It’s about more than pushing up daisies
by Michael Cook | 22 Aug 2020 |
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The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a wide range of difficult ethical questions. Many relate to care for the vulnerable –care for the aged, distribution of vaccines, mandatory social distancing, and so on. But all these revolve around living people. What about those who have died?
In a thoughtful post in the blog of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Portuguese philosopher Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues asks why we should mourn the dead. During the current troubles, many regretted that they could not mourn their loved ones properly because funerals are often prohibited or postponed.
But from both a Kantian and a utilitarian perspective, this makes little sense. For a Kantian, duties are owed only to rational autonomous beings. A corpse is neither. For a utilitarian, the dead should be respected only because of the disutility to their significant others.
But Cordeiro-Rodrigues points out that neither approach accounts for the deeply human need to grieve and to give the dead “a good send-off”.
“A better explanation for why we owe mourning rituals to the dead,” he writes, “lies on a relational moral theory. According to this theory, the highest good consists of positively relating to others.”
We can have a partial moral relationship with a corpse, he contends. “When mourning the dead, we are performing acts of good-will to the extent that we are helping to fulfill the goals they once had. We are also performing an act of identification because we are not creating distance, but closure, finding ways to connect with significant others who are no longer alive. In terms of negative duties, the theory implies that, as an act of good-will and identification, we ought not to use their body in ways they would not accept.”
Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge
As I see it, there are only three topics worth talking about at the moment: Trump vs Biden, the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump vs Biden on the coronavirus pandemic. Sorry, there is a fourth, Christopher Nolan’s new film, Tenet, which looks quite intriguing, but does not fit into BioEdge very neatly.
Just after I finished writing today’s lead story about the Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, he expanded on its central theme: that he will do a better job ending the pandemic than Trump. In an interview with ABC TV, he declared that he would shut the country down rather than let the pandemic roar out of control.
“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving, until we control the virus,” Biden declared. “In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”
That puts bioethics at the very centre of this strange election.
Michael Cook
Editor
Just after I finished writing today’s lead story about the Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, he expanded on its central theme: that he will do a better job ending the pandemic than Trump. In an interview with ABC TV, he declared that he would shut the country down rather than let the pandemic roar out of control.
“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving, until we control the virus,” Biden declared. “In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”
That puts bioethics at the very centre of this strange election.
Michael Cook
Editor
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