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Author’s Replies
Michael Cholbi
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Cholbi, Michael. 2022. “Replies to Garland, Ben-Ze'ev, Timmerman, and Beisecker.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 4, no. 1: 34-47. https://doi.org/10.33497/2022.summer.6.
Abstract: I respond here to commentators’ concerns about the scope of grief, further clarifying the role of practical identity in those whose deaths we grieve; elaborating my understanding of grief as egocentric; defending my own resolution of the paradox of grief against alternative resolutions proposed by my commentators; and substantiating the role of self-knowledge in the self-regarding duty to grieve.
Keywords: theories of emotion, morality, virtue, perception, history, and art
I would like to express my very deep gratitude to all four of my commentators for the thoroughness and acuity of their comments on Grief: A Philosophical Guide (GPG). The breadth and sophistication of their comments is heartening, for they suggest I was largely successful in meeting one of the book’s primary objectives, to illustrate that philosophy’s relative neglect of grief is unfortunate inasmuch as it is a theoretically rich and practically relevant topic.
Of course, the commentators raise important concerns about whether I achieve my second primary objective in GPG, namely, to defend a comprehensive theory of grief’s nature and value. The commentators offer many more specific points than I can engage with here, so I shall instead organise my reply to them thematically. This will permit me to respond to the commentator’s concerns more synthetically, highlighting overlaps among their concerns. It also enables me to respond to them more or less in the order that the corresponding topics are addressed in GPG. Readers can, I hope, infer from my replies how I would best respond to specific points that go unaddressed below.
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SCOPE OF GRIEF
The first philosophical question I address in GPG is who we grieve for, that is, which deaths prompt grief? My answer, roughly, is that we grieve in response to the deaths of those in whom we have invested our practical identities. A practical identity, as Christine Korsgaard (1996, 101) understands it, is “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.” Because we are social creatures, our practical identities will make frequent reference to others. Were a person to enumerate her practical identity, many other people would merit a mention inasmuch as their existence is assumed in what she finds worth choosing and pursuing. Our practical identities have a cross-temporal character. They are formed retrospectively, on the basis of past experiences and interactions, but they are prospectively practical, guiding our plans and our sense of our futures. I describe the process by which practical identities are created and shaped by others as a kind of investment. This process need not be deliberate or self-aware, as Aaron Ben-Ze’ev worries. To invest our practical identities in others is to take their existence as a fixed point for our subsequent choice or actions. We navigate our lives on the assumption of their continued existence, much in the way that we navigate familiar rooms or buildings thanks to our knowledge of their layouts. We grieve those individuals in whom our practical identities are invested, and in David Beisecker’s helpful phrase, our practical identities are invested in them so “long as we have structured our lives and conduct around their presence.” We thus invest in others as part of our practical identity formation whenever we enter into, cultivate, or develop relationships with others that anchor our subsequent choices, commitments, or goals.
To propose that we grieve those in whom we have invested our practical identities is to cast a wider net for grief than we might expect. For not everyone in whom we have invested our practical identities is someone we love, are intimate with, or even know. Nor (as Ben-Ze’ev proposes) does grief require “closeness” with those whose deaths prompt grief. Our practical identities are invested not only in friends, romantic partners, or family members, but also in role models, admired artists or political figures,[1] or in children that we conceive but who are never born. The fact that we grieve the deaths of individuals in all these categories is a strength of my account of grief’s scope. Granted, we do not grieve all deaths in the same way, but this too is a fact that my account of grief’s scope is well situated to explain: our practical identities are invested in others in different ways, and so grief will tend to reflect these differences. The grief I might feel upon learning that a philosopher I admire has died at an unexpectedly young age will have very different contours than the grief I would feel at the death of my spouse. In the former case, I can no longer look forward to reading the philosopher’s subsequent published work, and my own professional concerns may be shaped thereby. In the latter, I can no longer look forward to the innumerable day-to-day activities I enjoy with my spouse or make plans for our shared domestic future. Draw the scope of grief too narrowly, I suggest, and it becomes hard to account for the wide array of individuals we grieve and the wide array of our grief experiences themselves.
My account of the scope of grief certainly allows for the form of grief that concerns Beisecker, that resulting from the death of a pet. Pets often meet the criteria for our having invested our practical identities in them. Our past experiences with pets shape our present patterns of interaction with them and thereby inform both what we presently value in our relationships with them and the roles they play in our picture of our future lives. Someone with a large, rambunctious dog may come to have day-to-day patterns of interaction with their pet (the morning feeding routine, afternoon rambles in the park, etc.) and make significant life choices predicated on the dog’s existence (whether a possible new dwelling will accommodate the dog). If so, then it is to be expected that the dog’s death would be disruptive to their human companion’s practical identity and hence a suitable occasion for grief. As Beisecker notes, deaths of pets are likely to be formative in our knowledge of how to grieve, inasmuch as they are often among our earliest grief experiences. Their deaths will, my account of grief predicts, raise questions concerning the pet’s place in the companion’s subsequent practical identity. For example, after a pet’s death, many pet lovers hesitate before establishing pet relationships anew. I imagine the reasons for this are
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complex. But among the reasons are reasons pertaining to the reconstruction or rebuilding of practical identity associated with grief. Act too soon, and it may appear to be a clumsy attempt to “replace” the pet, act too late (or not at all), and it may appear that pet companions are depriving themselves of the goods of relationships with pets out of a misguided sense of loyalty to the deceased pet.
