[content warning: did you read the fucking title? Suicidal people, please consider whether it is a good idea for you to read this.]
[epistemic status: I don’t behave as if this were true, but the arguments are reasonable.]
[commenting note: If you wish to comment on this post with earnest recommendations about my mental health, don’t.]
There is a tremendous tragedy in our society today: not enough people have killed themselves.
Naively, one would assume that the individual is best at assessing whether their life is worth living. However, I believe there is a systematic bias in favor of people whose lives are not worth living failing to kill themselves.
First, consider it from an evolutionary perspective. There is considerable selective pressure against committing suicide: if you kill yourself, you won’t have any more children, and you will leave any existing children parentless. Therefore, like most animals, humans have evolved a preference to not kill ourselves, no matter how deeply in pain we are. In my personal experience of attempting suicide, the drive to live live at all costs live prompted by a suicide attempt is one of the strongest and most all-consuming feelings I’ve ever experienced.
However, our society does not leave the evolutionary bias towards life alone, but heightens it. Celebrities routinely discuss how important it is not to kill yourself– from Dan Savage to Lady Gaga to Gerard Way. If you google “suicide”, Google will show you the suicide prevention lifeline; the top results are universally people trying to talk you out of it. Similarly, looking up “suicide” on Tumblr will get you a message about suicide prevention. As a suicidal person, I can attest to the paucity of people who will talk with you openly about your desire to kill yourself without assuming that your desire to die is a cognitive distortion that should be put to bed as quickly as possible.
Information about how to commit suicide is censored to the point of being nigh-unavailable. Books like Final Exit and the Peaceful Pill Handbook are controversial, because how dare anyone give people information that could theoretically cause them to want to die? Similarly, many ‘public health interventions’ consist of nothing more than taking away suicidal people’s ability to control their own destiny. Eliminating coal-burning stoves and thus an effective form of suicide is hailed as saving lives. Today, many advocate for gun control with the same logic.
Of course, any discussion of the social pressure not to commit suicide is incomplete without mentioning the fact that planning for suicide (along with homicidal ideation) is one of the two cases where we consider it acceptable to imprison someone without trial. Fortunately, the crime of saying to a therapist “I wish to kill myself tomorrow, and I have a plan” is only punished by three days’ imprisonment, and such a punishment is trivially easy to avoid, but it speaks to the depth of pressure on the suicidal person not to commit suicide. If I wish to discuss with a trained professional all the options that are on the table– my chance of recovery, my hope for the future, and the prospect that my life will never be worth living– I will never be allowed to do so.
And you’re telling me, looking at all this cultural pressure not to commit suicide, that most people who ought to die do so? Some people report that most suicide attempters are impulsive people who regret it shortly after: of course they are! Anyone who would attempt rational suicide has already been dissuaded by all the people screaming about how rational suicide is wrong wrong wrong and the only moral option is to endure misery until your hopefully early grave.
This pressure not to commit suicide is culturally contingent and not inevitable. As Cicero writes in the De Finibus:
When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart from life. This makes it plain that it is on occasion appropriate for the Wise Man to quit life although he is happy, and also of the Foolish Man to remain in life although he is miserable. For with the Stoics good and evil, as has repeatedly been said already, are a subsequent outgrowth; whereas the primary things of nature, whether favourable or the reverse, fall under the judgment and choice of the Wise Man, and form so to speak the subject-matter, the given material with which wisdom deals. Therefore the reasons both for remaining in life and for departing from it are to be measured entirely by the primary things of nature aforesaid. For the virtuous man is not necessarily retained in life by virtue, and also those who are devoid of virtue need not necessarily seek death. And very often it is appropriate for the Wise Man to abandon life at a moment when he is enjoying supreme happiness, if an opportunity offers for making a timely exit.
Following this wisdom, Stoics like Seneca and Cato the Younger killed themselves when they felt it was time.
Some will say that suicide is a selfish act, because of the grief others experience. But everyone will die (for now). At some point, my loved ones will experience grief at my passing– or I will experience the grief of having outlived them all. To delay– not to prevent– the pain of grief, anti-suicide proponents ask that the rationally suicidal live in misery for decades upon decades. And somehow committing suicide is the selfish act?
I contend that suicide is the only moral form of death. The death of a happy person whose life was fulfilling and who had many friends? Every one a tragedy. A rational decision, made by a calm person, that the future contains more pain than pleasure in expectation and to a high degree of certainty? Never. Many are not sad when the very old die; they think that they lived a full life and that they would not have had many years left anyway. Surely the loved ones of the rationally suicidal can come to think, “at least they did not suffer, and though I miss them very much, I would not like them to have experienced pain so I would be with them.” Such a kind, selfless attitude may provide them much comfort.
There are three groups of people for whom this argument does not apply. First, chronically suicidal people have no doubt extensively assessed the pros and cons of suicide, and I will not dare to suggest that I know better than they do whether they should be alive. Second, suicidality is somewhat acceptable among terminally ill and incurably physically disabled people; the strength of the stigma on suicide is less, making it more likely (although by no means certain) that those people have an accurate assessment of their situation. Third, parents of children under the age of eighteen may cause their children undue trauma through committing suicide, and thus should wait until their children are grown.
However, many healthy, nonsuicidal individuals live lives of quiet desperation; they may do well to realize that suicide is an option for them. They do not have to continue a life of misery.
