Cholbi and Grief

 

In his book on grief (1) Michael Cholbi argues that in the long term it is good to grieve. He concludes that grief serves a useful purpose. This is an excellent book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. In this posting I will outline Cholbi’s arguments before moving on to offer an alternative as to why it is good to be able to grieve.

Cholbi argues that grief is paradoxical. He points out that grieving is painful and even harms us for no apparent benefit yet we would recommend others0 to grieve. Surgery hurts us but in the long term benefits us but the same doesn’t appear to be true of grief. Cholbi uses two examples to make his point. First he considers C S Lewis who terribly tormented by the death of his wife Joy. He then considers a fictional example. He considers Meursault in the book ‘The Stranger’ by Camus who remains completely emotionally indifferent to the death of his mother. Cholbi argues that the paradox of grief arises because we want to recommend Lewis’ torment rather than Meursault’s indifference whilst apparently having no reasons to do so. A Stoic might argue that we don’t have any reasons and commend Meursault’s indifference.

I will now outline Chobi’s reason for recommending Lewis’ torment before moving on to offer an alternative explanation. He points out that grief is a collection of negative emotions on the death of another. However this other can’t be anyone it must be someone who is close to us. Following Korsgaard he argues that those who are close to us help form our practical identity. It follows that the death of someone close to us damages our practical identity. Moods might be purposeless but emotions aren’t. Let us accept that purpose of emotions is to hold our attention on something important, see for instance Michael Brady. (2) Cholbi argues that the purpose of grief is to hold our attention on reshaping our relationship with the deceased and that this also involves reshaping our practical identity. He suggests that the grieving person needn’t be consciously aware of the purpose of his grief.

I agree with Cholbi that our practical identity is connected to grief. What we love is connected to our practical identity and I will now argue that grief is an unwanted consequence of our capacity to love. Before proceeding I must make it clear what I mean by love. To love doesn’t simply mean romantic love but to care about something as defined by Harry Frankfurt. According to Frankfurt love isn’t simply an emotion but a matter of the will. There seem to be three important features of ‘caring about’ or love so defined. First love makes the lover vulnerable to the fortune and fate of the loved one. If I appear to love someone or something and it is harmed and I remain indifferent, as Meursault did, then my love isn’t real. Secondly love must have persistence. IF I appear to love someone or something and five minutes later become indifferent to its fate thenonce again my love isn’t real. Of course love may fade over time, it needn’t be permanent, but it must have some persistence. Lastly love must motivate action. If I appear to love something but fail to act to prevent harm to the loved one when it is in my power to do so then once again my love isn’t real.

I now want to argue that our personal or practical identity can be defined by what we love. Someone whose actions are only guided by his emotions might be classed as a wanton because his life has no direction due to emotions having no persistence. Such a person doesn’t have a practical identity. If someone’s has a practical identity, rather than being a wanton, then his life must have some consistency and if this consistency cannot be achieved by his emotions then this might be done by his values or ideals. Our ideals and values have persistence, compel us to act and when our ideals are damaged we are damaged. It follows our values are determined by what we love or ‘care about’ and if our practical is defined by our ideals and values then our practical identity is defined by what we love.

If we accept this concept of practical identity then the paradox of grief disappears. Let us recall that the paradox of grief contends that grief is painful and even harms us for no apparent benefit yet we would recommend it to others in the right circumstances. Cholbi resolves the paradox by arguing that grief does have a purpose and it benefits us. However if we accept Frankfurt’s ideas on practical identity then if we love someone who dies we are harmed and this harm persists because of love’s persistence. If someone we love dies then grief is inevitable and it makes no sense to recommend the inevitable. The late Queen Elizabeth was right when she said grief is the price we pay for love. The paradox of grief is an illusion.

There are differences in our attitude to grief depending on whether we see grief as having a purpose or being an unwanted consequence of our capacity to love. Cholbi uses a thought experiment to illustrate the paradox. He imagines a situation in which a pill, which is completely safe to use becomes available, which takes away our grief. He argues that we shouldn’t take the pill as grief serves a useful purpose. However if grief is an unwanted side effect of our capacity to love we should. Caution is needed here. If such a pill only took away our grief then we should take it but if it also damaged our capacity to love we shouldn’t. Damaging our capacity to love would harm us. It is good to be the sort of person with a disposition to love even if this means we will sometimes grief and that this grieving will harm us. It seems possible to me that seeking to limit their capacity to grieve stoics limit their disposition to love, see Why I'm not a Stoic

I now want to briefly consider some of the consequences of accepting that grief is simply an unwanted consequence of our disposition to love. It seems if we accept this account then because we can love a great variety of things that we must also be able to grieve for a great variety of things and that some of these things aren’t persons or even living. Someone might love other people, dogs, a way of life and even a landscape or particular building. Does it make sense to say we can grieve for the last  things? Old people who live alone can become very attached to dogs and it is sensible to say that they grieve on their loss. It also seems to say someone can grief for a lost way of life, perhaps a new city dweller night grieve for his former existence. Lastly in some circumstances it makes sense to say someone can grieve for a building, perhaps the Dean of some ancient cathedral might grieve for it if it was burnt down. If we accept that we can grieve for a wide variety of things then this suggests grief is connected to love.

