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It's not a question of what else there is to support the widows and children; it's a question of how long such a work should continue to generate income.
If a business owner dies, his business can keep running. His family can still receive income from the business, or derive value from his shares in the business, etc. If he's invested in property or other tangible assets, they can still sell those assets at any point in the future at full value... often for even more than they were worth when the man was alive.
But works that are copyrighted, by their very nature, are intellectual properties that pay out over time. If authors got paid a fixed amount up front and that's it, it wouldn't be any different. But since the copyright is an asset that continues to generate income, the question is not whether or not they deserve it but how long that asset should continue to generate income. You don't want to punish creative artists by making their assets inherently less valuable than other forms of endeavour. But by the same token you want their work to pass into the public domain eventually. I think either a fixed period for each work or life plus fixed period are both approaches that have pros and cons, but just "life" isn't really reasonable.
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