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jooyous comments on How to Seem (and Be) Deep - Less Wrong
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How does a transhumanist respond to a person that wants to die? Like not in the future in a "death has X benefit" way, but an actual concrete "I'm going to finish up these things here and then put on my nice shoes and die" way?
Not all transhumanists share the same normative ethics and preferences, so the question is underspecified.
Oh, sorry! What various normative ethics and preferences are there? What else should I specify? o.O I guess I'm confused because I agree with the "death bad, health good" idea on the macro level, but I know a number of ... strange individuals on the micro level.
Immortalism (probably what you meant by "transhumanist") is the norm here. I'm not sure what the normative response to your query is, though; my response would be "try to persuade them otherwise, forcibly restrain them until you succeed in doing so."
I'm not sure how literally I'm supposed to take that last statement, or how general its intended application is. It just doesn't seem practicable.
I'm assuming you wouldn't drop everything else that's going on in your life for an unspecified amount of time in order to personally force a stranger to stay alive, all just as a response to them stating that it would be their preference to die. Was this only meant to apply if it was someone close to you who expressed that desire, or do you actually work full-time in suicide prevention or something?
Well, that's a best-case scenario. Obviously opportunity costs and such might make it impractical. But if possible you should prevent them from killing themself and work on persuading them not to try.
I don't work in suicide prevention and I don't know anyone who does; this is just my judgement of the hypothetical scenario presented (with a few additional assumptions for details that weren't specified.)
With respect to their terminal (no pun intended) values.
Supposedly there exist transhumanists who don't subscribe to immortalism, as the other two commenters seem to be trying to say, but less helpfully. Probably a more precise formulation of your question would thus be "how does a transhumanist immortalist respond to a person that wants to die?"
That out of the way, my direct response would probably be "here's the number for the suicide hotline". If they don't actually seem to be in any real danger of killing themselves any time soon, I might ask them what they hope to gain by dying today.
See, I feel like suicide hotlines are for people who don't want to live, which isn't quite the same thing? What if they do give you a concrete answer. Is there any answer they could give that would pop them out of the "death is bad" bubble? Like, what if they say they feel like their death is part of some weird, creative, performance art thing?
Thank you for helpfulness! I understand the distinction now. =)
I think suicide hotlines are for anyone who wants to die, although if someone has really though it through I doubt they'd be swayed by the advice of someone who was expecting a depressed teenager.