Love and Death

Abstract

Empirical evidence indicates that bereaved spouses are surprisingly muted in their responses to their loss, and that after a few months many of the bereaved return to their emotional baseline. Psychologists think this is good news: resilience is adaptive, and we should welcome evidence that there is less suffering in the world. I explore various reasons we might have for regretting our resilience, both because of what resilience tells us about our own significance vis-à-vis loved ones, and because resilience may render us incapable of comprehending how things really stand, value-wise. I also compare our actual dispositions to extreme alternatives ("sub-resilience" and "super-resilience"), and consider whether we might endorse (plain) resilience as a kind of mean.

Keywords: love, death, bereavement, marriage, resilience, ethics, philosophy