Travis Timmerman raises some potential counterexamples to my account of the scope of grief. One such counterexample concerns public figures, such as the actor Kirk Douglas, whose deaths seemingly prompt grief but do not alter the practical identities of their fans because they long ago receded from public life. In Douglas’ case, Timmerman observes that “his fans’ practical identities seemingly remained intact (or largely intact), and there is no evidence of any of his grieving fans acquiring self-knowledge of who they have been and who they seek to be.” In response, either Douglas’ fans were undergoing grief in response to his death or they were not. Either way though, the facts in question appear compatible with my account of grief as a response to deaths of those in whom our practical identities are invested.
First, Douglas’ fans may have actually undergone grief, including engaging with the alteration of their practical identities, which I have claimed is essential to grief. For Douglas’ fans might well undergo very minute alterations to their practical identities in response to his death. A handful might well have hoped that he might return to public life in some capacity (make a surprise appearance at the Oscars ceremony, for instance). Correlatively, their grief might lead to a genuine albeit marginal increase in self-knowledge. Fans could rewatch Douglas’ films and remind themselves of his greatest performances, in which case they could acquire additional evidence for what they already knew about his role in their lives, thereby ratifying their extant self-knowledge. I sometimes describe grief as an attempt to address an identity crisis caused by another’s death, but I gladly concede that bona fide grief can nevertheless amount to a tiny “crisis.”
An additional possibility is that many fans are undergoing delayed grief, in effect undergoing at the point of Douglas’ death the grief that perhaps they ought to have undergone when and as he withdrew from public life, insofar as his withdrawal ended any further developments within his fans’ relationship with him. Why ought they have undergone grief before Douglas’ death proper? Death just happens to be the most prominent and emphatic source of grief for inherently mortal creatures such as ourselves, but the cause of grief—the permanent alteration of our relationship with another such that our practical identities must respond—is not unique to actual deaths. A comparison: imagine that your loved one is part of a deep space mission that, within hours after departing, will lose communication contact with Earth and will be of sufficiently long duration that your loved one will not live long enough to return to Earth. Grief, at that very moment, would be entirely appropriate. For while the loved one is not yet dead, your relationship with them undergoes an alternation akin to death thanks to their mission. Hence, your practical identity will need to alter despite their deaths not being imminent. So too with Douglas and his fans’ relationship with him: unbeknownst to them, that relationship began to end years ago, but this reality only dawned on them upon his death, thus instigating delayed grief.
The other alternative is that while Douglas’ death elicited widespread mourning, far fewer individuals were actually undergoing grief. Mourning is the public manifestation of grief, but we cannot assume that all mourning is a manifestation of grief. Mourning involves public acknowledgement of a person’s death, acts of remembrance and the like. But we can mourn even in cases where the death in question is not someone in whom our practical identities are (or ever were) invested. Practical identities, as noted above, have both a retrospective and prospective dimension, and while the retrospective dimension was in place in a case like the death of Douglas, the prospective dimension may not have been. With respect to Douglas, I imagine many of his fans may once have invested their practical identities in him, but his withdrawal from public life resulted in their no longer being so invested. Hence, while he continued to be alive, he did not “live on” in their practical identities
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inasmuch they no longer looked forward to his films, etc. We may see their grief-like reactions as mourning his deaths, that is, as commemorations or celebrations of his life.
The other sort of counterexample Timmerman adduces comes from the opposite direction: individuals dying in whom we are practically invested, but we do not grieve or it does not seem fitting or appropriate to grieve. His case of a women pressured by her family to grieve the death of her abusive husband seems to fit this pattern. Assessing the force of this counterexample is difficult without more facts. But my account of grief can accommodate this case on certain plausible renderings of the relevant facts.
One possibility is that the woman was grieving, but not in the ways others (or she) might expect. I emphasise in GPG, chapter two, that grief is nearly always a complex emotional process, involving multiple affective states. We tend to suppose that sadness at another’s death is foremost among these states, but it strikes me as conceivable that an episode of grief includes no sadness at all. An abusive relationship might be so injurious that the death of the partner is, as in the case Timmerman references, no loss at all but instead a welcome relief. But even so, the abused party may undergo an emotional process responsive to the alteration in her relationship with the deceased, a process including relief, bitterness, and the like. Hence, the absence of the trademark grief emotion (sadness) need not entail the absence of grief altogether. After all, grief will track the relationships in which our practical identities are grounded, and it should not surprise us that especially harmful relationships can end without sadness occurring or being appropriate.
