Suicide

[Faith No More]

You are arguing that a suicidal person's condition is deterministic, while that of a murderer is an act of free will.  Who says a murderer can, generally speaking, "truly appreciate" consequences?

You talk about having a "clouded mind."  I think this is exactly the same thing a homicidal person would say, "He did ____ to me, and then I just saw red.  I didn't really have any ability to think about what I was doing."

I'd argue that unless someone ACTUALLY has a seriouly bad life-- family killed in a car crash or something-- suicide represents a defect.  I'd also argue that unless someone is under immediate threat, rage represents a defect.

I'm not convinced that you or any of the others in this thread have demonstrated that one state is truly deterministic, and the other one of free and malicious intent.

I'm saying that suicide quite often is a result of mental illness, and I don't think anyone here would argue we should hold the mentally responsible for a crime. It's not that it's so much deterministic as it is that the person has a malfunctioning brain. I assume we're accepting the legal sense that intent must be formed at some point to hold the person responsible? My point was that a person committing suicide most likely cannot properly comprehend the consequences of their actions, which is truly the legal litmus test.

As for the murderer, that is murkier, and I'm not convinced that it isn't just as deterministic as suicide. I was using the comparison in the sense of how we see things legally in our courts. That's not to say that the courts are correct in their assessment. I'm not a neruologist or a psychiatrist, so I can't really comment on the murderer's culpability. All I know is what I've experienced and that is the culpability of the person committing suicide.

(BTW, I'm not arguing that all suicide is the same and the result of mental illness. I'm just saying that there are certain cases that prove that suicide cannot be inherently immoral.)

[Joods]

Suicide gets a moral pass because the proverbial knife you are sticking in the proverbial back, is your own back and knife.
People who commit suicide aren't doing so to cause others harm. They are doing it to end their own personal pain and suffering.

Someone who decides to murder someone else isn't doing it for the same reasons as someone who is harming themselves because they are hurting. So I should point out that you didn't speak on the subject of mercy killing. Just misplaced anger and harming another vs suicide.

I disagree with your assessment.  I think many murderers have no foreknowledge of what they will do, and when they lash out, it's not so much at an identified person as at a world that seems infinitely hostile-- due to bad chemistry, out of control hormones, drug use, etc.  I think very, very few people "decide to murder."

People commit Premeditated murder all the time. It's called First degree murder and is a federal offense.  If you think that very few people "decide to murder", you apparently don't pay attention much. 

National Archive Criminal Justice Data website


Start there.

[bennyboy]

People commit Premeditated murder all the time. It's called First degree murder and is a federal offense.  If you think that very few people "decide to murder", you apparently don't pay attention much. 

National Archive Criminal Justice Data website


Start there.

You are still applying a double standard. If a person who will commit suicide goes out and buys a gun, or a rope, or some duct tape for the hose running from his car exhaust, is this not proof of premeditation? And yet you will still, I presume, consider them lacking clear enough insight to consider fully the consequences of their actions-- though a murderer, buying those exact same items for the execution of HIS impulse, you will condemn on the grounds that this type of premeditation indicates sufficient self-control to establish moral agency.

[bennyboy]

I'm saying that suicide quite often is a result of mental illness, and I don't think anyone here would argue we should hold the mentally responsible for a crime.  It's not that it's so much deterministic as it is that the person has a malfunctioning brain.  I assume we're accepting the legal sense that intent must be formed at some point to hold the person responsible?  My point was that a person committing suicide most likely cannot properly comprehend the consequences of their actions, which is truly the legal litmus test.

I've been borderline suicidal in my life, as well as borderline homicidal. Luckily, I managed to kill neither myself nor others, though I've done harm both to myself and others in my life. In both cases, my feelings so distorted my world view that I was essentially delusional-- my problems weren't really as bad as I thought they were, and any sensible person could have seen that time, combined with a change in lifestyle or circumstances, could provide hope of relief without drastic measures.

Tortured people arrive at a distorted idea about what will be needed to bring them peace. And the severity of the actions they are willing to take scales with the degree of torment they feel. It has nothing, really, to do with knowledge of consequence; it has much more to do with the degree of torment subverting their care about consequences.