Thing of Things 
I feel the real argument here is “not enough of the right people commit suicide.” I’d be surprised if more people should be killing themselves, as I’d be surprised if everyone suicidal person made the right choice. I’ve been suicidal, I remain suicidal, but the closest I’ve ever come to committing was definitely not an instance of “[a] rational decision, made by a calm person, that the future contains more pain than pleasure in expectation and to a high degree of certainty[.]” It was panicky and irrational and based on a vastly incorrect and overconfident prediction about the future.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell someone like me apart from someone who is right. And we’ll never get the testimony of people who made the right choice committing suicide.
LikeLiked by 1 person
IMO one way to fix this is to make it so that if you’re suicidal for a long time, and continuously say you want to kill yourself, you should be able to. (e.g. check in every week for 6 months, if you consistently say you want to kill yourself, then go ahead). that sorts out people being impulsive, and while it sucks people who are serious had to wait 6 months, it’s not THAT long.
also maybe have to have tried other treatments first, but more iffy on that.
in principle i agree that people should have the right to suicide but the fact that it’s so permanent and temporary brain weirdness can cause you to want to kill youself complicates things.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s a definite improvement in methodology. I worry, though, that just checking in once a week for 6 weeks runs the risk of falling prey to some of the perception biases. Given the irreversibility of the action, I’d want to have established a solid habit of considered responses to, say, randomized prompts for mood evaluation and take extended data on that.
There are also skill-level interventions that I’d want to check. For example, I know that when I’m chronically sleep deprived I’m significantly more vulnerable to the feeling from a negative moment. The same is true when I’m hungry, and – in a more subtle way – dehydrated.
All of which may add up to nothing more than me saying “I am highly risk averse and often find opportunity costs to be a thing I am deeply concerned with.”
And that might be why I’m still here to have this conversation.
That said, I’ve sought to align my beliefs with reality for longer than I’ve known about rationality in its current form,. And if I’ve learned anything it’s that I often think I’m better calibrated than I turn out to be.
Looking back at some of the points in my life, it seems like sheer chance that my stubborn flailing worked out for me. If I hadn’t had the encounters I did the people and resources I have, I might still be that miserable. I might never – for example – have learned to upgrade my personal models enough to recognize the hunger thing.
Interestingly enough, that makes gratitude much easier, which in turn has mood elevating effects if I make a point to think about it regularly. I find it’s also been a strong motivator for pursuing the discovery and translation of various mental models and emotional skill sets (work that feels very alive to me) which also creates a significant quality of life boost. But to claim that’s why we should continue to discourage suicide smacks of confirmation bias to me.
I do think that we stifle the discussion with the way we communicate about suicide. And things that make learning and access to necessary information for decision making are things that I find inherently problematic. I also suspect this is intentional.
I think that might be because the impression is that the vast majority of people who would make different decisions sans the stigma wouldn’t be what we consider calm and rational.* I don’t know how calibrated that impression might be.
Which, for me, ignites a lot of curiosity. If the belief that the stigma against frank discussions of suicide prevents the deaths of 100 people, and we find that only 30% of them were able to successfully defend their thesis (that suicide is a rational decision for them), is the continued existence of those 70 people worth the continued misery of the 30?** And at what number does the “best practices” option change?
____________
* I’m also curious about how myelination affects these evaluations.
** leaving out the – also related and confounding – questions of social vs individual welfare and whether anyone should have to defend such a thing to begin with. Either or both of which would be interesting discussions in their own right.
LikeLike
Six months seems short, actually. A typical major depressive episode lasts about six months, and can last longer. I’d feel pretty silly if I killed myself because I was majorly depressed, when my majorly depressedness only had a month or two left.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Except in suicide notes. Here’s one I found pretty convincing (this guy – I was at the same school at him when this happened, so there was a lot of discussion of it around me).
I agree with you otherwise, though.
Also, even if the fact that currently most suicides are impulsive is due to selection pressure by preventing would-be rational suicidees from killing themselves, there are so many probably wrong suicides already. I fear that interventions to make rational suicide more acceptable might also increase wrong-suicides. Though that could probably be worked around somehow – which I don’t want to admit, which means probably I just really don’t like the idea of more people killing themselves even though it’s sometimes justified, because it’s SO often not.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I should say, for the suicide note I linked to, content warning for child sexual abuse and detailed discussion of its aftereffects. Sorry I forgot to add that earlier.
LikeLike
I think you’re on the right thread here. You cannot unkill yourself. Lets say half of the people attempting suicide are doing so calmly and rationally and the other half are freaking out. Even in this extreme scenario it makes sense for us, a society, to strongly discourage suicide. We want to keep the people who are freaking out from killing themselves at the expense of the rational ones. People who are rationally considering suicide can always kill themselves later.
LikeLike
This is nonsense. To the degree that the prohibition works, they cannot “always kill themselves later” because the prohibition is permanent. People like you will just repeat the same argument later and do it again.
To the degree that the prohibition doesn’t work, the argument is useless anyway.
On top of that unlogic, the suffering endured in the time between when one could have killed oneself and a possible later suicide can also not be undone. And if during the time one loses the ability to complete suicide – by having a debilitating stroke, say – then that loss of choice and dignity can also not be undone.