In addition, the women in question might already have grieved her abusive husband. Perhaps once she came to recognize that the relationship was unsalvageable, she undertook a period of grieving (akin perhaps to the experience individuals undergo in the wake of divorce). As she says, by the time of her husband’s death, she had already “moved on,” suggesting that in reconfiguring her practical identity, she had already concluded that her husband would have no role whatsoever in her practical identity going forward. Again, the relationships we grieve for tend to be those radically altered by death, but these are not only alterations that can make grief fitting.
Timmerman’s counterexample highlights an issue that, regrettably, I was unable to pursue in GPG. Much of the book is dedicated to the ethics of grief in the sense that I set out to figure out how grief matters first-personally—when and why it is valuable, the conditions for our grief episodes to be rational, etc. Aside from grief’s medicalization, I say little about the interpersonal morality of grief, and even less about the interpersonal morality of mourning. And the familial pressure the woman is subject to in Timmerman’s counterexample is more naturally interpreted as a pressure to mourn her husband rather than to grieve him. Timmerman is right to entertain the possibility that, however ethically appropriate it may be to grieve a person’s death, it may be morally inappropriate to mourn that death. I lack the space to engage with this possibility, except to reiterate that grief and mourning are distinct such that we should anticipate that they would be governed by distinct (and possibly conflicting) normative standards.
THE NATURE OF GRIEF
The main objectives of GPG are normative: to ascertain how grief can be valuable, rational, or morally obligatory. But achieving these objectives depends on getting a handle on the nature of grief, an emotional condition that (I suggest) is not easy to locate within familiar philosophical thinking about the emotions. As I understand it, grief is a sustained and active species of emotional attention directed at the loss or transformation of the relationship we have with a deceased person in whom our practical identities are invested, where that attention unfolds as a temporally extended process that involves several different forms of affect (sadness, most commonly, but also such emotions as anxiety, guilt, anger, confusion, gratitude, etc.). No doubt grief has some similarities with other emotions, as Ben-Ze’ev observes. But not all emotions have extended temporal duration,
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whereas grief can last months or years. Moreover, Ben-Ze’ev is certainly correct that emotions have both causal antecedents and causal successors and that different emotions can co-exist in us simultaneously. Nevertheless, that (say) fear can be preceded by some other emotion (curiosity) or be followed by another (relief) does not make fear an emotional complex or process, nor does the fact that fear may be experienced simultaneously with another emotion (anger, say) make fear an emotional process. Still, I do not mean to claim that grief shares nothing at all with other emotional conditions. But I would nevertheless suggest that its being an active and attention-driven emotional process makes it distinctive, if not unique, among emotional conditions.
Ben-Ze’ev expresses trepidation about my describing the nature of grief as “egocentric.” Dictionary definitions notwithstanding, the term seems to capture an important fact about grief: we do not grieve every death. As the previous section illustrated, some sort of relationship needs to be in place to render grief possible and intelligible, and in particular, some sort of relationship that matters to the grieved so as to make sense of grief as a response to a loss of some kind to the bereaved. Grief is therefore self-concerning, but not selfish (that would imply that it is objectionably self-concerning). Ben-Ze’ev also notes that much of our cognition during an episode of grief is not directed at ourselves, but at the deceased and at what they seem to have suffered or lost due to death. This, however, is compatible with the egocentric nature of grief. In attending to the relationship we have lost due to the others’ death, we pay selective attention to the other. Take a very common event in grief: memories of the deceased. It would be very unusual for a grieving person to have been present with the deceased for every moment of the deceased’s life. The bereaved can only remember those events involving the deceased at which she (the bereaved) was present.
Furthermore, of those events, only some will likely be sufficiently emotionally salient to be available to memory. Thus, not only is grief itself selective, but the range of mental states concerning the deceased that we can entertain in grief is itself selective, and to a large degree, selected on the basis of the experience and emotional makeup of the bereaved. Even when a grieving person thinks of the deceased, their own practical identity investment operates in the causal background of that thought. Nor does the egocentric nature of grief preclude it including emotions rooted in love for the deceased or in the belief that their deaths were bad for them (or bad period). After all, love is among the central ways in which our practical identities can be invested in others, and love involves a concern for the beloved’s welfare. When those we love die, we will understandably experience whatever they have thereby lost via death as a mediated loss to ourselves.[2] In saying then that grief is egocentric, I do not intend therefore that it is narcissistic or self-obsessed. For even when the affective states within a grief episode seem directed at the deceased, they are framed by our self-concern. Indeed, one of the major takeaways of GPG (I hope!) is that grief is a defensible, even laudable, form of self-concern—rational in most cases, often good for us, and a manifestation of our capacity to establish relationships with others and ethically improvise in the face of the disruptions that occur as those relationships alter across our lifetimes.
