Dartmouth Events

Professor Michael Cholbi, University of Edinburgh

Friday, August 11
3:30pm
103 Thornton
Free & Open

Talk title: Love, Identity, and the Duty to Grieve

Abstract: "Grief at the deaths of our loved ones, Solomon (2004) proposed, is a morally dutiful feeling. But the ground of such a duty is perplexing. It cannot, for instance, be reduced to a duty to mourn their deaths, i.e., a duty to publicly or ritualistically acknowledge their deaths. So how can we plausibly owe it to our deceased loved ones to grieve them – to undergo the complex psychological process of bereavement – and what would count as grieving so as to fulfil this duty? Here I propose that the duty to grieve deceased loved ones rests on a wider duty found in mutually loving relationships, which I call a duty of practical fidelity. Prevailing philosophical accounts of love’s nature (love as special concern, as valuing, as union with the beloved, etc.) all entail that love mandates that we seek to know the beloved and to adapt our attitudes toward them in response to changes in them. A parent who holds all the same attitudes toward their adult child as they did when the child was an adolescent has failed in their duties of practical fidelity; so too the long-term romantic partner whose love rests on the idealized picture they acquired of their beloved in the early heady days of being in love. The duty of practical fidelity is thus a duty to love in accordance with the evolving realities of the beloved. When we grieve such that our practical identities come to incorporate a relationship with the deceased that reflects their deaths and its practical significance to them, we thereby fulfil our duty of practical fidelity to them. Failure to do so, in contrast, wrongs the deceased insofar as their pre-mortem predecessors desired to be loved for who they are."

The Sapientia Lecture Series is underwritten by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.