LikeLiked by 3 people
content warning: i know of at least one person with scrupilosity triggers for this, so look at your own risk
I was just thinking about this regarding the repugnant conclusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqBl50TREHU)
I think part of what’s going on is that when we think of ‘life barely worth living’, that’s artificially affected by the attitudes to suicide. so once you actually have the level at which suicide is the better option fixed, a life worth living just barely no longer seems as horrible as it does when we think about it now, and that’s part of what makes the repugnant conclusion so weird for us.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s my answer as well.
LikeLike
I’d tentatively agree with you if you put a lot of emphasis on the word “part.” But there are other thought experiments that also seem to reject total utilitarianism that don’t have this problem (for instance, most people think that it’s better to have one person who lives 80 years than two who live for 40, all other things being equal).
LikeLike
If you reverse it, and say it was possible to ‘steal someone’s remaining years’, so that someone was going to live 20 more years, and you take that from them so you live 20 extra years, i think most people would agree that that’s wrong. I think a lot of it comes from how we think of potential people vs. people who already exist. I also don’t think years lived can be added linearly since IMO the first few years are sort of what you have to ‘get through’ to get to the main bit.
LikeLike
The claim there is an evolutionary bias against suicide is debatable since it’s not clear in what sense it’s a “bias” rather than a completely valid preference. After all, all of our preferences are evolutionary.
Also, there is another reason not to commit suicide which you didn’t mention: it might be the case that your life in itself is a net negative but you have an ability to improve the lives of other people which more than compensates. This argument is somewhat of an “infohazard” since it might cause scrupulous people to endure needless suffering. However your arguments in favor of suicide are also potentially “infohazardous” in the opposite direction, so I feel justified in making this counterbalancing point.
LikeLiked by 1 person
One can argue it’s an evolutionary preference that creates bad effects, much like the general evolutionary preference to eat more sugar. Eating sugar is a valid preference and it can definitely outweigh the preference not to experience the negative health consequences of eating sugar, but if I didn’t have that preference I would be healthier and likely happier.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Whether you would be happier without a preference is not very important. You would also be happier if all your preferences are removed and replaced by a rule of “you are always happy, no matter what”. Most people would strongly object to such a modification (with some exceptions like our friend wireheadwannabe).
The real question is whether your preference for sugar is better modeled as a terminal value or a “tic” that makes you eat sugar even though you don’t really want to. One thought experiment that can be used to differentiate the two cases is allowing your to reflect for a long time on the question and then presenting you with the choice of deleting your sugar preference. If you would opt for “keep”, it means the preference is “valid” (reflectively endorsed). If you would opt for “delete” it means the preference is “invalid”.
LikeLike
Just thinking about whether you want a preference for sugar might not be enough– at the very least, experimentation with quality of life with varying amounts of sugar could give more information.
I had the surprising experience of doing things “right” (eating whole grains, meat, cheese, vegetables), getting some exercise, and then feeling unhappy and disociated. A small piece of sheet cake (sugar, white flour) set me right. I’m still not sure what was going on with that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s a bias if you’re a hedonist and don’t assign value to living in and itself.
LikeLike
Obviously I’m not a hedonist but I don’t think Ozy is a hedonist either.
LikeLike
>if you’re a hedonist
Since the odds of a true hedonist naturally evolving is astronomical, they’ve already addressed this point by pointing out that human values are evolved.
LikeLike
Even if it is true, that doesn’t necessarily translate into the overall suicide rate being too low: while there might be a group of non-suicidal people for whom death would be net positive, there’s likely a larger group of suicidal people for whom it’s net negative. Like you can see a lot of teenagers, especially LGBT, basically extrapolating their misery in school, and concluding that the life is net negative, even though the priors are such that life get substantially better after graduation and emancipation. Also, to go full crackpot, at some point of technological progress – maybe not right now, but sometime probably even in near future – it seems worth starting considering how likely it is that one would make it to the singularity, and how likely it is that it’s gonna solve the whole mortality and suffering things.
And I’m not quite sure how you decide whether the evolved anti-suicide bias is a bias of a genuine preference. If I’m allowed to not want my gender to be cis-gender-conforming-male, even though this by all means would substantially increase my level of satisfaction and happiness in life, surely people are allowed to want to continue hedonically net negative lives?
LikeLiked by 5 people
Or you get to the singularity and an unfriendly AI tortures you until the heat death of the universe.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, but it seems to me that the set of UFAIs that quickly kill and disassemble you for raw materials is substantially larger than the set of torturous UFAIs.
LikeLiked by 3 people
that most people who ought to die do so?
“Ought” is a tricky word.
They do not have to continue a life of misery.
My… inclinations towards considering suicide (it’s a stretch to call it suicidality, I feel I’m usurping a term that belongs to the “properly” suicidal) have nothing to do with my misery.
I may be unhappy or miserable, but that doesn’t matter. So what if I am? There’s a lot of misery in the world and there is no guarantee for anyone to be happy or to have a good life.
It’s rational that I should kill myself because I am worthless. I consume but do not contribute. There is no-one who would be harmed by, feel a lack because of, be made sad or lose what is theirs by right, by my loss or ending. I take up room in the world and take up resources that I do not deserve and do nothing to earn or justify my consumption.