Another concern related to the egocentric nature of grief is raised by Carolyn Garland. Garland observes a similarity between what I call “quasi-grief” and what might be called second hand or vicarious grief. I describe quasi-grief as a response to another’s death that has grief’s phenomenological features—an emotional condition that feels like grief—but in which the individual’s attention is not directed at what I argue is grief’s object, namely, the grieving person’s loss of their relationship with the deceased as it previously was. Garland notes that quasi-grief looks a bit like second-hand grief, wherein A grieves B’s death, but C (who has a close relationship with A) comes to grieve as well. The parallel to which Garland points is that in both quasi-grief and second-hand grief, the grieving individual does not have the apparent object of grief in her awareness. In quasi-grief, the individual is undergoing grief while either misidentifying or failing to attend to grief’s object. The second hand griever is moved by another’s death, yet seems to have in view not that person’s death but its effects on the bereaved individual who does have that object in view.
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Unfortunately, we are handicapped by our lack of vocabulary for describing our emotions related to death.[3] But I would propose that second-hand grief is likely not grief proper; it lacks, as Garland observes, the “self-focus” that defines grief. For the emotional reactions we undergo upon learning of the death of a friend’s parent are not usually anchored in our having invested our practical identity in that parent in the way that our friend has. It rather appears to be an instance of emotional contagion or empathy—admirable, but not (strictly speaking) grief. Quasi-grief, in contrast, is a bona fide form of grief, but an ethically or epistemically deficient form. The quasi-griever, in my estimation, is unlikely to grieve well and fully, and particularly unlikely to attain the self-knowledge that I argue is the distinctive good associated with grief, so long as their grief obscures what is truly causing it. An individual can be subject to many psychological barriers that stand in the way of acknowledging the grounds of their emotions. It can be difficult or upsetting to acknowledge the real source of our rage, fear, or sadness, inasmuch as doing so can bring to light uncomfortable truths about ourselves. So too I would suggest in the case of grief: we may find it worrisome to acknowledge grief and its source in our dependence on others. As I underscored in the introduction to GPG, the antipathy that much of the philosophical tradition has shown toward grief stems from grief highlighting aspects of our character and condition at odds with how that tradition has often conceived of the virtuous person, namely, as a person entirely self-sufficient and thereby invulnerable to change and loss. But grief is not easy to suppress, and in the case of quasi-grief, the individual would likely be better off not only acknowledging their emotions as an episode of grief, but also bringing the relationship whose disruption is responsible for their grief “fully in view.”
THE PARADOX OF GRIEF, GRIEF’S VALUE, AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE
A central puzzle addressed in GPG is the paradox of grief:
(1) Grief feels bad, and so should be avoided or lamented; but
(2) grief is valuable such that we ought not avoid it altogether and should be grateful that we grieve.
To say that the paradox of grief is distinctive to grief may exaggerate the matter, as Ben-Ze’ev points out. Other challenging emotions, such as fear, can certainly have good consequences, and as such, we should be grateful for such emotions. Nevertheless, this underestimates the paradoxical character of grief. Grief, as I suggest, is an experience that we should not avoid, even if (largely contrary to fact) we could avoid it. The absence of grief would betoken an impoverished human life, in the way that the absence of other negative emotions would not. And in any case, to the extent that other emotions are paradoxical, there is little to be said about how to resolve the associated paradoxes. The value of fear, for instance, is easy enough to discern: in its absence, we would lack the ability to identify or respond to threats. The eudaimonic value of grief, on the other hand, is more elusive. Why, given the emotional strains it involves, should we think it is good for us all the same?
My own resolution of the paradox of grief comes in two stages. In GPG, chapter three, I suggest that grief is a particularly fruitful source of a key human good, self-knowledge. In chapter four, I propose that the psychological pains associated with grief, while genuinely painful, are experienced as integral to grieving and the pursuit of self-knowledge, and as such, it is not surprising that we value these pains and even seek them out in the course of grief.
Garland notes that I do not explicitly consider another resolution of this paradox, namely, that grief is a healthy response to loss. This resolution is facially plausible, in that just as pain is a healthy (i.e., desirable) response to bodily injury, so too might the adverse psychological states associated with grief be a healthy response to psychic injury. And as I argue in GPG, chapter seven, we should resist the medicalization of grief in part because it is a healthy response to the losses that prompt it—neither inherently irrational nor a sign of some psychological
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dysfunction. That said, that grief is healthy is true, but not sufficiently illuminating on its own to resolve the paradox of grief, in my estimation. Assuming that health is a positive condition not reducible to the absence of disease, we may reasonably ask, by analogy with ordinary bodily pain, why grief is a healthy response to loss, especially given that it often feels bad. What, in other words, is the good that grief fosters which contributes to (presumably mental) health? I concur with Garland that grief is healthy, but this claim must rest on a more specific account of the value of grief in order for a resolution of the paradox of grief to be in the offing.