In the light of the above we might ask whether only humans can grieve. Can some animals grieve? Some might suggest a dog can grieve for their deceased owner and elephants appear to grieve for a dead herd member. Whether animals can experience a primitive form of grief or just exhibit grief like behaviour is an interesting question but the answer to it gives us some pointers to the nature of grief. Let us assume that no animal has a practical self. It follows if animals can grieve that the purpose of grief cannot solely be to reshape our practical identity.

I have argued that grief is an unwanted consequence of our capacity to love. I now want to row back a bit. Let us accept that grief is an unwanted consequence of our capacity to love and that it is unavoidable. Let us also agree with Cholbi that grief is connected to our practical identity. However I will still maintain that we cannot recommend grief to others. Let us further accept that most human beings ‘care about’ or love many things and that when we act we must be able to prioritise or rank these things, if we couldn’t our lives would be lives of inaction or chaos. Lastly let us also accept the things we love, ‘care about’, together with how we prioritise these things shapes our practical identity.  If we lose one of the things we love we should try to reshape our practical identity to reflect the change in reality. The bundle of emotions we experience during grief unconsciously draws out attention to the need to reshape our relationship with the deceases and our identity. These emotions are unavoidable and a failure to grieve involves a failure to love in the first place. Let us return to Camus’ Meursault. Meursault failed to grieve for his mother because he didn’t love her. Moreover it would be pointless suggesting to Meursault that he should grieve for his mother as this would require him coming to love her. People can’t simply come to love someone or something because they want to especially in retrospect. Coming to love is a natural process and cannot be willed. It follows that we have no reason to recommend grief to others and that the paradox of grief is an illusion. Nonetheless even if we have no reason to recommend grief to others we do have a reason to recommend that they lead a life which makes grief inevitable in the appropriate circumstances.

Even if the above is interesting does it have any practical consequences? First I would that grief counsellor’s should help the bereaved slowly overcome their grief by helping them reshape their identity. They should focus on how the changed relationship between the deceased and the bereaved requires that the latter needs to reshape her relationship with the deceased and by doing so her practical identity. Secondly it suggests that a stoic by seeking to eliminate her grief deprives herself of a useful tool which helps her maintain her focus on the need to reshape her practical identity. A reason to be wary of fully blown stoicism, see why I'm not a stoic . Lastly and somewhat controversially becausr people with autism have problems with empathy do they also have problems with grief?

 

 

1.Michael Cholbi, 2022, Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Harvad University Press.

2.  Michael Brady, 2016,Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience, Oxford University Press.

Is Loyalty an Outdated Virtue?

 

We automatically assume loyalty matters and is a virtue. In this posting I will question this automatic assumption and will argue even if this true in the past it might not hold now. I have previously argued tact isn’t. Talk of loyalty comes easily to most of us but ease of use doesn’t make the assumption true. In practice we can only be loyal to certain kind of things. For instance it makes no sense to talk of being loyal to the humanity or being a loyal parent, parents are meant to be loyal naturally. I will argue that if we consider the sort of things we can loyal to then being a loyal x isn’t a useful term and in some contexts loyalty can be a vice rather than a virtue.