My misery is of no bearing on that, apart from my own private feelings which don’t matter to the world and are of no importance when considering the reasons I ought to die. Even were I happy, there is very good rational reason to think the most ethical thing for the place where I live, the society I am part of, is for me to kill myself and stop being a leech.
Perhaps rational suicide, as a counterpoint to the societal pressure to “live live live” ought to consider discarding unhappiness as a justification. “Are you one of those who ought to die, since you leave a net decrease in the utility or happiness of others by forcing them to support an existence that is unproductive? Even a happy smiling parasite is still a parasite. What does your lack of pain count against the pain you cause others?”
I’m not being sarcastic or disingenuous here; if you take away the cultural barrier about “of course we should discourage people from suicide”, then we have to face up to it: there may be people who ought to die, even if they don’t feel so miserable as to desire suicide, because their lives are a net negative.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think there probably are happy people whose lives are net negative because of their effect on others, but I think there are quite few of them because a happy person needs to do quite a lot of harm before their life is net negative. Basically one needs to commit murder or do something of similar proportion to offset the value of one’s own life, assuming one’s own life has value.
Considering your effect on others is reasonable, but not to the exclusion of your effect on yourself. You can’t take into account only your effect on others.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Consider the campaigns about the “obesity epidemic”. The UK is bringing in a “sugar tax” on soft drinks in order to combat childhood obesity. Most discussion is about the public health crisis, about how these selfish fat people are giving themselves preventable diseases and draining cash out of the health service to treat them (after they’ve given themselves diabetes or heart attacks) that could go to the deserving sick.
Nobody argues “But fat people are happy! Leave them alone!”
So if you can be cajoled, lectured and bullied into being healthy because, despite your own personal feelings, you are a drain on society – why not rational suicide?
LikeLike
I doubt it’s hard to make a marginal contribution to humanity. If employed, donate some money to charity. If not, volunteer. [/armchair-advising]
LikeLike
What’s keeping me alive at present is the idea that the world is horrible enough, presently and throughout history, that the chance that I will produce a measurable increase in that blood and horror is far, far outweighed by the chance that I will produce a measurable decrease.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The economic dimension shouldn’t be counted as a problem in countries where safe rational suicide is illegal for the respective demographic. If the state forbids you to buy pentobarbital for self-deliverance, you should not be concerned with its budget.
LikeLike
Consumers are still beneficial to the world. Imagine if all the people that didn’t create, only consumed, killed themselves. You’d be left with a world with everyone creating and no audience, making it pointless to create in the first place. Consumers are necessary. It’s like a king with no peasants would have no reason to be king, if there are no peasants to rule.
LikeLike
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Sister Y from The View From Hell: http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/
She started that blog to argue that suicide should be made legal and socially acceptable, and that the most painless methods should be made freely available, for very similar reasons to the ones you argue above.
She also wrote a book that’s essentially a best-hits compilation called Every Cradle Is A Grave. I’m partway through it now, and it’s quite good: http://www.amazon.com/Every-Cradle-Is-Grave-Rethinking/dp/0989697290/ref=cm_rdp_product
(PS in case you go on a pro-suicide reading binge, I just wanted to remind you that your writing is cool and good and I read almost all of it and you are contributing to the community :D)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Enthusiastically seconding all three points:
Your (Ozy’s) writing is great; Sister Y’s blog is great; Every Cradle Is A Grave is great.
The book is more than a greatest-hits compilation, though. Maybe most of the ideas were already in the blog, but it’s a total rewrite for a different format, and a pretty seamless extended argument.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think You are right, maybe.
When I was a teenager I made a very serious suicide attempt and was hospitlized for 2 weeks against my will. Its been a little over a decade sense then, and I don’t know if I’m glad that my life was saved. I have been happy at times, but never have I looked back at my life and thought “yes I am glad that all has happened.” I have many friends and a good loving family. I seem happy, I get along alright most of the time. But I’m not happy most of the time. I wish I could talk to someone about this, calmly and without causing them pain. But all of my friends and family would be so hurt if I talked about this and would for sure tell me not to do it. And I dont want to be hospitlized again so I don’t mention it to my therapist. But I would love to be able to discuss this without feeling like I’m being irrational and crazy and just plain old wrong, when there is no objective reason to keep living. I don’t know. I don’t want to cause the intense pain to my loved ones that I know suicide would. So I just get through another day. 15,000 more to go.
LikeLiked by 2 people
YMMV, but I was in a similar situation and anti-depressants helped immensely. It was like removing a block between the things I expected to make me happy and the actual feeling of happiness.
Since you have a therapist you have likely already explored this route, but on the off chance you haven’t, I recommend it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Can confirm this. It pains me to admit this, since I was prescribed it involuntarily and under very coercive circumstances, but trazodone (an SSRI) has made a huge difference for me wrt resisting depression.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I recently told a friend that I’m not going to tell him how much pain he has to endure.
More generally, I wonder how much of pain people feel when someone they know has killed themselves is a result of believing that somehow, the suicide could have been prevented, and it’s the obligation of people to make sure no one they’re close to has killed them self. (Goddam autocorrect, it keeps insisting on “themselves”. It lets some other words it doesn’t like go through.)
LikeLiked by 4 people
Proud proponent of the repugnant conclusion, myself. Or, as I like to call it, the resplendent conclusion.