Beisecker raises some important concerns about my appeal to self-knowledge as the distinctive good of grief. His primary concern is that some instances of grief lack the epistemic character that my appeal to self-knowledge implies. I note that grief usually has a “questioning” dimension to it. Many bereaved report a sense of confusion, alienation, or disorientation, as if the world after the death of the individual in whom we had invested our practical identity no longer fully makes sense or is no longer homey and familiar. On my view, these feelings are indicative of a disruption to practical identity that instigates a period of reflection, self-examination, or “questioning,” that (when grief benefits us) culminates in self-knowledge. Beisecker admits that some grief episodes include an “especially severe or even brutal kind of doubt,” but many do not seem to be epistemically puzzling at all. He further observes that these episodes lack the “theoretical” orientation suggested by my picture of grief: “If there is an essential aporia of grief, it does not operate on the theoretical side, so much as it concerns the practical one,” according to Beisecker. “When I am faced with grief, I am struck not so much by a crisis of what I should believe, but rather what I should do.”
Granted, grief need not involve “severe” or “brutal” doubt. But even when it does not, it retains a minimally epistemic character. The self-knowledge that I propose lends grief its distinctive value is knowledge regarding our practical identity—the goals, concerns, and commitments that structure many of our choices and actions. We are, in other words, trying to figure out what matters to us. The relationship between the theoretical and practical aspects of such self-knowledge is too intricate a philosophical question to be pursued here. Nevertheless, the relationship appears to be one in which the theoretical and the practical are deeply intertwined. The question of what matters to us is on the one hand a descriptive question about our psychologies, biographies, etc. But the question of what matters to us often presents itself as the question of what ought to matter to us, particularly in moments (such as the disruption in our practical identities that occurs in grief) when we are uncertain about what matters—or even what can matter—to us prospectively. A practical identity is thus both a set of normative commitments and (sometimes) an object of theoretical interrogation. The “crisis” of grief, echoing Beisecker, is ascertaining what one should do and what one should believe (in particular, what one should believe matters). As such, the anguish of grief will have both an epistemic element and the practical element Beisecker identifies, of “actually having to get on with the onerous task of rebuilding a stable practical identity that has been disrupted by the loss of a significant other.”
As noted above in my remarks about the scope of grief, grief’s identity “crisis” need not be profound. Sometimes grief raises easily answered questions about practical identity, and sometimes grief merely adds to the body of evidence that corroborates what we already know. In addition, there is no barrier to the acquisition of self-knowledge that grief affords us occurring prior to the death of the individual responsible for that grief. We sometimes grieve in anticipation of another’s death, and I do not see any reason why whatever self-knowledge grief makes available could not be acquired during this period of anticipatory grief. (Indeed, that may have been true of Beisecker’s grief in response to the death of his dog Siggy.)
Timmerman casts doubt on the second stage of my resolution of the paradox of grief, namely, the significance of the psychological pain found in grief. I argue that grief’s pains become good in the context of the valuable activity of grieving. He takes issue with the thought that the “indescribable agony” of grief is not “intrinsically bad, even within the larger context of grief.” Timmerman thus reasons that we should prefer instead a different
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account of grief’s value and a different resolution of the paradox of grief, namely that the pains of grief are a cost to be borne in exchange for the goods of grief.
Of course, I deny that such agony is necessarily bad, all the more intrinsically bad. But the apparatus needed to make sense of my claims is not that of intrinsic or extrinsic badness, but unconditional or conditional badness. The question of whether something’s value (or disvalue) is intrinsic or extrinsic is a question about the source of that value (or disvalue)—whether it has value is “for its own sake” or supervenes on the thing’s intrinsic properties, or whether its value (or disvalue) derives from the intrinsic properties of other things and so has value “for the sake of” something else. The distinction between unconditional or conditional value, in contrast, is a distinction regarding the circumstances under which something has a particular value. My claim about the psychological sufferings of grief is that such sufferings are not unconditionally bad, but in fact conditionally good, i.e., good on the condition that they occur within the valuable undertaking of grief. I grant that to the extent that such suffering is bad—and it is suffering, after all!—that badness is intrinsic. But that badness is itself conditional.
Of course, there must be something about grief to lend it its value, on my view, in order for us to be able to say that the pains of grief are indispensable to the good of grief. The good of self-knowledge plays this role in my account. Timmerman argues, by way of an imagined grief-eradicating pill, that if we could attain self-knowledge without grief by taking such a pill, we would have reasons to prefer it. I am uncertain about how to evaluate Timmerman’s proposal. For it is not clear what the mechanism of this grief-eradicating pill could be. Does the pill eliminate all affect arising from the deaths of those in whom we have invested our practical identities—or only the painful affect? Or does it enable some other emotional condition besides grief that facilitates self-knowledge? I find it difficult to envision how such a pill would allow for self-knowledge, because as I see it, our emotions are indispensable tools for revealing our values to us. I thus hypothesise that a pill that eliminates grief (or eliminates only its painfulness) would thereby eliminate our central tool for such self-knowledge. Granted, it is not inconceivable that there could be a grief-eradicating pill compatible with our attaining the self-knowledge I argue is the distinctive good of grief. But I am sceptical about this as an empirical possibility absent further explanation about how self-knowledge would be obtainable in grief’s absence.
