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.
If you dig up a skeleton, can you tell if that person was evil or charitable in his lifetime? We’re all merely copies of each other and are equally capable of all the good and all the bad in the world depending on our individual circumstances and upbringings. Nothing is black and white and everything is gray. You’d be Putin too if you were in his shoes.
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?
Reagan and Thatcher can rest in piss. Extrapolate my answer from there, I guess.
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.
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.
Bury them as soon as they are convicted.
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.
I’m inclined to treat the body with what I would call “professionalism”. You are not emotionally attached beyond the desire to do your job well. Though I am not opposed to some people getting a burial at sea. The better for them to be forgotten.
Yes, because compassion is what makes us better then them.
pedantry is what makes some better than others :p
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.
You are exactly on the right track.
It is only for the living. The dead one is not affected in any way anymore, whatever you do.
So to me, the question seems like, should the relatives of a bad person be allowed to see the corpse treated respectfully.
Turn the question around and it becomes easy:
Should the relatives of a bad person get punished along with him? Obviously not. They deserve the full, normal respect. So let them have the burial as they wish it.
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.
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.
The worst person in the world, while living, looses all consideration for how they’re treated. At that point, it’s not about what they deserve as much as it’s about living up to our own standards for how we compose ourselves.
We don’t feed evil people to rabid hogs not because they don’t deserve it, but because we respect ourselves more than that.
Likewise, everyone deserves a baseline level of dignity in death because that’s a standard we hold ourselves to.
It’s not for them.It’s not for them. Exactly.
We don’t choose not to speak ill of the dead because we’re going to like offend the Dead or that we’re going to invoke some sort of spiritual curse on ourselves.
We choose not to speak ill of the Dead so that the people who still miss them and love them and care for them won’t live in a world where the people that they care about are being slandered.
It just saves everybody a whole lot of grief if you let the dead be the dead and move on.
Sure, if you have a personal grudge against the person then that’s a different story but if you did not ever interact with that person and they are a bad person then just let them be dead and let them fuck off into non-existence.
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.