LikeLike
The repugnant conclusion also (if I am not misunderstanding it) seems to assume for no good reason that “life just barely worth living” is identical to “life just barely good enough that a person won’t commit suicide.”
I think that we make this assumption because we don’t want to draw the conclusion that, right now, a significant number of people are living lives that are not worth living, but I have no problem with idea myself.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m quite partial to the Sadistic Conclusion. I prefer to call it the Blatantly Obvious Conclusion that People Embrace All the Time In Their Day To Day Lives.
LikeLike
This assumes whether it is a good idea to kill yourself or not depends on you’re happiness/suffering balance rather than … whether you want to die or not. Which works for hedonistic utilitarians of course, not so much for me.
I mean I know that personally I would rather live a shitty life forever than die. My occasional suicidal ideation* comes from self hatred (kind of hypocritical considering my views on the death penalty), not general unhappiness.
*I’m OK now
LikeLiked by 2 people
Actually I misspoke, I’m not sure I entirely agree with everything being about preferences exclusively- but I do think that wanting to continue existing despite having a negative hedon balance is a totally legitimate preference.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As someone who once had a negative hedon balance and still decided my life was kind of okay enough to keep living, I quite agree.
I recovered eventually, but I remember thinking “this is unpleasant, but I’m getting enough stuff done that I’m going to keep going.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
It may also be that we’re not very good at counting hedons. Or defining them properly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes. My “I just feel like I want to die” moments have not been triggered by “I am suffering, I am unhappy, I am disappointed” but simply because I don’t want to be alive anymore.
You can have a hard life and still want to live; you can have a good life and still want to die; you can have an ordinary life and yet objectively your life is not worth much to the world at large and it would be better if you were dead.
LikeLike
Wow, I don’t know what to tell you. Suicide is actually illogical and irrational because we all get to experience death in due time. What some of us never get to experience is life and life abundant, and that is a tragedy indeed. It really isn’t death we fear, but rather living.
LikeLike
“It really isn’t death we fear, but rather living.”
There should be a term for the “we” which means, “I am claiming to be an expert on the hidden motivations of a great many people I don’t know.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
…yes? This is what my blog post is about? Some people have a quite rational fear that their life is going to be miserable forever and I am encouraging them to act on it by fleeing life the same way one would flee a rampaging alligator.
LikeLiked by 4 people
There is a better way. It’s called surrendering all and facing your fears.
LikeLike
A comment by WireheadWannabe was deleted for being unkind.
LikeLike
WTF man. This post is ridiculously infuriating and I am not even suicidal.
LikeLiked by 5 people
We seem to have fallen into a death worshiping cult, full of fear and nihilism.
Since this subject appears to need some humor, have no fear, their ability to reproduce and clone themselves seems to have a built in fail safe.
LikeLike
We merely mean to get respite from being trapped in a cult which worships unbearable life. Your commentary is redundant, society is already screaming all the thing you say all the time. *stops feeding*
LikeLike
Our cult of death celebrates the death of the Old, and the death of the Other, but it doesn’t celebrate the death of the Suicide. Excepting the first two cases (and even many cases of the former), there is a cult of life that is convinced that it is always preferable to live, no matter the circumstances. And if old people could be kept alive perpetually through some sort of agonizing torture then the death of the Old would also no longer be celebrated.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think most people accept far too much medical care when they are very sick/dying. Dying in a hospital is often a prolonged and hellish experience. Many people, often doctors, do agree with me and opt out of most treatments preferring to die at home.
However once you have decided to accept terminal illness it doesn’t really make sense to just take painkillers and let the illness finish you. Probably its better to painlessly kill yourself (if possible) at the right time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My impression is that a lot of the excess medical care is done because of choices made by family members and medical professionals, not by the person receiving the procedures.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I see two major problems with this argument.
The first is that it ignores what I believe to be an overwhelmingly high prior that a life will have been worth living; this prior, coupled with the fact that people are only so rational and the fact that preference for death is much more likely to be instrumental than terminal, leads me to believe that suicide is an unwarranted action.
Said differently, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs.” – steven0461 [1]
The second problem is that its reasoning is incompatible with utilitarianism (of any variety). This post makes an “ought” claim, and the only way I know to read those is as moral imperatives; however, all branches of utilitarianism agree that self-sacrifice is necessary (not moral in itself, but decreasing your own utility to increase net utility is a moral move, and the converse an immoral one). Following this utilitarian logic, suicide _is_ (in a society that condemns it) a selfish act in a morally significant sense; after all, your existence increases your loved ones’ utility, and your death as a suicide will impact them more negatively than your death at a “ripe old age”.
[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3m/rationalist_fiction/2p6
LikeLiked by 3 people
Another effect of the stigma against suicide is that in places like ASH, which do frankly discuss suicide, everyone is sick of being told not to kill themselves, resulting in an equal and opposite social pressure against suggesting alternatives to suicide. Perhaps society needs somewhere where one is supported in their attempts to find alternatives to suicide, and if that fails, in how to die.
LikeLike
/b/ is pretty supportive.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Are you being serious here? /b/ seems like it would be a huge crapshoot wrt supportiveness.
LikeLike
If you want to commit suicide, /b/ contains a large contingent who will help you plan it out. And committing suicide is always an option in discussions if you’re unsure. Or merely nearby and standing still.