Finally, Timmerman offers an example of a husband and wife who will die within a week of each other, insufficient time for either to attain the self-knowledge I believe constitutes the good of grief. Should the surviving spouse grieve nevertheless? This example raises fascinating moral questions about whether, for instance, we should notify dying people of the deaths of others or notify those unable to grasp the deaths of others (those with advanced dementia, for example) of deaths they might well grieve. I agree with Timmerman that the surviving member of the ageing couple probably should not grieve. But this shows not that grief is good in the ways that I suggest, only that it is not absolutely good, good without limit, or incomparably good. In circumstances such as these, other goods may do more to contribute to a person’s quality of life than would their acquiring additional self-knowledge by way of grief.
THE DUTY TO GRIEVE
In GPG, chapter six, I argued that we have a duty to grieve. There I distinguished between the duty to mourn the dead and the duty to grieve. The duty to mourn the dead is the duty to ensure that the death of another is publicly acknowledged, their life commemorated, their existence physically memorialised (with grave markings, etc.), and so on. The duty to grieve, on the other hand, is a duty to undertake the process of grief, the process by which we come to terms with the death of someone in whom we have invested our practical identities by incorporating the fact of their death into our subsequent practical identities.
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The duty to mourn is fundamentally interpersonal or social. As mentioned earlier, GPG refrains from addressing the interpersonal morality of mourning. I certainly do not offer an account of the duty to mourn in GPG, but here is a brief sketch of how such a duty might be justified. One possibility is that the duty to mourn is a duty owed to the dead themselves. If we owe it to the dead to mourn them, this could rest on a duty of respect, akin to the duty to honour their wills. If a living person requests (say) a traditional Jewish burial but is denied this, then we have failed to mourn them in accordance with their desires. Alternatively, we may owe it to the dead to mourn them because of certain core interests they have that are not impugned or cancelled by their deaths. Whether (and how) a person is mourned can be critical in determining their legacy and how they are remembered, for example. These remarks are only a gesture in the direction of understanding how mourning might be owed to the dead, and no doubt open to question. (One puzzle: What are our duties to the dead if mourning in accordance with their pre-mortem wishes is at odds with their post-mortem interests—if, say, mourning in the way they requested might well undermine their legacy?) And vindicating such claims regarding the duty to mourn the dead would require engaging with several difficult moral and axiological questions, including whether the dead (being presumably non-existent) can be owed anything at all morally, what their legitimate interests are, whether we can be harmed posthumously, etc.[4] Indeed, certain answers to these questions may imply that there is no duty to mourn owed to the dead as such.
Less controversially, the duty to mourn is likely to be rooted partially in duties we owe to other mourners. By participating in mourning rituals and practices, we are likely to provide comfort to other mourners in their time of emotional turmoil or distress, build solidarity with them, and assist them in planning for and resuming their lives as their grief dissipates. In so doing, we may well be fulfilling duties of fidelity, beneficence, or respect that we owe to others.
We may also assist those who are grieving in fulfilling their duties to grieve: I argued in chapter six that the duty to grieve rests on the distinctive good associated with grief, namely, the self-knowledge of our practical identities (i.e., of our own values, commitments, and goals) that can result from grieving. The emotional tumult of grief, and in particular the “questioning” grief often involves, both motivate us to seek such self-knowledge and afford us a large amount of emotionally salient information about ourselves and our practical identities, information that we can draw upon to enhance our self-knowledge. Yet even though self-knowledge is knowledge of ourselves, others can play a role in enabling us to attain it. Indeed, we often turn to friends or loved ones in our efforts to make sense of life’s losses. They can be powerful sources of evidence or insight into our own emotional condition and what that condition says about the significance of our losses. Self-knowledge is therefore often highly dialogical, and so if (as I contend) self-knowledge is at the root of our duty to grieve, others can play a crucial role in enabling us to fulfil that duty. Beisecker is thus correct in observing that the grief of others can generate moral responsibilities to them. And the responsibilities in question could well be reciprocal: A and B could both be grieving their friend’s death, and so could have interpersonal duties to one another to mourn and support one another in their respective pursuits of self-knowledge.
In contrast, the duty to grieve is an intrapersonal or self-regarding duty. Mourning will often have a part to play in our fulfilment of this duty though. After all, most (though not necessarily all) of those in mourning are also grieving, and again, mourning with others can be a pathway to self-knowledge. But because this is a self-regarding duty, norms of interpersonal morality do not straightforwardly apply to it. While we may permissibly encourage or facilitate others’ grief, their not grieving (or their grieving in ways unlikely to catalyse the self-knowledge whose value explains the duty to grieve) ought not elicit the interpersonal attitudes that violations of interpersonal moral duties do. Blame and resentment toward others for the inadequacies of their grieving are thus misplaced. Moreover, moral criticisms of their grieving could well prove counterproductive. To suggest to a person either that they ought to grieve, or that they ought to grieve better, on pain of moral failure, may elicit puzzlement or antagonism rather than motivating them to take their duty to grieve more seriously.
