Suicide: An Ethical Delimna

[bennyboy]

I'm sorry, lust, gluttony, laziness? I didn't realize you were religious. We will never come to an agreement on this because I think you have a skewed sense of morality and you probably think I do too.

I'm not. My point is that the actions we consider harmful to the self or others are ALL mediated by brain chemistry. They all involve influences beyond the direct agency of a consious person.

Regardless of how it may or may not affect other people, no one else has any right to claim ownership of my life. So killing myself doesn't fit with your analogy at all.

Why do people keep shifting the moral burden away from the one actually contemplating the act? Suicide is a violent act, and the person committing the act knows that they will leave victims behind. They have chosen to commit the act anyway, because the cessation of their own pain is more important to them than the prevention of suffering in others.

If knowingly acting in a way that will cause harm to others isn't unethical, then ethics is a meaningless term.

[FlyingNarwhal]

I'm sorry, lust, gluttony, laziness? I didn't realize you were religious. We will never come to an agreement on this because I think you have a skewed sense of morality and you probably think I do too.

I'm not. My point is that the actions we consider harmful to the self or others are ALL mediated by brain chemistry. They all involve influences beyond the direct agency of a consious person.

Regardless of how it may or may not affect other people, no one else has any right to claim ownership of my life. So killing myself doesn't fit with your analogy at all.

Why do people keep shifting the moral burden away from the one actually contemplating the act? Suicide is a violent act, and the person committing the act knows that they will leave victims behind. They have chosen to commit the act anyway, because the cessation of their own pain is more important to them than the prevention of suffering in others.

If knowingly acting in a way that will cause harm to others isn't unethical, then ethics is a meaningless term.

You're using the term 'victim' here pretty broadly, as in if someone makes another person feel bad, that person is now a victim. By that same logic, a gay person should deny their sexuality if there family isn't accepting of gay people, because it may hurt their family's feelings and make them victims. That gay person knew their family was against homosexuality, and decided to come out of the closet anyways. Fucking selfish....

[Mystic]

I'm not. My point is that the actions we consider harmful to the self or others are ALL mediated by brain chemistry. They all involve influences beyond the direct agency of a consious person.

Why do people keep shifting the moral burden away from the one actually contemplating the act? Suicide is a violent act, and the person committing the act knows that they will leave victims behind. They have chosen to commit the act anyway, because the cessation of their own pain is more important to them than the prevention of suffering in others.

If knowingly acting in a way that will cause harm to others isn't unethical, then ethics is a meaningless term.

You're using the term 'victim' here pretty broadly, as in if someone makes another person feel bad, that person is now a victim. By that same logic, a gay person should deny their sexuality if there family isn't accepting of gay people, because it may hurt their family's feelings and make them victims. That gay person knew their family was against homosexuality, and decided to come out of the closet anyways. Fucking selfish....

That analogy is wrong, because the family should accept the person regardless of his sexual orientation. In the case of suicide, the people affected ought to feel hurt about the person dead and can't be blamed for it.

[bennyboy]

You're using the term 'victim' here pretty broadly, as in if someone makes another person feel bad, that person is now a victim. By that same logic, a gay person should deny their sexuality if there family isn't accepting of gay people, because it may hurt their family's feelings and make them victims. That gay person knew their family was against homosexuality, and decided to come out of the closet anyways. Fucking selfish....

This is the joy of working with ethics: it's almost all grey area.

In the case of homosexuality, there's a more complex balance of goods and bads involved. For example, if one decides not to come out, it may save the family's feelings, but might leave other homosexuals isolated, still leading to a net harm; one can imagine that a young gay person isolated in this way could even be a suicide risk. If one goes so far as to marry, then the wife will almost certainly suffer as well. So this is not a purely selfish issue: be myself, or save others. It also involves the GOOD that an openly homosexual might do in the world and in his/her society, as well as alternative bads that could be prevented by honesty.

In the case of suicide, things are usually clearer: it really is a conflict between the desire of the self to end suffering and the pain that it will cause many others. It's hard to imagine a scenario where someone's suicide will lead to any good.

