I mean, this question is not just about normal criminals.
Think like very bad crimes. Like serial killers, rapists, child rapists, terrorists, corrupt officials, terrible leaders, cruel dictators, generals that ignore laws of war, or like people has bad as Hitler. Which of these people do you think deserve a respectful burial, if any.
Is there a level of evilness that you think should not be allowed to have a proper buriel or have their corpses mutilated. Or should everyone deserve a respectful burial regardless of crimes.
I personally don’t even know how to answer this question myself. Like the funeral isn’t even for the dead. Its for the living. So to me, the question seems like, should the relatives of a bad person be allowed to see the corpse treated respectfully. I personally don’t have an answer to this question.
Yes, because compassion is what makes us better then them.
pedantry is what makes some better than others :p
You can only be evil when you are alive. In death we are all rotting meat, neither good or evil.
Not entirely true, when memorials are built to an evil person which perpetuates their evil, that evil survives the mortal coil.
It’s why after taking DNA samples, Osama Bin Laden was thrown in the ocean, and Hitlers bunker was built over and his body disposed of by the KGB. Evil lives on.
Does rotten meat care about its burial at all?
Decency is a decision you make about who you are. It’s not about them.
My family had an interesting experience with this
My mom’s cousin was a wonderful woman, I don’t think there is anyone who would have anything bad to say about her.
Her husband was a piece of shit. I’m not going to go into all of the ways he was a shitty person, I’ll just leave it at he was an illiterate moron who wasted all of their money, never held down a job for long, weighed probably well in excess of 300lbs (my mom, who is not petite by any definition, could fit in one of his pant legs) bought stupid cars and all kinds of shit for himself, and his wife had very little despite usually being the sole breadwinner of their household.
She got sick, my mom helped make arrangements for what would happen with their dogs when she passed because fat ass definitely wasn’t going to take care of them.
The day she died my mom was over helping take care of her, I was on my way over to pick up the dogs, I’m a couple blocks away and get a frantic call from my mom telling me not to come over, because he came downstairs with a shotgun and was talking about ending it.
I pulled up outside, my mom met me at the porch. He’d calmed down a little, I made sure cops had been called.
I go inside, there’s her cousin gasping for air beating down deaths door on the couch. He’s sitting in the kitchen, fucking around on his computer, distraught but not even giving a moment’s thought to his wife dying in the other room. He’s clearly more upset that no one’s going to take care of him than anything else. The shotgun is leaning in the corner of the kitchen.
We decide it’s best if I don’t stay long and I don’t pick up the dogs at that time.
I get on my way, cops come soon after, confiscate all of his guns. She passes, my mom gets the dogs and gets them to their new homes.
Fat ass never has a funeral for her, and definitely never tried to reach out to any of us.
Some months later my mom and grandmother are going to check out a new store that recently opened. They were driving near that house, and fat ass, being who he was, had recently purchased a ridiculous new Camaro, probably with life insurance money that most people would have used for a funeral.
My mom makes a small detour to drive by and show my grandmother that car, when they see several police cars and an ambulance turn down the same road, and sure enough they stop right in front of the house.
My mom pulls up and asks what’s going on, afraid that maybe he had done something to the neighbors, they’ve had issues before.
Turns out that they’d gotten a 911 call from the house, from a woman, who I don’t believe was never identified, we suspect probably a prostitute.
Fatass had a heart attack and keeled over dead.
She called 911, grabbed his computer and maybe a few other small valuables, nothing in particular that we noticed missing, and ran off never to be heard from again.
Good for her.
My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to untangle their debts, see what could be salvaged, etc. it wasn’t much.
I’m especially salty about the whole situation because the house originally belonged to my mom’s aunt/he cousins mother. It had been paid off years ago, and at one point the plan had been for the house to be left to me, since her daughter didn’t have any kids, and most other branches of that side of the family were also dead-ends, I sort of represented the future of the family.
But when her daughter married fatass, since he kept wasting all of their money she let them move in because they would have probably been homeless otherwise, and they got the house when she died. They took out loans against the house, he didn’t really keep up with any sort of maintenance, etc. to call it a fixer-upper would have been an understatement.