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Grieving is an opportunity to reconfigure our ethical relationships with ourselves: to relate to ourselves more authentically and to manifest self-respect and self-love. Such reconfiguration is a task for which each of us is ultimately responsible as an individual, and overly persistent or forthright efforts aimed at persuading others to pursue this reconfiguration can backfire.
Garland raises a compelling challenge to my claim that the duty to grieve rests on a duty to acquire substantial self-knowledge. She concedes that there is such a duty and that (as I argue) the duty is imperfect, not a duty to pursue self-knowledge to the utmost or to take every opportunity to acquire self-knowledge that presents itself. Rather, an imperfect duty, at least within the scheme of moral duties bequeathed to us by Kant, is a duty to will or commit ourselves to an end, but one that allows for personal latitude in how we go about realising that end. The duty to perfect ourselves by developing our talents, for instance, is not a duty that demands that we develop all of our talents or that, with respect to the talents we opt to develop, we must develop each of these to the maximally possible degree. The duty in question is instead to have the development of our talents as one of our abiding ends across our lifetimes. In this regard, whether a person fulfils this duty can only be accurately judged by looking at their lives as a whole. That a person who shows (say) mathematical ability opts not to develop this talent does not entail, therefore, that this person has failed in their duty to develop their talents. For they may well have opted on other occasions to develop their talents in music or public speaking. So too, I would suggest, for the duty of self-knowledge on which the duty to grieve rests: we of course fulfil it by way of our choices and actions on particular occasions, but its fulfilment is to be judged less by adding up the number of such choices or actions than by looking to the pattern of those choices and actions over time and ascertaining whether those choices and actions indicate that self-knowledge is an abiding end to which they have been committed.
Garland observes, however, that grief is far from the only opportunity we encounter for substantial self-knowledge. She observes that falling in love has many emotional parallels to grief and could well represent an equally large opportunity to acquire self-knowledge. And yet it seems implausible that we have a duty to fall in love.
Before responding to Garland’s provocative objection, let me clarify that the duty to grieve, being grounded in the imperfect duty of self-knowledge, does not strictly entail that every conceivable agent who suffers the death of someone in whom their practical identity has been invested thereby has a duty to grieve that loss. There could well be “super self-knowers” with both an abiding commitment to self-knowledge and an unusually high aptitude for it. For them, grief may not represent an especially fecund opportunity to augment their already abundant self-knowledge, in which case their failing to grieve would not speak against their fulfilling their duty of self-knowledge. This is a straightforward implication of the duty of self-knowledge, and the duty to grieve it generates, being imperfect.
That said, I hypothesise that very few of us are “super self-knowers,” unlikely or unable to gain much in the way of self-knowledge from grief. We often live in accordance with practical identities whose elements we do not know or understand, living day-to-day on a eudaimonic autopilot in which the commitments and concerns that actually motivate our choices are unarticulated or even opaque to us. Foremost among these opaque commitments is the dependence of our practical identities on the continued existence of other individuals around whom those identities have been constructed, mortal individuals whose existence is ultimately contingent. We know that those who matter to us are vulnerable to death, but we are often clever in mentally bracketing this fact or not appreciating it fully. No doubt these tendencies are partially due to the awkwardness of acknowledging our interdependence and vulnerability, as Robert Solomon (2004) argued in an essay on grief and gratitude. And even when we do enjoy a high degree of retrospective self-knowledge, including an appreciation of how our practical identities are contingent on the existence of other mortal beings, we may not
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have the self-knowledge needed to know how best to adapt our practical identities to their deaths. Grief could well be a transformative experience for which even the most astute self-knowers are imperfectly prepared.
Such considerations suggest that while it is possible for us not to have a duty to grieve, that will rarely be the case, given the magnitude of self-knowledge that grief makes possible for highly fallible self-knowers such as ourselves. We thus have reasons to recommend grief to those we care about and to think that those who actively avoid grief (such as The Stranger’s Meursault) are depriving themselves of a valuable good and letting themselves down, morally speaking. What, though, of Garland’s parallel reasoning, which seems to demonstrate that the very same considerations imply (implausibly) that we have a duty to fall in love? Assume arguendo that failing in love is, as she contends, one of life’s particularly prominent opportunities for substantial self-knowledge. I nevertheless have reservations that Garland’s parallel holds.
First, a distinction is in order: Garland intends that the putative duty to fall in love would rest, like the duty to grieve, on an imperfect duty of self-knowledge. This means that to the extent that there could be a duty to fall in love, it would not be a duty to fall in love in any context where doing so is feasible. Put differently, were there a duty to fall in love, it would almost certainly not entail a duty to fall in love with anyone in particular. Attraction to a person is likely to be a precondition for falling in love with someone, but a putative duty to fall in love would not require that one fall in love even with each person to whom one felt attraction. Hence, even a person attracted to the local barista likely does not have a duty to fall in love with the barista.
