Obituaries and the Good Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study suggests that news obituaries have a role to play in educating practical reason using The New York Times’ Overlooked project to illustrate. The argument draws from virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre’s book Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. A close reading of Overlooked’s15 initial obituaries used the biographies in MacIntyre’s book as templates. The analysis concluded that the articles on LGBTQ activist Marsha P. Johnson and novelist Charlotte Brontë illustrated lives that were happy in an Aristotelian sense despite misfortune. The articles on journalist Ida B. Wells and mathematician Ada Lovelace illustrated incomplete lives despite overall directedness. The articles on novelist Nella Larsen and Brooklyn Bridge supervisor Emily Warren Roebling illustrated the challenge of reconciling different aspects of one’s life to achieve unity of character. This finding was closely tied to how structural injustice prevents or distorts the kinds of relationships MacIntyre says agents need to flourish.