The Woman Carrying a Corpse
Chi Hui, "The Woman Carrying a Corpse" translated from Chinese by Judith Huang, from The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories , 2023. Read for free at Reactor Magazine This story is thought provoking. Issues of futility, how our lives and actions come to have meaning, and our relationship to the dead are all interesting topics brought out in Hui's story; however, I'm going to murmur about something else: The story brings to mind how explanations that involve citing reasons for actions are different than explanations that involve citing causes for actions. While it might be natural on first reflection to think of reasons as simply causes, and as such, reduce all explanations to causal, the story points to a couple of features of reasons-explanations that distinguish them from causal explanations. We tend to muddle the two up, but reasons have a normative component that causal explanations simply don't have; reasons justify an action, but causes can't justif