(December 15, 2014 at 12:52 pm)bennyboy Wrote: No. The murder victim didn't perpetrate the act of murder. The person who committed suicide did perpetrate the act of suicide. Not only that, unless they accidentally jumped out a window, or accidentally ingested a bottle of sleeping pills and a quarter of Jack Daniels, they made a conscious decision to end their own life. What they did NOT do is include the suffering of others in their calculus of whether to go through with the act. That's selfish and unethical.
Or, they did include the suffering of others in their calculus and decided that their own suffering was too overwhelming, and that the suffering of others would be lesser than their own. And, this is not always an incorrect assessment.
How many people end their own lives because, in large part, they feel that nobody else cares about them being alive? If you make the assessment based upon the honestly-held conviction (whether or not it is actually true) that your death would go unnoticed or unlamented (or worse, would be cheered), your perspective of the ethics of suicide is going to be entirely different from that which you're suggesting.
