Death is inevitable, and both tradition and the health department require that someone deal with deceased persons’ bodies. As long as death is unavoidable, investing in mortuaries while advocating against dying will involve no hypocrisy. The advocate in this case can do nothing to stop death while tradition and social hygiene render mortuaries indispensable.
Most importantly, mortuaries neither cause death nor play any role in enabling it to continue. So investing in mortuaries really is consistent with advocating against dying. Thus, one really can advocate against dying and invest in mortuaries without hypocrisy. However, this situation is not analogous to Cook’s advocating against benefiting from oil used as a source of energy while she benefits from oil used as an investment opportunity.
The advocate in this case, Cook, claims that we can and should curtail our practice of benefiting from oil used as source of energy because this practice is harmful to the environment. The moral, and/or practical, force of her claim consists in the fact that it is wrong to unnecessarily derive benefit from oil when doing so causes so much harm to the environment. If she is right, then she should not benefit needlessly from oil, whether by using it as a source of energy or by using it as a source of investment income, because these practices cause harm to the environment and enable this harm to continue. The first practice causes pollution, and the second practice enables this pollution to continue. Thus, Cook’s analogy does not support her conclusion. Debbie Cook may be able to advocate against the practice of benefiting from using oil as a source of energy while she invests in oil companies, but she cannot do so without hypocrisy.
