RE: Do we own our own lives? A discussion on the morality of suicide and voluntary slavery.
December 11, 2012 at 5:32 pm
(December 11, 2012 at 4:11 pm)Kirbmarc Wrote: This is true, and indeed most suicides motivated by selfish reasons are due to some kind of mental illness. But what about a person who rationally decides to end his life even if his life isn't threatened by pain and suffering? What if, for example, you were rationally sure that your existence is a danger to others?
Let's say you are a carrier of a (hypothetical) disease that won't kill you, but that will infect anyone that comes in contact with you and will kill 25% of them. Would it be morally acceptable for you to commit suicide in order to spare countless others from probable death?
And what about suicide as a rational act of protest against a tyrannical regime (i.e. political martyrdom)?
Well if one is certain that ones existance is a threat to others or that one can save the lives of others through your death, that is a completly different thing. Then I think one could justify suicide.
Aswell as I think that suicide as protest can be justified.
In case of the disease, well i would at first try to find methots to contain myself. I think the hypothetical desease example is therefor (no offence) a bit far fetched.
On the subject of a rational persons "right to commit suicide"...........
pffffffffffffffff. thinking thinking thinking
The french writer and receiver of the nobel prize for literature (and one of my favorite novelists of all time) Albert Camus argued that life itself could be set equal to freedom and that therefor ending your own life is to end your own "freedom" and people should be prohibited from setting limits or ending their "freedom".
Or one may argue with the idea of utilitarianism and say that a individual is bound to a social contract within his sociaty and therefor bound to not act selfishly by commiting suicide?
