fact that some historically valuable things are irreplaceable, and that irreplaceability is not a distinctive feature of historical value at all. Rather, historically significant objects, from heirlooms to artifacts, offer us an otherwise impossible connection with the past, a value that persists even in the face of suitable replacements.
Among recent criticisms of impartial moral theories, especially in consequentialist and deontological forms, Bernard Williams’ integrity objection is perhaps the most tantalizing. This objection is a complaint—at once both general and deep—that impartial moral theories are systematically incapable of finding room for integrity in human life and character. Kantians have made forceful responses to this integrity objection and have moved on. Consequentialists have found the objection more trying. I offer reasons to think that consequentialists too can safely move on. These reasons suggest the relationship between integrity and impartiality is less antagonistic than often supposed.
RÉSUMÉ : Parmi les récentes critiques des théories morales impartiales, notamment les critiques conséquentialiste et déontologique, l’objection d’intégrité de Bernard Williams est possiblement la plus attrayante. Cette objection—à la fois générale et profonde—reproche aux théories morales impartiales d’être incapables de retrouver l’intégrité dans la vie et le caractère humains. Les kantiens ont répondu vigoureusement à cette objection, puis sont passés à autre chose. Les conséquentialistes ont trouvé l’objection plus éprouvante. Je soutiens que les conséquentialistes peuvent, eux aussi, passer à autre chose, en suggérant que le rapport entre l’intégrité et l’impartialité est moins antagonique que supposé.
The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close one, and the processes of grieving and mourning.
The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an
analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on
the associated practice of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the 'extreme emotion' of grief in his extensive
theorizing on the emotions, particularly in his essay 'On Grief and Gratitude', commenting that grief is 'often described
as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world' (2004: 73).
While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical
reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere - notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva
- and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom.
KeywordsGrief–Death–Mourning–Melancholia–Solomon–Nussbaum–Jewish–Hindu–Buddhist–Continental–Freud–Kristeva–Heidegger
Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operate to prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as might be expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen the impact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce the value of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted, lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effects were not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buy lottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lottery salient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minor pleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness.
Remarriage is one of the most important determinants of physical and economic well-being among the widowed. The goal of this study is to estimate how hazard rates for remarriage vary among widows and widowers on the basis of both observable and unobservable characteristics. The remarriage estimates rely on nationally representative samples of widows and widowers from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Continuous-time hazard rate regressions indicate strong age and duration dependence effects for middle-aged widows and widowers and for older widowers. Among middle-aged widows, blacks and those with dependent children in the home have lower rates of remarriage. For middle-aged widowers, living in urbanized areas limits the prospects of remarriage. For older widowers, education and, to some extent, economic status appear to have positive effects on the remarriage rates. Overall, age and time since widowhood have the strongest and most consistent effects on remarriage rates for different widowed groups.
Using prospective longitudinal data on an older sample beginning prior to the death of a spouse, G. A. Bonanno et al. (2002) distinguished 5 unique trajectories of bereavement outcome: common grief, chronic grief, chronic depression, depression followed by improvement, and resilience. These trajectories having been identified, the aims of the current study were to examine differences in how respondents in each group reacted to and processed the loss. Specific hypotheses were tested regarding differences in coping, meaning making, context, and representations of the lost relationship. Results suggest that chronic grief stems from the upheaval surrounding the loss of a healthy spouse, whereas chronic depression results from more enduring emotional difficulties that are exacerbated by the loss. Both the resilient and the depressed-improved groups showed remarkably healthy profiles and relatively little evidence of either struggling with or denying/avoiding the loss.
Healthy people generally underestimate the self-reported well-being of people with disabilities and serious illnesses. The cause of this discrepancy is in dispute, and the present study provides evidence for 2 causes. First, healthy people fail to anticipate hedonic adaptation to poor health. Using an ecological momentary assessment measure of mood, the authors failed to find evidence that hemodialysis patients are less happy than healthy nonpatients are, suggesting that they have largely, if not completely, adapted to their condition. In a forecasting task, healthy people failed to anticipate this adaptation. Second, although controls understated their own mood in both an estimation task and a recall task, patients were quite accurate in both tasks. This relative negativity in controls' estimates of their own moods could also contribute to their underestimation of the moods and overall well-being of patients.
Recent research has indicated that many people faced with highly aversive events suffer only minor, transient disruptions in functioning and retain a capacity for positive affect and experiences. This article reports 2 studies that replicate and extend these findings among bereaved parents, spouses, and caregivers of a chronically ill life partner using a range of self-report and objective measures of adjustment. Resilience was evidenced in half of each bereaved sample when compared with matched, nonbereaved counterparts and 36% of the caregiver sample in a more conservative, repeated-measures ipsative comparison. Resilient individuals were not distinguished by the quality of their relationship with spouse/partner or caregiver burden but were rated more positively and as better adjusted by close friends.
The illness of a spouse can affect the health of a caregiving partner. We examined the association between the hospitalization of a spouse and a partner's risk of death among elderly people.
We studied 518,240 couples who were enrolled in Medicare in 1993. We used Cox regression analysis and fixed-effects (case-time-control) methods to assess hospitalizations and deaths during nine years of follow-up.