My mom’s main priority was to have a proper funeral for her cousin, and had her ashes buried.
She never bothered to claim his remains from the coroner’s office. They tried to reach out to his kids from other relationships, other relatives, etc. and none of them wanted anything to do with him either.
After a certain amount of time, the coroner’s office here cremates the remains, and if they’re still not claimed I believe they eventually have them scattered or buried somewhere.
I’m not someone who cares much about what happens with my, or anyone else’s body, once they die. Once you’re dead you’re dead, and your corpse deserves no more respect than any other slab of expiring meat. I’d just as soon throw bodies unceremoniously into an industrial composter.
Many people of course have a different idea of that, and I’m willing to respect their beliefs.
But I think fatass should be more-or-less the model we should follow for bad people. Everything is carried out respectfully, but without ceremony, no fancy headstones, no elaborate funeral ceremony, and no easy way for mourners and kooks to make a pilgrimage site from it.
In some cases where religion and culture and such dictate that a body shouldn’t be cremated, I would support burial at sea, unmarked graves, or plain graves in in an area where they can be visited by family but not the general public.
Our rituals around death are really for the living. We should respect the wishes of the family of the deceased because it’s important to make the (already difficult) grieving rituals as meaningful and painless as possible, not because of the moral qualities of the deceased.
When I was in China we visited the tombs of the ancient Emporers. Chinese culture dictates that respect for the dead includes absolutely no pictures and no gawking or unnecessary peering/staring at final resting places.
There was one Emporer in particular though that has such a bad reputation as pretty much being rotten to the core his whole tomb is open for public viewing. We walked right through his area, gawked at his stone coffin and stared at everything in there, along with a great line of many other tourists.
Yeah, fk that guy…
Sanitation concerns first. Proper disposal is what you’re owed.
When they tossed the corpse of Osama Bin Laden into the sea, it wasn’t just because no country’s soil would take him, but to respect his religion, where in Islam cremation is considered a desecration. So they showed him the respect of a burial at sea, even though he was our enemy.
That one also has the aspect of avoiding a deliberate insult. Desecrate the corpse and you risk turning it into a Thing™ that people might rally around.
killing him does that too, but people rally a little less around a relatively restrained killing of a valid military target and unremarkable handling of the body.
Yes but not for the reasons people are stating here. Dead people are dead. They don’t deserve a damn thing, whether saint or sinner.
Burial is for the living. So it’s up to the next of kin how to go organize it. Since those people are typically innocent of the crimes of the deceased, their behavior has little or no relevance to what sort of burial there will be, unless it affects how those people might wish to go about it.
They deserve a burial for the sake of public health. What they don’t deserve is to have their legacies whitewashed.
A burial is a ceremony where the living show their respect to the deceased. The larger/more extravagant the bureal, the greater the (financial) sacrifice, the greater the respect for the person and their actions.
Everyone who thinks Hitler should have received a state burial (whether by the allies or by his supprters) is definitely a nazi.
Should respect for a person be measured by how much money you can spend?
Ideally: No.
But i live in a materialistic society where status is expressed trough expensive houses/cars/brands and products.
If you buy a expensive gift (for a living person), you show to them that you are willing to go to great lengths to make them happy.This is the societal norm in (probably) all western countries. And therefore, making a extravagant bureal for a horrific person implies approval for them and their actions.
So if you are not a materialistic person you can give a small burial to a person without disrespecting them, but there will definitely be some people that will then assume that you did not like that person. They will simply assume it without proof, as it is a custom, unless they know that you are a anti-materialistic person.
I hear what you are saying and agree that Hitler and others are disastrous dickheads. But what about their family? Should they live in the shame and horror of this person that they probably attempted to curb at some point. But it’s fuckin Hitler! Probably blackmailed his own mother. So is it fair to the family not to mourn?
Funerals are for the living. Not for the dead.
Should they live in the shame and horror of this person that they probably attempted to curb at some point.
No. Those relatives that have not enabled or supported a monsters actions are of course completely innocent.
And if they want, they can of course mourn the loss of the ability to ever have a nice conversation with that person again.