LikeLike
I think you’ve made some errors here. One, I don’t think you’re recognizing the sheer scale of the bias-towards-suicide introduced by depression. Two, you’ve never established that *anyone* ought to kill themselves, let alone that there’d be any way to know in advance.
How would you define “should” commit suicide? Will never be happy? Even if we grant this (and I’m not sure we should), there’s no way to know in advance. Most people will later be happy, and we don’t have any way to predict the future particularly reliably. So the best option available is to play the odds, and not commit suicide, because the chances are you’ll end up happy later.
You might be able to make a reasonable argument for some of the boundary cases, where we get into discussions of physician-assisted suicide, but for the general case? No.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, you presumably have more information about your case than you do from the base rate of “most people are happy”. For instance, if you have severe chronic pain that the doctors say won’t get better, you have thirty years’ probation for having sex with a seventeen-year-old when you were nineteen, you’re schizophrenic, and you live on SSDI and will thus be poor for the rest of your life, you can probably make some shrewd guesses about how the rest of your life is going to go.
Friend, I have been suicidal since I was eight, I am perfectly aware of the scale of biases towards suicide.
LikeLiked by 3 people
None of the arguments presented, singly or together, are sufficient for the conclusion “the suicide rate is too low.” For that, you would need to also establish that the correct suicide rate is higher than it is currently. These arguments merely prove that the current suicide rate is lower than it might otherwise be.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Look man, isn’t it asking a bit much to ask bloggers to place their need for rigorous analysis above their need for a click-baity title?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wanted a title that would ward off those who ought not read this post.
LikeLiked by 2 people
probably the historical majority of humanity ‘should (have)’ killed themselves, but this is an argument against hedonic utilitarianism
see also “the price of glee in china”
LikeLike
Actually hunter-gatherers are pretty happy people most of the time. And the historical majority of humanity have been hunter-gatherers.
LikeLike
Amen to you for saying this. And I’m pleasantly shocked at the number of people who agree.
Can we this do something about this? Can we make a space, a movement, a push back against the fear, the taboo (and often, outright illegality) of talking honestly about suicide?
Disclaimer: I’ve been suicidal. I’m not suicidal now. I’m glad I didn’t kill myself. But one of the most traumatic things to me about being suicidal was simply the stigma surrounding it: that I wasn’t seen as having a reasonable problem that I could discuss reasonably with others, but that my considered choices on the subject of escaping pain were ones for which I would always be judged as a monster, a selfish and irrational person who must be stopped by any means possible.
If I could have talked honestly about suicide without being afraid, I would doubtless suffer less trauma now from flashbacks to my suicidal days, in which I feel like I’m failing everyone. Someone who is already considering suicide doesn’t need that added angst.
And yes, I can’t think of a better death than to be able to choose the moment of it. For those of us who are transhumanists, keen to argue that they, not nature, should dictate their own lifespan, then does that not necessarily apply to time and mode of death? I don’t want my final moments to be at the whim of randomness; even if it’s in old age, I want to choose when I go, to pick a time and place that suits me.
LikeLike
I’ve had the idea of doing sit-ins to overwhelm the system until it can’t perform its function. Keep saying you’ll kill yourself, force them to treat you, then repeatedly declare bankruptcy while refusing to pay the medical bills. Eventually they run out of space/resources etc and have to pay attention to you. Drastic, but perhaps called for.
LikeLike
At least it will cause them costs, which will make it harder for them to finance star ships and spread suffering throughout the universe. 🙂
LikeLike
The only places I found that talk frankly about suicide are the ones focussed on the practicalities of suicide, such as certain groups on the alt.* usenet hierarchy.
Also I hear Samaritans has a non-interventionist policy, but I’ve never contacted them, so I don’t know how things are in practice.
LikeLike
So what is / would be the correct series of actions for someone who suspects they would cause significant pain to others through suicide? Is it their obligation to live and self sacrifice? Ironically, the person who is strongly net harmful to others receives freedom (and with blessings), but the one who is good for others is a slave…
What about cutting those ties with others? It would presumably be morally good to separate yourself if by doing so you could reduce the total pain others experience from your act.
The best would be, to appear the villain while actually helping others – allowing for a guilt free exit.
Can you offset the damage caused by your action (say, with high limit insurance policy directed to EA?)
How do you differentiate between wanting to be dead as a valid opinion, and depression as a mental illness you must strive against?
LikeLiked by 1 person
//Can you offset the damage caused by your action (say, with high limit insurance policy directed to EA?)//
You probably could, but you’d have to be tricky about it; most life insurance policies are void if you commit suicide. This, plus the difficulty of keeping my organs in donation-worthy shape if I were to commit suicide, contributes to my present opinion that I am (even if only a little bit) probably more useful alive than dead.
(At the very least, I should wait until I’ve donated all of the organs that I can donate while alive, and *then* do myself in.)
LikeLike
Why insurance? Why not just life savings? And a load of credit cards (debt is cancelled on death, right?) It shouldn’t be too hard to kill oneself in such a way that preserves organs.
LikeLike
Pretty sure (but not 100% confident!) that any savings that I had would first have to go to whatever debt I had, before being inherited by another party.
