The death positivity movement seems to misunderstand the point that the issue with death isn’t some ancillary result such as people not getting buried in the exact way they desire, but rather that sapient human beings with thoughts, knowledge, memories, and emotions are ceasing to exist forever! Now if DPM thinks that there are issues in the way that death is handled that cause solvable negative externalities (besides people dying) that’s all well and good and probably true. The problem is that they seem to equate solving those minor negative externalities with solving the inherent problem of death itself.
The website’s name, “Order of the Good Death” is oxymoronic. Death is bad. Even if people can die at age 90 in exactly the way they want, have their remains taken care of exactly how they want, and be assured that their decaying body won’t negatively impact the environment, their death is still bad. DPM implies this bizarro world where if they can just solve all these minor issues related to death that somehow the whole process will become good. If you could just take out all the fuss, dirtiness, and other minor negative externalities from torture then that practice could be made “good” as well.
I see no value in this movement and actually quite a bit of harm as it may successfully attract resources that could otherwise be used to solve the fundamental problems of aging and death towards solving non-issues like overcrowded burial sites.
Additionally, tenets 5 and 6 are clear warning signs of intersectional nonsense: “Let’s throw some anti-racist and anti-sexist talking points into our philosophy to latch onto those movements and hopefully they’ll throw some support our way.” The rest of the website is littered with similar intersectional phrases as well. They’re not there to solve any particular issue but to signal to others that the founders of this movement are Right-Minded Thinkers Who Should Be Supported By The Cause. Any movement that isn’t explicitly related to anti-racism or anti-sexism that wastes bandwidth signalling to people that supporters of this movement are also anti-racists and anti-sexists just isn’t practicing effective altruism and is instead virtue-signalling.
The website’s name, “Order of the Good Death” is oxymoronic. Death is bad. Even if people can die at age 90 in exactly the way they want, have their remains taken care of exactly how they want, and be assured that their decaying body won’t negatively impact the environment, their death is still bad.
I think you’re missing the point of my question, which was that “Death is bad” is, at least on the surface, an instance of the Mind Projection Fallacy: projecting a label out into the world as if it could exist independently of the mind doing the labeling.
Specifically, “badness” requires a mind capable of experiencing the concept of badness… and a dead person lacks such a mind. So to say “Death is bad” is leaving out the whom. That is, it’s bad as perceived by the living. Dead people lack any values by which to judge it, or an active mind with which to do the judging.
While a person is alive, they can look forward to a future in which they would dead, and experience emotions regarding this imaginary predicted future… but that’s not the same thing as that future actually being “bad” for them in that future time. It can only be bad for people still alive.
So, (for example) the analogy to torture fails here. A tortured person is alive and can perceive the experience to be bad, regardless of whether anyone else cares. But a dead person can only matter to the living.
Do you think the analogy of a person believing (for some reason) that he will live forever in an empty room drugged to feel happy applies here? the person in question might feel negative about his fate but at the moment future-him will not say his experience is bad. and since there is no future-future-him (since he will live there forever) then no one will even say that in retrospect it was bad.
in this case, you could say that it is our place to judge the experience our future self might enjoy.
Even if people can die at age 90 in exactly the way they want, have their remains taken care of exactly how they want, and be assured that their decaying body won’t negatively impact the environment, their death is still bad.
Would you say that a 90 year old who feels that they are ready to die is suicidal? Is being ready for death the same as wanting to die? I can definitely see how the DPM could lead to restructuring of resources which may be counterproductive. But I think that is only the case if full immortality is in fact achievable. Do you think that it is? If not, it seems to me that cultivating a healthy reconciliation with death is a worthwhile goal as long as freak accidents can end still lives.
Also, 5 and 6 definitely seem like liberal posturing, but I think they’re entirely necessary. Especially with regards to religious traditions, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to specifically state that respecting the religious traditions of the dead are important, especially if the dead person in question is a member of a minority religion.
The impact of the funeral industry on the environment is also not negligible. The first duckduckgo result for “environmental impact of burials” was this article, which says that
According to the Berkeley Planning Journal, conventional burials in the U.S. use 30 million pounds of hardwood, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete for burial vaults and caskets. The sheer amount of materials used is staggering.
The amount of wood needed to create caskets is equivalent to 4 million square acres of forest, which contains enough trees to sequester 65 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The amount of wood used in casket making can supply the wood needed to build over 90,000 homes.
Many members of the DPM favor natural burial (put the body directly in the ground), but since this is far from the status quo, and since the status quo is itself harmful, I think addressing this concern is not entirely signalling.