Overall, 383,480 husbands (74 percent) and 347,269 wives (67 percent) were hospitalized at least once, and 252,557 husbands (49 percent) and 156,004 wives (30 percent) died. Mortality after the hospitalization of a spouse varied according to the spouse's diagnosis. Among men, 6.4 percent died within a year after a spouse's hospitalization for colon cancer, 6.9 percent after a spouse's hospitalization for stroke, 7.5 percent after a spouse's hospitalization for psychiatric disease, and 8.6 percent after a spouse's hospitalization for dementia. Among women, 3.0 percent died within a year after a spouse's hospitalization for colon cancer, 3.7 percent after a spouse's hospitalization for stroke, 5.7 percent after a spouse's hospitalization for psychiatric disease, and 5.0 percent after a spouse's hospitalization for dementia. After adjustment for measured covariates, the risk of death for men was not significantly higher after a spouse's hospitalization for colon cancer (hazard ratio, 1.02; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.95 to 1.09) but was higher after hospitalization for stroke (hazard ratio, 1.06; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.03 to 1.09), congestive heart failure (hazard ratio, 1.12; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.16), hip fracture (hazard ratio, 1.15; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.11 to 1.18), psychiatric disease (hazard ratio, 1.19; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.12 to 1.26), or dementia (hazard ratio, 1.22; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.12 to 1.32). For women, the various risks of death after a spouse's hospitalization were similar. Overall, for men, the risk of death associated with a spouse's hospitalization was 22 percent of that associated with a spouse's death (95 percent confidence interval, 17 to 27 percent); for women, the risk was 16 percent of that associated with death (95 percent confidence interval, 8 to 24 percent).
Among elderly people hospitalization of a spouse is associated with an increased risk of death, and the effect of the illness of a spouse varies among diagnoses. Such interpersonal health effects have clinical and policy implications for the care of patients and their families.
Until recently, resilience among adults exposed to potentially traumatic events was thought to occur rarely and in either pathological or exceptionally healthy individuals. Recent research indicates, however, that the most common reaction among adults exposed to such events is a relatively stable pattern of healthy functioning coupled with the enduring capacity for positive emotion and generative experiences. A surprising finding is that there is no single resilient type. Rather, there appear to be multiple and sometimes unexpected ways to be resilient, and sometimes resilience is achieved by means that are not fully adaptive under normal circumstances. For example, people who characteristically use self-enhancing biases often incur social liabilities but show resilient outcomes when confronted with extreme adversity. Directions for further research are considered.
This study explores gender differences in older widowed persons' interest in dating and remarriage, and the implications of these desires for psychological adjustment to loss. Analyses are based on the Changing Lives of Older Couples study (N = 210). Men's interest in dating and remarriage is conditional upon the amount of social support received from friends. Six months after spousal loss, only those men with low or average levels of social support from friends are more likely than women to report interest in remarrying someday. Similar patterns emerge for interest in dating 18 months after loss. Persons who both want and have a romantic relationship report significantly fewer depressive symptoms 18 months after loss, yet this relationship is attributable to their greater socioeconomic resources.
A technique was devised to estimate age specific remarriage probabilities for newly widowed persons utilizing North Carolina marriage certificates plus informatiom from the 1970 U. S. Census. Remarriage probabilities are very high for persons widowed before age 35. Remarriage probabilities decrease faster for widows than widowers. Less than one-fourth of men widowed after age 65 ever remarry. Less than 5% of women widowed after age 55 ever remarry. Age specific intervals to remarriage were also calculated. Men remarry more quickly than women. The median interval to remarriage was 1.7 years for men and 3.5 years for women.
While it is becoming increasingly clear that mood disorders tend to be chronic, intermittent and/or recurrent conditions with different manifestations over time, little is known of the variability or course of mood disorders that are associated with severe psychosocial stress. This paper reports on the prevalence and course of major, minor, and subsyndromal depressions in 328 widows and widowers followed prospectively from 2 to 25 months following one of the most disruptive of all naturally occurring stressors, spousal bereavement. The results are consistent with the following conclusions: (1) past major depression (prior to the death) predicts an increased risk for major depression following bereavement; (2) membership in any of the unipolar subgroups, in turn, predicts future depression throughout the unipolar depressive spectrum; (3) subsyndromal and minor depression stand between major depression, on the one hand, and no depression, on the other, in terms of their effects on overall adjustment to widowhood. Thus, the results support the validity of subsyndromal depression, and that the three subgroups (major, minor and subsyndromal depression) are pleiomorphic manifestations of the same unipolar depression disorder.
People prefer to make changeable decisions rather than unchangeable decisions because they do not realize that they may be more satisfied with the latter. Photography students believed that having the opportunity to change their minds about which prints to keep would not influence their liking of the prints. However, those who had the opportunity to change their minds liked their prints less than those who did not (Study 1). Although the opportunity to change their minds impaired the postdecisional processes that normally promote satisfaction (Study 2a), most participants wanted to have that opportunity (Study 2b). The results demonstrate that errors in affective forecasting can lead people to behave in ways that do not optimize their happiness and well-being.