It is not about betraying Jack, it is about betraying oneself. Hannah made a promise and shouldn’t bow to pressure. This isn’t even a difficult promise to follow.
Says Mika, who feels very strongly about being cremated, and never wants to be buried.
They no longer matter to him, though.
I wasn’t just addressing the idea of what to do with his remains, but the general idea of why you should be honest with people who are dying. You can lie and cheat and steal from the dying and they won’t know it and it won’t hurt them. But if I did it, I would be betraying something fundamental about myself.
When my cousin “Darryl” was dying–by which I mean the last few days before his death, his sister, boyfriend, and my brother Johnny died lied like rugs to him. They told him that certain absent members of his family he was longing to see were on their way to the hospital and wanted him to know that they didn’t care that he was gay, rather than being assholes and boycotting his hotel room lest they incur the wrath of Jesus.
That wasn’t wrong. That was the right thing to do. Telling the truth is not always the moral choice. Their moral comfort was not worth more than keeping a dying man from suffering unnecessarily.
I know it’s HANNAH’s wishes at issue, I’m saying I thing Grace’s feelings/wishes are of no import when I consider the OP.
The OP:
*Given plenty of warning of Billy’s fate, the couple discussed in detail what he wanted done with his body after his death. Jack was unequivocal in wanting to be cremated–partly because he felt burial to be a waste of resources, partly because, unlike his parents and siblings, he was a confirmed atheist and does not wish to pretend that he thinks that one day he’ll be physically resurrected.
*
I understand your position, that it’s more valuable to comfort the living than keep a promise to the dead. I would be fine with that logic if Jack just had a vague idea about the disposal of his remains but "Jack was unequivocal in wanting to be cremated."
Jack knew exactly how he wanted Hannah to deal with his body and he discussed it with her in detail and explained his unequivocal feelings. She promised to honor his wishes, end of story.
That means no matter how cool Grace is and no matter how sad she is over Jack’s immortal soul, I think that Hannah should keep her promise to Jack.
It sounds like Grace is a really great person but she still put Hannah in a shitacular position and I think that was a dick move. OTOH, you’re right, she just lost her son so she should get some slack AND you should be able to ask your loved ones for just about anything without feeling like an asshole.
Particularly after re-reading the OP in which Grace says she isn’t trying to pressure Hannah, I must retract my ‘asshole’ assertion. In fact, I might be an asshole, I hate it when that happens.
Yes, you can come up with times when lying is fine. Anne Frank, Nazis, blah blah. Just coming up with one example in no way validates other examples. I have a general rule, as I said, and it’s going to take something massive to get me to go against that rule–and someone hoping I’ll violate my husband’s wishes to make them feel better isn’t sufficient.
If I make Grace a promise, I’ll live by that, too. People who find that there are always things that come up that prevent them from living up to their promises–and let’s face it, there’s always an excuse that can be made to justify whatever we really want to do–should stop making promises.
What is unethical about breaking promises to people who no longer exist? Who does that harm? If you have a choice between giving comfort or causing distress, when giving comfort will harm no one else, I don’t see how that’s even a choice. Keeping promises to dead people at the expense of the living just strikes me as irrational and superstitious.
Sure it does–for certain meanings of validate.
My position is not that promises should not be honored, or that they may be violated at will, or that truth-telling is meaningless. It’s that truth-telling is not the only virtue and not the ultimate virtue; neither, for that matter, is promise-keeping. In fact, it’s impossible for both TTing and PKing to be the ultimate virtue, because they can conflict.
I think lying and breaking promises are both morally perilous; they are more likely to be the wrong course of action than not. But I also think that no action has any moral value outside of an actual situation; to assess an action’s rightness or wrongness, you – no, I – have to take into account the likely and foreseeable results of the action. If telling the truth or keeping a promise causes more damage or unjustifiable pain than lying or breaking the promise would, then TTing & PKing are wrong in that context.
TTing and PKing are more likely to be moral courses in the same way that, say, not moving an injured auto accident victim until paramedics arrive is more likely to be the correct course of action. But if the car is on fire and the flames are approaching said victim, the situation changes.
I’m a contextual moralist.
I’m not sure who you’re arguing with, since I have explicitly said that there are some circumstances where lying or breaking promises is justified, but that I don’t think your hypothetical is even in the neighborhood.
Obviously I’m arguing with the jsgoddess from of a neighboring alternate Earth. She’s just like you except she writes villanelles about New Testament figures.
Again, what Skald said. No one is talking about merrily dashing through life, breaking promises with utter disregard. This is a very specific situation. Truth telling and promise keeping are not the only, or even the absolute highest virtues. Kindness is a very important virtue as well. I would rather have it said of me that “she never did a deliberate unkindness” than that “she never broke her word.” Truth telling can be an excuse for all kinds of asshole-ish behavior. In this case, I believe that a case can be made for either side, but my feeling is that the feelings of the living, especially the beloved living, trump the request of the dead. This despite the fact that I am utterly in agreement with Jack in the first place, and feel that burial is stupid and wasteful, and resurrection is a joke. But kindness to a loved-one is real.
There are times that kindness to Grace may not come so cheap. If she, in the terrible grief of her mourning, requested Hannah to do something in the way of religious indoctrination to her children, I would say Hannah has every business refusing. But Jack isn’t going to care; he’s dead, and his remains are dust in the wind, whether quickly by fire or slowly by decomposition. If Jack felt that strongly about it, he should have talked with his mother or not died. Once he died, he lost any say or interest in the situation.
Since villanelles are the tools of the debbil, that jsgoddess is made of evil. EVIL!
:eek:
:eek:
:eek:
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
I’m going to need you to take that back.
I prefer to think that Grace is basically a faithful Narnian. She knows that, while Aslan would forgive the grief-stricken outburst (on account of knowing more about sorrow than anybody else), he’d say that the indoctrination request simply may not be uttered.
Let us hope you are right, Skald.
About Grace’s character or Aslan’s position on asking for indoctrination? 
Both!
“I am Jack’s posthumous imperative.”
I don’t agree it was the right thing to do. Really, I can’t imagine many things more depressing than your loved ones writing you off like that, no longer willing to treat you like an adult.
Wait. What?
Are you saying that, when asked by a dying man whether his beloved but estranged aunts & uncles were coming to visit him on his deathbed, they should have said, “No, they think you’re too grody and will only come if we toss out your boyfriend and you are willing to renounce him and admit that you’re a damnable sinner”?
Is the sky pink in your world?
Telling Darryl the truth would accomplish nothing. The HIV (or whatever opportunistic infection was the proximate cause of death) had turned his brain to Swiss cheese; he had maybe two or three hours worth of short-term memory at a time. Telling him the absent relatives were not coming would have hurt him to no purpose, and treating someone in such a condition as if they were capable of ordinary, mature, adult decision-making is nuts.
I know that Immanuel Kant would say that they were obligated to tell him the truth. Kant was an idiot in the literal sense.