Vain creatures that we are, most of us hope to be grieved after our deaths. To learn that our loved ones will not grieve for us or that their anguish will subside quickly might imply something unsettling about ourselves: that we really do not matter as much to others as we ordinarily suppose.Empirical studies of grief indicate that these egoistic hopes often go unrealized, however. Far from being permanent, the pains of grief, while often initially intense, tend to dissipate in a few months, rather than years. In the immediate aftermath of a spouse or loved one's death, grief is nearly always detrimental to subjective well-being. Yet most individuals return to their antecedent level of well-being surprisingly quickly. Our apparent ability to move on, or move beyond grief, seems to indicate that our "emotional immune system" deals with the pain of loss with far more resilience than we might expect.1In a well-regarded article, Dan Moller has argued that these empirical findings do not show that we fail to care (or care very little) about our loved ones while they are alive. However, such findings give us reason to regret our apparent resilience in the face of grief, according to Moller.2 Because our emotions enable us to "perceive value," our apparent ability to adapt to the loss of our loved ones suggests that we eventually end up blind to the value of our loved ones and our relationships with them, he argues. We should thus regret this resilience on epistemic grounds, inasmuch as it precludes emotional engagement with our lost loved ones and "so deprives us of insight into our own condition."3

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato.

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Abstract:The achievement of intentional learning is a powerful paradigm for the objectives and methods of the teaching of philosophy. This paradigm sees the objectives and methods of such teaching as based not simply on the mastery of content, but as rooted in attempts to shape the various affective and cognitive factors that influence students' learning efforts. The goals of such pedagogy is to foster an intentional learning orientation, one characterized by self-awareness, active monitoring of the learning process, and a desire for publicly certified expertise. I provide a number of examples of philosophyspecific teaching strategies that follow this paradigm.

Thanks to recent scholarship, Kant is no longer seen as the dogmatic opponent of suicide that he appears to be at first glance. However, some interpreters have recently argued for a Kantian view of the morality of suicide with surprising, even radical, implications. More specifically, they have argued that Kantianism (1) requires that those with dementia or other rationality-eroding conditions end their lives before their condition results in their loss of identity as moral agents and (2) requires subjecting the fully demented or those confronting future dementia to non-voluntary euthanasia. Properly understood, Kant's ethics have neither of these implications (1) wrongly assumes that rational agents' duty of self-preservation entails a duty of self-destruction when they become non-rational, (2) further neglects Kant's distinction between duties to self and duties to others and wrongly assumes that duties can be owed to rational agents only during the time of their existence.