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No. Someone may well work out perfectly logically that there's nothing more for them to do in life. And that's their choice. You're pathologising someone just f
by smorrow 11y ago
No. Someone may well work out perfectly logically that there's nothing more for them to do in life. And that's their choice. You're pathologising someone just for coming to a certain conclusion.
Of course, people might also make emotion-based decisions to kill themselves, which might be a symptom of their depression or whatever, but that doesn't mean that all suicide must be a mistake. You'd kill yourself to keep the Borg or the Alien from getting you, wouldn't you?
If you're pro-choice w.r.t. abortions at all, then you should really be pro-choice w.r.t. suicide. If your logic for the first one was "it's their body, so it's their choice", you're inconsistent in your logic if you oppose the second one 100% of the time.
> illogical
Given that there's no good reason to be alive in the first place, it's perfectly logical. It's only ill-logical if you assume that what's good for the (selfish) genes and what's good for the individual are the same thing, which they're not.
Just let people make their own decisions.
- gohrt 11y agoYou wrote "No" but did not disagree with anything parent wrote.
- bayesianhorse 11y agoThat's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time. And that disease of depression has been studied in so immense detail, that your point of view about it is plainly wrong. The suffering is clearly immense. And it is clearly temporary for almost all patients, especially with good treatment. It can't be rational to kill yourself to avoid temporary suffering. Of course you can construct situations where it would be more rational. But really, if someone has suicidal thoughts, the assumption that this is an irrational, "insane" idea, is pretty much a no-brainer.
- DanBC 11y ago> That's just not the reality. If you look at suicides, you pretty much always see someone who was depressed for a long time. That's definitely not true. Most people who die by suicide have a mental illness, but not all of them. (And by "had a mental illness" I'm including those people who had an undiagnosed illness.)
- Omniusaspirer 11y agoIt only seems insane to someone completely averse to nihilistic thought processes. If you believe that everything in this life and universe are effectively meaningless then ending your own microscopic existence is basically irrelevant. My understanding of his comment was that he was trying to convey the above, not necessarily argue that feeling depressed one day (or year!) makes killing yourself a fantastic idea. See: "Of course, people might also make emotion-based decisions to kill themselves, which might be a symptom of their depression or whatever, but that doesn't mean that all suicide must be a mistake."