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.
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…
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.
That is a remarkably bad hot take
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.
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.
Decency is a decision you make about who you are. It’s not about them.
You can only be evil when you are alive. In death we are all rotting meat, neither good or evil.
Does rotten meat care about its burial at all?
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.
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.
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.
I don’t have an opinion on that, but I do think they don’t deserve us to call them by their names. Having their name go down in history is what they want — referring to them descriptively (eg. ‘the tyrant who took over Nazi Germany’) takes the focus away from the person and puts it on their horrible actions – which anyone with those traits, not necessarily just A**** ****** could have done.