It’s harder than you think to keep the organs safe, from what I’ve heard. At least if “actually dying” is a priority. There are plenty of ways that could keep the organs safe, but they’re also (1) not just prolonged but painful at the same time, which is something that I totally admit would make the process difficult, and/or (2) not certain to actually kill me, and carry a significant risk of permanently damaging me, which is *also* not an interest of mine, because if I’m *already* going to kill myself then the last thing on my list would be to *still* live, but now in an even worse condition, and probably with less ability to carry out a second attempt.
LikeLike
It all depends on how quickly people can come and put your innards on ice, but I’m sure that mechanical methods could leave the organs intact and usable. (Would go into detail but it turns out people tend to freak out when one talks about suicide in too much detail.
LikeLike
It seems that there are very few “moral” considerations re: oneself wrt suicide. To the extent that any exist, they are pretty much mooted by that fact that a nonexistent entity isn’t a very useful moral subject.
So really, you’re just talking about other people. It’s hard to get around the fact that suicide is pretty damn rude. For friends and family, it’s not uncommon (or unreasonable) for them to feel insulted since you are implicitly saying that their company is worse than being dead. And even if you are one of the friendless people, you are still making some unpleasant work for whoever has to clean up your stinking corpse.
Therefore it seems to me that in order to have a moral suicide there are a couple of related things you have to do:
1. Nobody can know that you suicided. It’s easier for this to happen if you don’t have anyone that will actively miss you when you disappear. I have a couple of family members with sufficient tenacity and senses of familial obligation that they would investigate my absence and would feel traumatized, even if they never discovered the truth. So I’ll have to wait until they are gone. It’s also important that you eliminate any source of identification so that authorities don’t track down the next of kin/emergency contact and give them the news.
2. Your body should never be found. This is actually pretty damn tricky, since any place you go to kill yourself is by definition someplace that humans can go. In my case, all the wilderness that I’m sufficiently competent enough with to be fairly certain that nobody will come around for weeks or months do not have any scavengers strong enough to consume a human. I guess the surest way would be to get some sort of inflatable craft with range to get to a truly deep part of the ocean, secure yourself and all parts of it together, and then scuttle it.
LikeLike
It’s hard to know what effect your suicide will have on others, and it’s also hard to hold people who kill themselves responsible for the reactions of others.
What I know from a case of someone who killed themselves: their surviving parent (all children in family were adults by this stage) was devastated. Couldn’t cope. Killed themselves eventually as well. Further devastation for surviving siblings, as on top of the death of their sibling, their parent also was gone, and they were left with “why weren’t we enough for them, they didn’t love us as much as they loved X”. The effects are still reverberating through the wider family.
The ripple effects are very hard to gauge. I don’t think it’s fair to blame someone for damage a survivor does, and you can’t hold people hostage by how badly you will feel, but suicide is not – except in some cases – something that affects only one person.
On the other hand, if you are only one person, no family or friends or dependents, then it’s a different matter.
LikeLike
This entire post is an information hazard and you should delete it.
LikeLike
See, the idea that talking about how suicide is the right choice for some people is an infohazard is exactly what I was talking about in the post.
LikeLiked by 3 people
That’s exactly what an person who speaks hazardous information would say!
LikeLike
Ozy: your post was very interesting; thank you for writing it. The title was a little clickbait-y, but I understand why you chose it. My apologies for the following, but this is a sentiment which is tolerated in some rationalist communities which I am sick of.
Lawrence:
If there exists a truth which, by its truth alone, will destroy me, then I desire to be destroyed.
The claim that something is an “information hazard” (or a basilisk) is exactly the “rational irrationality” claim extended to a societal level. It is certainly possible that some information, without context, is a danger, then it is to be provided with all necessary context. Which Ozy has done a fine job of providing here. For any given piece of information, it may be possible that deletion would be better than leaving the information as is. But it is always better to add further information than to simply delete.
LikeLike
I’m not saying I disagree, but you’re tacitly assuming this post *is* true.
Also, um, I don’t want to point fingers at Ozy here (because this is inevitable), but …
Next time I’m feeling suicidal, my brain will come up with another parade of true or false-but-plausible things that point toward suicide while dismissing or minimizing the things that point away from it.
This post’s thesis – “oh, you’re just saying this is a bad idea because you’re biased against suicide! Society is biased against suicide! See, they think it’s bad!” – *will* probably be on that list now. Regardless of it’s truth-value.
That’s a cost I personally chose to accept by reading this post (although I guessed the thesis from the title, I knew it would contain arguments for it), but it’s nevertheless a real cost.
LikeLiked by 4 people
“If there exists a truth which, by its truth alone, will destroy me, then I desire to be destroyed.”
I don’t understand why you would believe this. Can you explain why you care more about knowing truth than about all of your other goals put together!
LikeLiked by 1 person
“If there exists a truth which, by its truth alone, will destroy me, then I desire to be destroyed”
Thanks for stating your position so plainly!
I do not love truth so much that I am willing to sacrifice all other values at its alter. I think elevating any single value or principle to that status is dangerous fundamentalism. If truth and life are in conflict, we must weigh the balance, not let one value trump the other.
Which isn’t to say that I agree with Ozy’s arguments. They’re good arguments*, but I am unpersuaded.
I judge this discussion to be an infohazard because social pressure against suicide appears to be effective (look at Japan) and I view almost all suicides of healthy people to be in error. Providing intellectual support for suicide erodes the social pressure.
In other words, to disagree on the substance of the topic is also to disagree on whether or not it is an infohazard.