Let us accept that if someone has some virtue then she has a disposition to usually act in a way which helps her or others flourish, courage helps her and justice helps others. This is an incomplete definition but will serve our purposes here. Intuitively it seems to make sense to talk about a loyal friend. I will start by considering whether loyalty is a virtue by considering how loyalty and friendship are connected. Before doing so I must define loyalty and friendship. Loyalty can be roughly defined as a commitment to help someone or some cause achieve their aims. Friendship is more complicated. Basically friends care about each other but they do so for different reasons. According to Aristotle there are three types of friends. Friends who care about each other for erotic reasons, friends who care about each other because they are useful to each other and friends who care because they share aims and values. Friends of utility and those who share erotic purpose are fair weather friends and I will only consider the last sort as real friends. Friends share values and are committed to furthering their common aims, if they weren’t then these wouldn’t be aims or values. It should be noted that using this definition some people can be good friends even if they share bad values and have evil aims. Nazis can be friends. A good friend is someone is some who is good at furthering his friend’s aims. A loyal friend is one who is committed to furthering his friend’s aims. If we accept the above then adding the term loyal to f friend serves no useful purpose because friends by definition seek to further each other’s aims whenever possible. Adding loyalty to friendship does no work. A loyal friend is just a good friend. I would suggest that the same applies if we add loyalty to colleagues, team mates and causes. Colleagues and team mates have common aims which they seek to further whilst it would be nonsensical to say someone serves a cause if she doesn’t seek to further the aims of the cause. It might be concluded that in many contexts attaching ‘loyalty’ to someone does no useful work and is simply rhetoric and shouldn’t be considered as a virtue.   

I now want to consider some objections to the above conclusion. First an objector might argue that my definition of loyalty is an inadequate one. My definition focusses on the loyal person sharing the values and furthering the aims of the person or cause she is being loyal to. My objector might argue that these aims and values are the sub focus of loyalty and that the real focus should be on the person or cause involved. The aims and values only matter because they are the aims and values of the person or cause. I am reluctant to accept this conclusion for two reasons. First whilst it is possible to simply respect and accept human beings without referring to any aims and values this isn’t true of feeling positive affect for a person. Feelings of love, admiration and loyalty would seem to depend on the character of the person involved, on her aims and values. Even a Jane Austen heroine doesn’t admire her beloved simply because of his good looks and wealth, even if these help, she falls in love because of his values and sense of honour. It follows that we cannot be loyal to someone without reference to her aims and values.

Another argument can be used to counter my objector’s contention that we can be loyal to someone without reference to her aims and values. Even if this were possible we might question how we acquired our initial loyalty to someone or some cause, surely we must have had some reason to do so. Surely loyalty doesn’t just spring fully formed from thin air. We acquire loyalty because we admire a person or cause, loyalty based on admiration of someone’s beauty or the popularity of some cause would seem to be a shallow sort. Admittedly such loyalty is unconnected to aims and values but it gives no reason to further these. I would suggest that we can only acquire loyalty by admiring aims and values. I would argue that when we become friends, team mates or support a cause that we do so because of the aims and values and saying someone is a loyal friend or is loyal to a cause adds nothing and serves no useful purpose. At this point my objector might accept that aims and values matter in becoming loyal but continue to insist that loyalty is a meaningful idea. She might suggest that my defining of loyalty fails to consider persistence. Someone might become loyal to someone else because of his aims and values but even if his or the other’s aims and values change loyalty persists to a person or cause. She might suggest that it makes sense to talk about being a loyal friend because of the former congruence of aims and values. Once again I am reluctant to accept this objection. True friends share aims and values and once they cease to do so friendship dies as does the suggestion that loyalty can be based on persistence even if persistence matters. Political parties often demand loyalty when times are hard if the times are hard due to poor decision making or incompetence loyalty becomes an excuse for dishonesty.

At this point my objector might raise another argument against my contention that loyalty isn’t a virtue. She might argue that loyalty has a much broader domain than the one I’ve suggested. She might argue that we can be loyal to entities which don’t have particular any aims or values. Entities such as families, tribes and football teams. However being loyal to an entity without any aims isn’t always virtuous. A racist might be loyal to his race and a misogynist to the patriarchy. Such loyalty is a vice rather than a virtue. Nonetheless are there some things without any aims for which being loyal to is a virtue? Perhaps, I admit that the way I’ve used the term loyalty is incomplete.  Let us accept that it matters when we are loyal as well as how we are loyal. Being loyal in easy times is easy and doesn’t matter much. Perhaps loyalty only matters in hard times. It also matters why times are hard. For instance shielding a family member who is a killer isn’t acting virtuously.  Perhaps also being loyal to such entities requires a narrowing of our domain of moral concern. In the twenty first century do we really want loyal to a class or tribe, class traitor would seem to be an outdated idea. In conclusion I would suggest that in most cases using the term loyalty does no useful work because loyalty is already baked into the concept. A loyal friend is just a friend. Friendship incorporates the same characteristics as loyalty. Perhaps loyalty was an important virtue in ancient times but its importance has dwindled as our moral domain has expanded and  we can't restore its former importance without restricting this domain  again something I would be reluctant to contemplate.

Afterthoughts. loyalty is vital to tribes, clans and monarchies if l loyalty is outdated are these outdated? it might be objected that loyalty remains essential to families. loyalty to a murderer, rapist or even a liar?