Moller, Dan - Love And Death

11/16/2007

The Journal of Philosophy, June 2007

This is a relatively quick paper that discusses recent findings in psychology that people tend to recover relatively quickly after the death of their spouse. There are a number that don't, but in general there is remarkable 'resiliency' in the face of losing a loved one (the discussion is mostly about romantic love). This contradicts the conventional wisdom/folk psychology about grieving. Author considers this ability to have a brief grieving period and then relatively quick return to regular emotive states the 'Adaptive Theory' (pg 304). The Adaptive Theory:

The rationality of activity is evaluated according to whatever propensity that activity has toward promoting a person's interests.

One major concern about these findings is a lack of care for another(carelessness). Another concern is a lack of importance to or valuing of others (shallowness). Author wants to show these two as distinct. Both commonly use conditionals or counterfactuals, but author claims that it is clear we care for others because of the enormously costly things we will do for them while they are alive.(pg 307-8) Author discusses instead that these findings threaten the concept of importance, perhaps because the concept includes something like 'I am not replaceable'. (pg 308-10)

Another concern about these findings is that we may not be able to 'properly' grieve, or somehow not be able to 'digest' our loss. This is because the resilience factor goes to work before, perhaps, we are able to fully figure out what we have gone through. There is some evidence that we need emotions in order to complete our cognition of fraught experiences. (pg 311-2)

Author finishes paper (section III) by arguing that this is some sort of 'middle way' between complete shallowness and unending grief.

Note: In this paper there is an interesting summary of our errors in 'affective forecasting' and how readily we return to an affective 'baseline' within 3 months (approx) after good or bad events occur. (pg 305-7)