Is it moral for crematoria to generate electricity with their waste heat?

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Why would it be?

If you are burning bodies so as to generate electricity, that would probably be immoral. But if you are using the heat generated by cremation to generate electricity, I don’t see why that would be wrong.
 
The only problem I can conceive of is that the heat generated by burning a body is technically part of the body. The products of combustion are less massive than the reactants by the mass-equivalent of the heat released.
 
Not at all. Even before Einstein proved that conservation of mass and conservation of energy are the same thing, indeed even before our modern understanding of atoms and molecules, people understood fire to be something that was contained within the fuel.
 
And given that one is not guilty of cannibalism for having consumed atoms that used to be human flesh but have since been decomposed to their basic constituents and rebuilt from photosynthesis, it follows that once the energy has been turned into heat, it is no sin to make use of it.
 
But to this argument it would be like claiming all human waste should be collected and buried with the body and not flushed down the sewer because it is part of the body.
 
mythbuster1 said:
Does this undermine the dignity of the deceased?
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Goodness I’d say yes. Dead bodies shouldn’t be used “for” anything. The dead are not fuel or ingredients. And most importantly, I don’t want to know that my X-box is being powered off of Grandma.
 
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I thought crematoria made a lot of heat to burn the bodies? This sounds like using the heat from the food you are cooking to generate energy.

ETA: sorry, I realized what I wrote was obscure.

What I mean is, if you cook, you have a source of energy to create the heat to cook your food. After you finish cooking, the stove and pan are still warm, right?

So as I understand it, what the crematoria are looking into is capturing that “leftover” heat to use to generate electricity.

Yes, there would be some small amount of heat that had been generated by the body when it burned–the body being a very small source of fuel in the process–but that heat would be generated in any case.

The majority of the heat captured would have been made by the ovens and not the bodies, and the heat would not be captured from the bodies but from the surroundings, mixed in with the rest of the heat.
 
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Is it moral for cemeteries to use the products of the decomposition of human bodies to grow grass? Is it ok to compost that grass to help the roses?
 
FiveLinden said:
Is it moral for cemeteries to use the products of the decomposition of human bodies to grow grass? Is it ok to compost that grass to help the roses?
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I think the grass will grow regardless of how decomposed the body is 6 feet below. It’s different than using a (dignified) human body as an ingredient in some money-making scheme.
 
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I have no relevant contribution to make on the objective morality of this.

I think it’s creepy though. It sketches me out enough that I’d want to avoid it unless really convinced by proper authorities that it’s morally neutral or even positively good for some apocalyptic reason. And even then it doesn’t feel emotionally neutral to me. I sort of feel like maybe certain things shouldn’t be ‘efficient’.

Maybe a person dies, we wilfully waste some stuff on honouring them. In ancient times, folks would pour out liquor over a grave, bury gold and expensive items with the deceased, expend extra resources in honour of the dead. Maybe the least we can do is not ‘use’ the resource energy generated by our dead?

Just my emotional and non-morally-expert thought, though.
 
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If I power your X-box I’m fine with that as long as that’s not why I was burned.

If you play Overwatch, I am a Mercy main, btw.
 
Kinda off-topic, but the mass lost in combustion is minimal.

In chemical reaction, Lavoisier’s Law predominates over Einstein’s Mass/Energy equivalence. You would only loss appreciable mass in a nuclear reaction, or in an matter-antimatter anihilation. If you see that the ashes weight less than before burning, it’s probably because of combustion gases escaping.

Of course, you could also argue that the energy contained in the orbitals of the chemical bonds is part of the body, but raw energy is a much more abstract concept than matter so…
 
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God designed our bodies to decompose, providing nutrients for the carrion feeding creatures and this process continues until we are dust or part of a body of.water.

We don’t think about this anymore because our society works spending time and money to preserve the dead flesh with chemicals and sealants.

Remember you are dust and to first you shall return.
 
Caitlyn Dougherty has written in detail about cremation. Name of.that book escapes me, it was her first book
 
TheLittleLady said:
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
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Yes, that is true, but our bodies are also Temples of the Holy Spirit infused with God’s grace / energies, which is why Eastern Christians don’t crush and burn them after death. We hope our bodies will one day be saintly relics, not the fuel in someone’s Honda.
 
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My desire is to be wrapped in a linen or cotton shroud and placed in a grave. I will be food for carrion beetles and such, eventually I will nourish the soil.

My body will be resurrected at the end of time. One can be a saint without a preserved body.

I respect my EO brothers and sisters in their own burial practices.
 
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When I woke up this morning, the last thing in the world I could have even imagined doing, was reading a question about generating electricity from the waste heat of cremated bodies. It would be impossible to make this stuff up.

I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, it does seem like a violation of human dignity, similar (though not identical) to using the body itself for compost. But on the other hand, if we would all return directly to nature the way @TheLittleLady proposes — which is the way it should be for everybody — we go back to the earth anyway, and the dirt we become is then nourishment for plants and burrowing creatures.

I would love to know that I were going to become food for worms and nutrients for the trees near my grave, but mainstream American family sensibilities — and I am part of a mainstream American family — have forced me to make conventional arrangements. Just so long as I get my Requiem Traditional Latin Mass and thirty Gregorian TLMs (and somehow manage to save my pitiful soul) the rest is just details.
 
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