I hope I’m not misinterpreting you! Let me know if you have any further thoughts. Your points are very interesting.
Would you say that a 90 year old who feels that they are ready to die is suicidal?
Suicidal would imply that they somehow actively contribute to the outcome. Like if they stopped eating, or something. For merely feeling ready to die, I’d say the proper word is “depressive”.
The death positivity movement seems to misunderstand the point that the issue with death isn’t some ancillary result such as people not getting buried in the exact way they desire, but rather that sapient human beings with thoughts, knowledge, memories, and emotions are ceasing to exist forever! Now if DPM thinks that there are issues in the way that death is handled that cause solvable negative externalities (besides people dying) that’s all well and good and probably true. The problem is that they seem to equate solving those minor negative externalities with solving the inherent problem of death itself.
The website’s name, “Order of the Good Death” is oxymoronic. Death is bad. Even if people can die at age 90 in exactly the way they want, have their remains taken care of exactly how they want, and be assured that their decaying body won’t negatively impact the environment, their death is still bad. DPM implies this bizarro world where if they can just solve all these minor issues related to death that somehow the whole process will become good. If you could just take out all the fuss, dirtiness, and other minor negative externalities from torture then that practice could be made “good” as well.
I see no value in this movement and actually quite a bit of harm as it may successfully attract resources that could otherwise be used to solve the fundamental problems of aging and death towards solving non-issues like overcrowded burial sites.
Additionally, tenets 5 and 6 are clear warning signs of intersectional nonsense: “Let’s throw some anti-racist and anti-sexist talking points into our philosophy to latch onto those movements and hopefully they’ll throw some support our way.” The rest of the website is littered with similar intersectional phrases as well. They’re not there to solve any particular issue but to signal to others that the founders of this movement are Right-Minded Thinkers Who Should Be Supported By The Cause. Any movement that isn’t explicitly related to anti-racism or anti-sexism that wastes bandwidth signalling to people that supporters of this movement are also anti-racists and anti-sexists just isn’t practicing effective altruism and is instead virtue-signalling.
Bad for whom?
https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda
Eliezer has written extensively on why death is bad for everyone and my understanding closely aligns with his.
I think you’re missing the point of my question, which was that “Death is bad” is, at least on the surface, an instance of the Mind Projection Fallacy: projecting a label out into the world as if it could exist independently of the mind doing the labeling.
Specifically, “badness” requires a mind capable of experiencing the concept of badness… and a dead person lacks such a mind. So to say “Death is bad” is leaving out the whom. That is, it’s bad as perceived by the living. Dead people lack any values by which to judge it, or an active mind with which to do the judging.
While a person is alive, they can look forward to a future in which they would dead, and experience emotions regarding this imaginary predicted future… but that’s not the same thing as that future actually being “bad” for them in that future time. It can only be bad for people still alive.
So, (for example) the analogy to torture fails here. A tortured person is alive and can perceive the experience to be bad, regardless of whether anyone else cares. But a dead person can only matter to the living.
Do you think the analogy of a person believing (for some reason) that he will live forever in an empty room drugged to feel happy applies here? the person in question might feel negative about his fate but at the moment future-him will not say his experience is bad. and since there is no future-future-him (since he will live there forever) then no one will even say that in retrospect it was bad.
in this case, you could say that it is our place to judge the experience our future self might enjoy.
Would you say that a 90 year old who feels that they are ready to die is suicidal? Is being ready for death the same as wanting to die? I can definitely see how the DPM could lead to restructuring of resources which may be counterproductive. But I think that is only the case if full immortality is in fact achievable. Do you think that it is? If not, it seems to me that cultivating a healthy reconciliation with death is a worthwhile goal as long as freak accidents can end still lives.
Also, 5 and 6 definitely seem like liberal posturing, but I think they’re entirely necessary. Especially with regards to religious traditions, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to specifically state that respecting the religious traditions of the dead are important, especially if the dead person in question is a member of a minority religion.
The impact of the funeral industry on the environment is also not negligible. The first duckduckgo result for “environmental impact of burials” was this article, which says that
Many members of the DPM favor natural burial (put the body directly in the ground), but since this is far from the status quo, and since the status quo is itself harmful, I think addressing this concern is not entirely signalling.
I hope I’m not misinterpreting you! Let me know if you have any further thoughts. Your points are very interesting.
Suicidal would imply that they somehow actively contribute to the outcome. Like if they stopped eating, or something. For merely feeling ready to die, I’d say the proper word is “depressive”.