Does it actually bother people when a stranger dies?

The only mechanism for caring about them is via an exercise of simulant-empathy.

Distinguished from acquaintance empathy because there is no impactful concept of that person in memory that might automate the response.

I.E: The person only 'cares' because they've put it actual conscious effort into simulating that person so as to empathise with them. It isn't automated, they're choosing to do it - if only by habit. Why would you do that?

In fact, it wouldn't even be that because 'loss' is not derived from empathising with the deceased - so you'd actually essentially be synthesising a 'third-person' that 'knew' the deceased in order to empathise.

Assuming this is a doubly-non-acquainted person. Obviously if you're interacting with someone who is mourning them, you feel bad via empathising with them, if purely simulating their emotions rather than simulating actual concern over the death.

What's even more bizarre is when people act 'hurt' by deaths of completely unknown strangers. No third hand experience, no pictures, no name even.

145 people dead in ... attack. Do you care? How could you?

It's a question of how they die really.

The victims of 9/11 strike an immediate chord because it immediately conjured the horror of a death in which there was no way out. The horrible could've been's. I could've been on that plane or in the most doomed part of the towers, and no-one could've helped us. It extenuated the diabolical mercilessness of those who did it, and made them unreachable to us, and in comparison, made the victims far more reachable. Like we knew them.

Deaths in general are a fact of life, but when they happen to kids, or in a way that isn't mundane or is particularly cruel, they do stop us in our tracks and strike us with the horrible unfairness of how someone was taken away.

Bladeswitch wrote:It's a question of how they die really.

The victims of 9/11 strike an immediate chord because it immediately conjured the horror of a death in which there was no way out. The horrible could've been's. I could've been on that plane or in the most doomed part of the towers, and no-one could've helped us. It extenuated the diabolical mercilessness of those who did it, and made them unreachable to us, and in comparison, made the victims far more reachable. Like we knew them.

Deaths in general are a fact of life, but when they happen to kids, or in a way that isn't mundane or is particularly cruel, they do stop us in our tracks and strike us with the horrible unfairness of how someone was taken away.

So that (9/11) 'bothers' you in the direct simulant-empathetic sense, i.e: 'I dislike this event because I can sense that it would be discomforting to be in that situation.'

Unique to this form seems to be the irrelevance of scale. Logically the individual discomfort would be equal whether there was one victim as if there were many.

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Fi_murders

'(An incident where) several men entered the "Hi-fi Shop" shortly before closing time and began taking hostages; two would survive but with severe life-changing injuries. Violence included a pen being kicked into an ear and the brutal rape of a teenage girl who was later shot in the head. Corrosive drain cleaner was also forcefully given to the hostages causing horrific burns to their mouths and throats.'

Now, this make me uncomfortable from that base of affective empathy, moreso than does the same for 9/11.
At the same time, the scale is much smaller - and much smaller still from equivalents in war and genocide.

So that's one form of 'botherment', though it remains as rather a conscious exercise. You don't have to be bothered. I can read that article without empathising with the victims and thus being unaffected. So you're still essentially choosing to care.

TiberiusDidNothingWrong wrote:So that (9/11) 'bothers' you in the direct simulant-empathetic sense, i.e: 'I dislike this event because I can sense that it would be discomforting to be in that situation.'

Well, I would substitute the word 'discomforting' with 'hopeless', but more or less, yes.

'(An incident where) several men entered the "Hi-fi Shop" shortly before closing time and began taking hostages; two would survive but with severe life-changing injuries. Violence included a pen being kicked into an ear and the brutal rape of a teenage girl who was later shot in the head. Corrosive drain cleaner was also forcefully given to the hostages causing horrific burns to their mouths and throats.'

Jesus Christ!

I think in a way for me that sounds.... I don't want to say 'cartoonish', but almost too absurd to properly process. Like I know it happened but it sounds like something from a horror film.

So that's one form of 'botherment', though it remains as rather a conscious exercise. You don't have to be bothered. I can read that article without empathising with the victims and thus being unaffected. So you're still essentially choosing to care.

I think for me, maybe the barrier with the Hi-Fi case is I didn't experience those events in 'real-time', whereas with 9/11 I did, and it was more world shattering for it.

The Hi-Fi murders just sound like a bunch of sick punks by comparison, who are perhaps penny a dozen, but I'll grant their methods were distinct and shocking, in a way that we can immediately visualize as a graphic picture.

Maybe that's the thing. You and I visualize the graphic wounds far more than the people themselves and what was going on in their mind in that ordeal.

Rebecca Schaeffer's death bothers me. Imagine opening your front door thinking you're going to receive the script for a Hollywood movie only instead to find the man you told to stop pestering you earlier that day with a gun aimed at your chest. She kept screaming "Why?" as he shot her. She was only 21 years old.

There was an episode of The 1980's The Deadliest Decade about her murder that I watched.

It was genuinely disturbing.

The guy who did it seemed to have a raging virgin/whore complex, and killed her because he felt personally 'betrayed' by her taking parts that diverged from her usual wholesome image.

Yeah, Robert Bardo was his name. I can't believe people actually told him where she lived. What pains me the most is how easily the disaster could have been avoided. I mean, Bardo was clearly a ticking time bomb.

I think she had agents who knew the risks of psycho admirers, but there wasn't really yet a top-down understanding of just how dangerous or determined some of these unglued obsessives were if they wanted to find her, and how vulnerable famous stars could be.

And sadly it seemed only a disaster like that would make them wise up to that.