A suicide victim doesn't just go along fine and then step in front of a bus. He or she ponders, dwells, considers, and pushes off suicide, partly because the consequences ARE known: death, and the suffering of others. That he might not be thinking about all this at that last moment doesn't, to my mind, mean he has a guilt-free mind.

[Joods]

This arbitrary asymmetry also shows an unwillingness to engage with those other people I mentioned: murderers, rapists, pedophiles, etc. because I guarantee if you talked to ANY of them, they'd tell you they hated what they did but couldn't control themselves.

emphasis mine. 

Please produce some confirmed documentation that shows this to be true. Statistics perhaps? 

Premeditation in whatever form is done with intent and malice to actually cause harm to another. It is thought out ahead of time, regardless of the AMOUNT of time that thought required. 

Under United States Federal Law, "murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought."  18 U.S.C. subsection 1111 (a) 2010. "A person is guilty of first degree murder if it was "perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing" or while committing or attempting to commit "any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggrravated sexual abuse...child abuse, burglary, or robbery" or "as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children..." ld. "Any other murder is murder in the second degree." ld. In contrast, "manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice" and includes both voluntary manslaughter (killing "upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion") and involuntary manslaughter (killing while committing a non-felonious offense or killing "without due caution and circumspection"). . .

I pulled this directly from the pdf file below. It came from the January 2012 Volume 60 Number 1, United States Departent of Justice Executive Office for United States Attorneys, Washington DC, 20530.

Google usab6001.pdf. I am on my tablet and it won't let me copy and paste the website's link to the article. 

Suicide, as it has been explained to you time and time again, happens because the person suffering, feels so much torment and pain that they are looking to end that torment and pain by ending their life. Read some real suicide notes sometime and I'm sure you'll finally get it.

[Joods]

People commit Premeditated murder all the time. It's called First degree murder and is a federal offense.  If you think that very few people "decide to murder", you apparently don't pay attention much. 

National Archive Criminal Justice Data website


Start there.

You are still applying a double standard.  If a person who will commit suicide goes out and buys a gun, or a rope, or some duct tape for the hose running from his car exhaust, is this not proof of premeditation?  And yet you will still, I presume, consider them lacking clear enough insight to consider fully the consequences of their actions-- though a murderer, buying those exact same items for the execution of HIS impulse, you will condemn on the grounds that this type of premeditation indicates sufficient self-control to establish moral agency.

Well then based on your train of thought, how exactly would you punish someone who has killed himself? Honestly, your argument is redundant and lacking any sort of real depth.

[bennyboy]

Suicide, as it has been explained to you time and time again, happens because the person suffering, feels so much torment and pain that they are looking to end that torment and pain by ending their life. Read some real suicide notes sometime and I'm sure you'll finally get it.

How about skipping the homework assignments, and read what you wrote. . . "suicide NOTES" (caps mine)

This isn't something that just happened on a spur, as a note takes time, as does planning how one will kill himself. It is, by definition, premeditated. Strong feelings eventually lead to strong actions-- and treating suicides like sad, special snowflakes feeds into it-- knowing people will feel this way contributes, I think, to the suicide: "They don't care about me much now, but they'll be sorry when they see what their lack of care has led to."

Well then based on your train of thought, how exactly would you punish someone who has killed himself? Honestly, your argument is redundant and lacking any sort of real depth.

This thread isn't about punishment, or about law. It's about whether it is moral to decide unilaterally to remove oneself from existence. And in general, I'd say that it is not a moral act, although specific circumstances (like a painful terminal cancer) would be accepted as justification by most people. You might argue that it's a-moral rather than immoral due to the sufferer's lack of self-determination. However, if you read the OP, I'd say two things:
1) he clearly shows that he is aware of consequences and wants to know if there is moral justification for ignoring them
2) your sympathetic stance could be enabling, and this is immoral of you, in my opinion, unless you know the OP so deeply that you can agree that suicide could be a good thing

[Joods]

There are no homework assignments. You ignored most of my post, as you have already done so with previous posts. I'm done talking to you. Your circular arguments are getting nowhere.

[bennyboy]

I'm done talking to you. Your circular arguments are getting nowhere.

Neither is your special pleading.  Laters.

[Faith No More]

Quite frankly, I think premeditation is irrelevant. It's whether or not the person can understand the consequences of thier actions that counts. One can premeditate their death but still not be able to understand the consequences of taking their life.