Moreover, grieving and falling in love seem to differ in a crucial moral respect: falling in love is often a prelude to a relationship with another person, whereas grieving is brought about by the death of a person with whom one already stood in a certain sort of relationship. And there seems to be a moral gap between the duties pertaining to entering into an intimate relationship with another and the duties that exist within that relationship. Again, there does not seem to be a duty to enter into any particular romantic relationship at all. And there may well be strong moral reasons against it in particular instances: the person with whom one might fall in love could have intense emotional vulnerabilities or a personal history that would make them deeply susceptible to being wounded in the course of a subsequent romantic relationship, especially if the relationship were to end. Conversely, one might bring their extant self-knowledge to bear on the decision and conclude that one’s own personality, romantic history, etc., make one likely to harm the person with whom one might fall in love. Falling in love thus carries a significant degree of interpersonal moral risk, and even if falling in love is a source of self-knowledge, the value of that self-knowledge may pale against this risk. For the intrapersonal value of self-knowledge does not always outweigh interpersonal moral values. Furthermore, to fall in love with someone (or to try to do so) in order to attain self-knowledge thereby could be at odds with love’s demands. Even if one’s beloved and the relationship with the beloved turned out to be profound sources of self-knowledge, to establish the relationship in order to acquire this self-knowledge may represent a very instrumentalizing attitude toward the beloved, treating one’s relationship with them as a kind of epistemic resource. This does not mean that self-knowledge is not valuable or that it cannot be among the reasons for entering into relationships predicated on romantic love—only that it must be normatively juxtaposed with other reasons, including those flowing from the nature of loving relationships itself.
In contrast, grief does not present the same interpersonal moral perils as falling in love. Interpersonally speaking, grieving does not present the same levels of risk of harm to others that falling in love does, nor does grief seem to invite the possibility that we treat anyone as merely an instrument for the improvement of our own self-knowledge. That grief is less interpersonally morally risky is in part a byproduct of the fact that grief responds to relationships that already exist, and one of whose members (the deceased) cannot be wronged by our grieving their deaths in all the ways that a prospective romantic partner could be wronged by our falling in love with them or by entering into a relationship with them. There are thus moral reasons that weigh against
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falling in love that do not weigh against grieving, thus implying that the duty to grieve has the greater weight of evidence behind it than does the putative duty to fall in love.
Still, these replies to Garland’s objection allow that we could have a duty to fall in love in general (again, rooted in the same imperfect duty of self-knowledge I have argued generates a duty to grieve). And here I am less sceptical than Garland about the existence of such a duty. Some find it difficult not to fall in love or to fall in love with a particular person. Sometimes “I can’t help falling in love with you,” as Elvis Presley crooned. Yet it is also not unheard of for a person to have difficulties falling in love, and this could well be regrettable from the standpoint of self-knowledge. Imagine an aged person who has lived their life with a resolute policy of avoiding the ongoing social contacts with others that foster falling in love. There may well be autobiographical reasons behind their policy, but all other things being equal, this policy seems unfortunate. They have deprived themselves of the many goods that can arise from genuine romantic relationships. I would not suggest that self-knowledge is the most prominent of these goods, but it is at least among them. A caveat is in order: Perhaps this person has achieved sufficient self-knowledge through other means or is one of the “super self-knowers” I mentioned earlier. If so, then the case for their having a duty to fall in love, solely to the extent that falling in love, etc., enables substantial self-knowledge, is weakened accordingly. But for most of us, an openness—admittedly, an open-eyed, even cautious, openness—to romantic love is likely to be good for us as far as self-knowledge goes.
Garland’s objection has force because falling in love, like grieving, is a landmark event within relationships. But they are very different landmarks, and that fact, along with the interpersonal moral risks of falling in love and the imperfect nature of the duties at issue, entail that there will very often be a duty to grieve our lost relationships but only very rarely a duty to create such relationships.
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Notes
[1] Ben-Ze’ev e reports grief at the death of journalist Kim Wall, with whom (I assume) he lacked any relationship of closeness.
[2] For further elaboration, refer to Cholbi (2021), “Grieving Our Way Back to Meaningfulness.”
[3] I note, for instance, difficulties philosophers face in trying to describe the unease that contemplating our own deaths often causes even if we do not seem to fear death exactly, i.e., we do not view death as a bad we can or will suffer.
[4] David Boonin (2019), Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm, is a thorough and plausible investigation of these questions.
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References
Boonin, David. 2019. Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Cholbi, Michael. 2021. “Grieving Our Way Back to Meaningfulness.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90: 239-40.
Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Solomon, Robert. 2004. “On Grief and Gratitude.” In In Defense of Sentimentality, 3-19. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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Michael Cholbi © 2022
Author email: mcholbi[at]ed.ac.uk
