RE: Atheists only vote please: Do absolute MORAL truths exist? Is Rape ALWAYS "wr...
February 21, 2015 at 12:44 pm
(February 21, 2015 at 12:00 am)Nestor Wrote:(February 20, 2015 at 11:34 pm)whateverist Wrote: It's called suicide and people do choose it. Just saying.You cut my quote right before I went on to say, "and still be engaged in rational inquiry..."
Can a person whose solution to anything is suicide be considered by the rest of us to offer a reasonable proposition for each of us to pursue, judging its reasonableness by its utility in how it advances our interests?
The preference for life over death is not rational. It would be more accurate to call it instinctual, since it isn't a position arrived at through reasoning at all.
When someone decides to kill themselves, that might be called rational, as it is arrived at after some reasoning on the subject (whether flawed or not is irrelevant).
One starts with the instinct to live, and one goes from there. But that starting point is in no way rational. It just is.
(That is, it just is from the way one experiences it. Obviously, from an evolutionary standpoint, the preference for life over death is necessary for the survival of the species; any species that had the opposite preference would die out. This, too, shows that it is not a position derived from reason, as it is something in a species even without much capacity for reason.)
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
