Hedonic_Treader comments on Ethics and rationality of suicide - Less Wrong

46 Post author: anonymous259 02 May 2011 01:38AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 20 February 2012 09:27:03AM 1 point [-]

It could be both, but I do think suicide interventionists usually imply that there is something objectively wrong with rejecting suffering - or at least some suffering or small probabilities of strong suffering - for the sake of more average human life. This assumption has to be a part of why suicide is labelled a mental health symptom. If I "threatened" suicide based on this exact argument, with this exact reasoning, the police would still forcibly enter my home and drag me to the mental health institutions, where my human rights would vanish the second the door would close behind me.

The problem here is that there is nothing logically wrong with rejecting suffering for the sake of average human life. There isn't even anything wrong with rejecting suffering for the sake of 10 trillion years of life as a demi-god. There is no objective fact of the matter that suicidal people are somehow wrong about/in their preference, but non-suicidal people aren't.

Why don't we kill people without consent to make sure they're not wrong about their decision to continue living? Because it's a preposterous transgression, right?