[The_greatest_river]

Suicidal thoughts, depression and being a pessimist are signs that you are probably a intellectual with feelings. Life isn't black and white, it's an entire color spectrum. Life is shitty, and chances are it won't get better. It's a sad truth from what I've learned. That doesn't mean you should give up, we have one life, even if it's shitty it's still all we have. I'm sorry you feel this way, but don't give up.

[Ryantology]

If a person is suffering to the point that the person considers killing themselves, that suffering is subjectively worse than whatever may be suffered by others as a result of their suicide. I think the only scenario in which ethical balance is truly at play is if one's suicide might drive someone else to it.

I may not be getting you all the way so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as though ethics doesn't care about such a nuance. Suicide is bad because it may cause residual harm to others, regardless of the depth of suffering the suicidal person is experiencing (unless that suffering is certain to never end while alive).

Let's assume that I fell into the clutches of a person who was known to torture and murder his victims. I don't know for certain that my fate will end up like theirs. I may be rescued, or there may be some fortunate series of events that permits my escape, but I have absolutely no way of knowing and it seems like a slim possibility in any case. I have family who would be hurt to find that I killed myself, but they would also be hurt to find out I was flayed alive, so that would be more suffering for me and them both. They would be overjoyed if I was rescued, which would be less suffering for my family, but it may not happen until after I was subjected to gruesome disfigurement.

Is suicide an unethical choice?

[thesummerqueen]

Suicidal thoughts, depression and being a pessimist are signs that you are probably a intellectual with feelings. Life isn't black and white, it's an entire color spectrum. Life is shitty, and chances are it won't get better. It's a sad truth from what I've learned. That doesn't mean you should give up, we have one life, even if it's shitty it's still all we have. I'm sorry you feel this way, but don't give up.

Is that your professional opinion?

[ManMachine]

MM, to me you seem to be jumping in and out of thinking about things from an evolution standpoint.

If you consider evolution, then everything that happens, suicide included, is part of evolution. Because evolution is what happens. It's a tautology, it's the very definition. You can't alter evolution, the environments change as a result of evolution, which evolving species then adapt to. It's a cycle. But agreed, from this point of view we are no better or worse than anything else. This is of no real worth though as an observation, because we don't make moral decisions or evaluations based on evolution.

You can only "alter" evolution if you define it in a certain way under certain conditions, such as not having the environment radically changed or DNA being messed with. But that's just one possible path evolution could take, and it's not what is really happening, so it's useless to think of it that way. That is a world without humans.

If you're not considering evolution, and I think it's pointless to do so because evolution has no aims anyway, then objectively we are fucking terrible. We screw over other species and the planet, and it would be better for all of those other species if we weren't here. Say if we came to that conclusion as a species and wiped ourselves out on purpose, then that would be objectively good for the planet and the other species. And it would still be part of evolution.

My meander through genetic drift was to arrive at the point that you cannot simply refer to suicide as a process to 'weed out the unfit'', whether in part or in whole.

MM

[robvalue]

What I said was if you personify evolution then suicide can be viewed that way. It was a metaphor. I don't personify evolution. I was pointing out that your argument of trying to "help" evolution doesn't make sense, because suicide is a part of evolution, and I was giving it a descriptor as such. We can't sidestep the process.

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It's hardly a big deal, I just felt like a little debate about it.

[Losty]

I'm sorry, lust, gluttony, laziness? I didn't realize you were religious. We will never come to an agreement on this because I think you have a skewed sense of morality and you probably think I do too.

I'm not. My point is that the actions we consider harmful to the self or others are ALL mediated by brain chemistry. They all involve influences beyond the direct agency of a consious person.

Regardless of how it may or may not affect other people, no one else has any right to claim ownership of my life. So killing myself doesn't fit with your analogy at all.

Why do people keep shifting the moral burden away from the one actually contemplating the act? Suicide is a violent act, and the person committing the act knows that they will leave victims behind. They have chosen to commit the act anyway, because the cessation of their own pain is more important to them than the prevention of suffering in others.

If knowingly acting in a way that will cause harm to others isn't unethical, then ethics is a meaningless term.

That's ridiculous. By your standards the family of someone who is killed would be victims of the murder victim. Suicide is a victimless crime.