I don’t understand the attitude that it’s immoral to make jokes or celebrate or whatever when a reviled public figure dies. I dislike those responses too (and would prefer a social environment where I don’t have to hear them) but that’s a matter of personal preference, not morality. What kind of harm do you think those responses could possibly do?
It’s mostly a ritualistic norm about the death of a specific person being inherently solemn, I think. Like most ritualistic norms, it has some good qualities and some bad qualities but for the most part it just is.
I think the root idea is that gloating about death, particularly death from aging, disease, or accident, is in some sense “taking Death’s side”, because (in the cases where the norm applies) the person’s death wasn’t because of or related to any of the bad things they did, it’s just a reminder that death is arbitrary and inescapable.
I can go either way on it, so long as one is consistent (i.e. you can’t make fun of the death of a public figure you hate and object when someone makes fun a public figure they hate but you love, but accepting both or neither is fine.)
The family of the person who died is having a really terrible time and by what moral calculus is your round of public spite worth more happiness to you than adding to their suffering by taunting them?
In public, that is. In private I don’t think people really care what you say about the dead.
I feel like part of the ambiguity for me is what counts as “public.” Is my Facebook page public? What about my tumblr? What if I had s Tumblr read by exactly two people who hardly ever reblogged anything from me? Etc.
…I would really like it if we had a norm to the effect of “if it’s on the Web, it’s public.”
(Yes, I feel very 1998 referring to “the Web,” but I’m trying to avoid any ambiguity resulting from the fact that email etc. are also parts of the internet.)
I get the sense that a lot of sorrow results from the mismatch between “this is my private space where I can hang with my peeps and vent about whatever I want!” and “oh, hey, turns out that my Hated Outgroup can also read this page and somehow that thing keeps happening.” In a world of social media, you can’t actually tell which content will randomly explode.