But a burial is not like mourning in your bed, crying yourself to sleep. There you can accept that you are sad about the loss, even tough the world is a better place without that person.A bureal however is a public performance that, as you say, is for the living. Not for the dead. It is not useful for mourning, but a ritual to pay the last respects to the deceased person. Not only for their good side, but also for their evil side. And the bigger the burial, the greater the (implied) respect. This holds true in any western/materialistic society, and was practiced in ancient times, where pyramids were built to honor kings, and a bigger pyramid implied a better king.
Therefore holding a large burial for a horrific person signals to the living that you not only miss that person as a friend, but also support their actions and choices in life.
I disagree. Funerals are definitely part of the mourning process. And enabling a person is a case by case basis. I respect your opinion on Hitler and understand. I’m not so sure about serial killers.
So is it fair to the family not to mourn?
How many families of Holocaust victims were given the privilege and closure of mourning and burying their loves ones?
I agree that no person is at fault for the actions of their family or their ancestors, but, their family’s actions do no negate the consequences of those actions. Seeing what people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini did to their own people, nevermind what they did to those of other countries… Do their families have more right to mourn their loss than the people do who suffered at their authoritarian hands?
I would argue no, because life isn’t fair, but also because the amount of suffering enacted should not be met with honor or remembrance or respect. The family of authoritarians can mourn in their heads, if they do choose, but I would argue they should choose not to. There’s no “separating the art from the artist” when it comes to authoritarian genociders. Mourning their life isn’t just mourning the loss of them, but the loss of everything they did in their life as well.
If you’ve lived the kind of life where people are debating the morality around whether or not you deserve a funeral, I’d say you don’t deserve one.
Hey that’s a fair point. I do agree that the Holocaust victims were not given the same right. And I don’t know Hitler’s history off hand. I read it at one point and forgot it.
I guess I was also including people like serial killers in the mix. There are definitely parents in that bracket that were not stellar parents, but created monsters.
Reagan and Thatcher can rest in piss. Extrapolate my answer from there, I guess.
Lots of good answers here, mostly consense is that everybody deserves a decent burial. In my opinion this is correct, but because it’s about respecting live itself. They might not have made anything good out of it, but respecting life in any form should be the thing we as a society do.
One good way to answer your question is to ask the exact opposite question: why wouldn’t they deserve decent funeral?
How would it help anyone to refuse decent funerals to a dead body? No matter their crime, the ‘real bad guy’ is now dead and is no more. It’s a body not a person anymore.
And then, one may want to consider this question: why would anyone want to punish innocent people (the family of the ‘real bad guy’ has committed no crime, right?) by refusing them the right to pay respect to the deceased? And if it is somehow right to punish the family for crimes they have not committed, have they been (secretly and silently) trialed? By whom and for what crime exactly? And who was their defendant?
One may also want to question their desire to hate so much on a person as to hate their corpse and then, once again, to apply their hate onto innocent people, aka the family of the ‘real bad guy’.
I generally agree, but there are two addenda.
First: Even the worst should be burried with dignity, because their behaviour is not the standard by which we measure our actions. Nobody is so evil that they can take our will to be decent human beings. So we do the right thing (decent burrial) to spite evil.
Second: With dignity is not the same as “with reverence” or “with honor”. In many cultures criminals are denied certain parts of funeral rites (like processions, official or acknowledged mourning periods). This reinforces social norms to the living (don’t do the bad thing or you will be shunned by society) and can also prevent retraumatizing their victims. The most common form of this is not allowing to have their gravesite marked. This is done so that their family may have a place of grief (the unmarked grave) but to prevent the grave from becoming either a shrine to their followers or a target of defilement by the victims. A fairly well known example of the last part is Adolf Hitler who was properly buried in an unknown location and then a parking lot was put over the area with the possible grave sites.
This is a question that is at least older than feudalism - the Greek tragedy Antigone deals with this question. And the answer, like always, is that desecrating a corpse is bad and dangerous and don’t do it, family is gonna be pissed and rightly so.
Even if it’s funny as shit that there were heads on sticks on top of Parliament for a while.
