Abstract
Sigmund Freud argued that people believe in God because they fear their own death. If there is a divine entity that takes a very positive personal interest in you, and has the power to keep your personality alive after your body has died, then death need not concern you because you will never undergo it. Hence, since death is unable to harm those God preserves, then fear and other feelings and emotions should alter accordingly. Fear, for instance, should be assuaged by the belief in this god, although in reality it might be simply repressed. In this chapter, I examine the morality of some of the most significant feelings and emotions we have toward our own deaths. Depending upon which view is adopted for understanding emotions and feelings—and I advocate for a pluralistic, pragmatic approach—we can not only have morally right/bad or wrong/bad emotional reactions and emotions, we can also have obligations to feel a certain way at a certain time.
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Notes
- 1.
Emotions and feelings are not treated as the same thing in the literature on emotions. If feelings are discussed, then they tend to be an involuntary emotional reaction. I will argue that emotions are actually comprised by different things. In some cases, they are involuntary feelings, and in others they are cognitive judgments. However, I will assume that there is a unique feeling to each emotional reaction which might or might not be controllable in some way by the entity experiencing the emotional reaction or feeling.
- 2.
Prinz seems to define emotions as emotional reactions to a particular stimulus rather than as habits or traits (Prinz 2006).
- 3.
Angst might be an exception.
- 4.
This seems to be Damasio’s position as well: emotions are “constituted by a patterned collection of chemical and neural responses that the brain produces when it detects the presence of an emotionally competent stimulus… Emotionally competent stimulus depends on evolutionary history, personal history or current context.” (Damasio 2004, 50–1). Moreover, the responses are produced automatically, which entails that we would have no free will other than trying to alter them through a different stimulus.
- 5.
Elster (2004) also argues that, at times, emotions can subvert rationality.
- 6.
Solomon’s Chapter 8 of The Passions (1993) is an excellent resource on particular emotions, including how they work.
- 7.
As usual, there is no one version of cognitivism that has been adopted by those working in the area. William Lyons , for example, argues that not only are emotions judgments, but also they are affect-laden judgments (Lyons 1980).
- 8.
This is Robinson’s example.
- 9.
de Sousa believes both are the result of evolutionary processes (de Souza 2010, 96).
- 10.
Robert H. Frank argues that moral emotions are at least consistent with an evolutionary explanation of their origin. It better serves someone’s self-interest if the entity is cooperative with others than if the entity was not part of a cooperative arrangement (Frank 2004, 422).
- 11.
Tangney et al. claim that a person’s history or past allows people to infer the emotions that will result (Tangney et al. 2007, 3).
- 12.
Jeanne Safer believes that we can train ourselves to respond appropriately when our parents die, which would seem to work for other instances of the death of loved ones.
-
1.
Motivate—make a conscious decision to address and learn from your parent’s death, investing time and energy in the project.
-
2.
Anticipate—give yourself permission to seek death benefits and identify your resistance to doing so.
-
3.
Meditate—cultivate a receptive stance. Think seriously about both the positive and negative impact your parent has had on your life, and the unfinished business between you.
-
4.
Activate—death benefits are available at any time, and evolve over time. Actions to periodically pursue them—construct a narrative of your parent’s history as objectively as possible; conduct an inventory of your parent’s character; seek new experiences and relationships to support the changes you desire (Safer 2008, 5–6).
-
1.
- 13.
I am assuming a world in which merit is used in the music industry, which might be too fanciful an assumption to capture how the real world functions.
- 14.
Bernard Williams argues that this is also reflected in Ancient Greek culture (Williams 1993, 83).
- 15.
Marie de Hennezel uses the narrative approach in her therapy with the dying so that they can form a perception of their life as a whole. By doing this, she believes that “Death can cause a human being to become what he or she was called to become; it can be, in the fullest sense of the word, an accomplishment.” (Hennezel 1979, ix). I take this to mean that understanding one’s life as a result of understanding death is what she is referring to here and not that being dead is an accomplishment for a person.
- 16.
Daniel Haybron’s Systematic Imprudence thesis is that “Human beings are systematically prone to make a wide range of serious errors in matters of personal welfare. These errors are weighty enough to substantially compromise the expected lifetime well-being for individuals possessing a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as they wish, even under reasonably favorable conditions.” (Haybron 2008, 227). Haybron provides a plausible and probable argument for the Systematic Imprudence thesis over the Aptitude thesis, which somewhat naively believes that if people have the freedom to do so, they will choose and live prudently (Ibid., 229).
- 17.
Murphy’s argument could possibly work for avoiding harm that would not immediately end one’s life. I keep up my brakes because I do not want to die in anguish, be disfigured, experience enormous pain and suffering, or be affected in other ways that would greatly reduce the quality of my life and my ability to flourish.
- 18.
William Hazlett argues that “The effeminate clinging to life as such…is the effect of a highly civilized and artificial state of society.” (Hazlett 1926, 311).
- 19.
In many African societies, death is not feared because there is a widespread belief in a very positive afterlife (Wiredu 1989, 24). In fact, death can be a positive for both the deceased and the survivors. It “gives the community the opportunity to give concrete expression to community solidarity.” (Opuku 1989, 20).
- 20.
She actually died on her bed or the floor after she took an overdose.
- 21.
Descartes’ clear and distinct perception seems to work well enough here for distinguishing immediate sensation and reflection from imagination.
- 22.
Kekes’ explicitly claims that the enjoyment of life varies with individuals and contexts so that morality cannot hold universally or impersonally (Kekes 2008, 137). However, there seems to be a universal rule on how to live one’s life well that applies to all people, although what one can do to have an enjoyable life in particular is under a great deal of control by the individual.
- 23.
By meaningful choice , I mean that there are at least two attractive enough alternatives from which the agent can choose. Moreover, the choices carry about the same benefit and burden so that none of them could be considered to be more coercive than the other. That is, if one alternative leads to a billion dollar reward, while the other had no more benefit than the feeling of a job well done, then the first would have an element of duress to it for the agent that the latter lacks.
- 24.
Ruth Garfield argues that our natural death anxiety can be dealt with appropriately by recognizing and acting upon the need to take responsibility for one’s life (Garfield 2010, 129).
- 25.
I believe that an argument can be made that they are inferior in certain situations, but are not always or generally so. The standard by which to measure a person’s pleasure is related to the person’s flourishing as that person exists in this world.
- 26.
There is a thought experiment posed by Robert Nozick that asks people whether it is better to lead a real life rather than one that is imaginary (Nozick 1974, 42–5).
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Cooley, D.R. (2015). How Should We Feel About Our Own Death?. In: Death’s Values and Obligations: A Pragmatic Framework. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7264-8_5
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