* as in, among the population of arguments for Ozy’s position, these are among the better ones.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Truth isn’t a maximum-strength terminal value for me, really. But it is at least tied for first among instrumental values for basically every goal I have, especially meta-objectives like “have goals that best capture my terminal values”. So, since I pursue truth in general, I’m pretty likely to meet any basilisk (partial or otherwise) that exists in the course of that pursuit. For what I’m calling a partial basilisk, it suffices to add information that amounts to “this is a partial basilisk of type X, if you are vulnerable to it please take countermeasures.” For what it’s worth, I think Ozy’s post is a partial basilisk of type “plausible argument in favor of suicide”, and their chosen title plus the content note are an appropriate warning. If you don’t do that, then you condemn anyone vulnerable to the partial basilisk who could have properly protected themselves to encounter the basilisk in the wild, with no warning. And then they get basilisk’d.
In the original statement, though, I was talking about what I would call a true basilisk: a piece of information that everyone is vulnerable to, which gets through all appropriate countermeasures. And I’m highly suspicious of claims that a true basilisk exists. That was sort of my point, after the click-baity tagline :p
My suspicion comes from what I consider to be a grounding assumption necessary to reason about the universe, morality, and fun, in the rationalist sense. If rationality is about winning, then necessarily we must assume that the game is winnable – that a deliberate strategy can get you to the (or a) winning state. If it’s a matter of just rolling the dice and hoping you don’t get basilisk’d, well, you’re fucked, go home. Time to play a different game. That’s where we are, in my view, if a true basilisk exists. But if we can win, if we can reduce the danger from the basilisk to zero or nearly zero, then necessarily it isn’t a true basilisk, because there are appropriate countermeasures. And again, “avoid the basilisk” is not an appropriate countermeasure – the right answer is to not engage without proper defenses, and acquire proper defenses where you don’t have them, because you’re probably going to encounter the basilisk anyway. And if you find a basilisk, the answer is not to hide it and hope nobody else finds it. The answer is to determine the appropriate defense and provide it to others who follow you.
LikeLike
I’m not alone, hurray!
Although my views are slightly different than yours: Without disagreeing with anything that you said, I also think that, from a consequentialist point of view, there are probably people who should commit suicide because, on the one hand, they are making the world a worse place, but, on the other hand, for whatever reason it would set a bad precedent for other people to kill them.
I mostly think about this in terms of myself, wondering if I am more likely to improve the world by no longer being a part of it and reducing some infinitesimal amount of dead weight. I’m leaning, based on some thinking that’s been sparked by Scott Alexander’s writings, on saying, “No, I stand a better chance of improving the world, and improving it more, by being alive than by being dead,” and that this is (probably) true of *most* people. Also I have bipolar II, so if I judge myself to be too shitty to live then I’m more likely than not to be wrong just on that basis.
But I still think that it’s a question that warranted asking, because the answer *was* in doubt, which sets me apart from most people, and it’s nice to see that I have some company (even if you’re probably a few steps away from me as well).
LikeLike
If you’re the kind of person who spends lots of time worrying that they’re making other peoples’ lives worse, you’re probably not the kind of person who is making other peoples’ lives worse.
LikeLike
If we’re going to count voluntary euthanasia for people in the end stages of horrifically painful illness as suicide, then I suppose you’re probably right.
But for the general public… There’s something odd about acknowledging the instinctual drive to live as a preference, but also referring to it as a “systemic bias” lowering the suicide rate below its natural level. Especially while uncomplicatedly treating the desire to die as something people might rationally choose. That’s a framework that starts by admitting that the instinctive drive to live is part of human psychology… but then others it hardcore, pushing it out of the set of things that the “proper” suicide rate would be based upon.
I can’t help but think that any form of scrutiny that would classify the instinctive drive to live as “systemic bias” influencing people away from what they otherwise might choose would also do the same to the psychological features that typically influence people towards suicide.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Your drive to live is certainly not a bias, in the pejorative sense. But my desire for you to live (which may be selfish or may simply be typical-mind) in some sense is, or could be. At least I think that is Ozy’s point.
LikeLike
I’m not a fan of a phrase some people use when talking about suicide “It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
Besides what Ozy mentioned about lifetime happiness sometimes being pretty predictable, it kind of falls flat. Death is always a permanent end to a temporary condition. Dying early and by choice is just exchanging one temporary existence for another.
LikeLike
“First, consider it from an evolutionary perspective.”
There is no possible circumstance where suicide is an evolutionary advantage. No, not true – sacrificing yourself for the benefit of another is the only possible circumstance where suicide has an evolutionary advantage.
Therefore, the only times when suicide seems rational must be times when you’re irrational, or when there’s something wrong with nature.
There are definitely times when this “something wrong with nature” hypothesis is favoured. For example, perhaps you society has sentenced you to death, and expect you to carry out your own punishment; a misdirected (from an evolutionary perspective) sense of civic duty may lead you to kill yourself.
However, there is no reason to expect that suicide based on a preponderance of pain is rational, perhaps based on some sort of negative-utilitarian theory of morality.
Indeed, we find that people subjected to sufficient amounts of pain beg for death even when they know that it is temporary, or agreed to it beforehand; and when it is gone, they are glad that they survived. Thus, it seems clear that the issue is that humans were never designed to experience pain beyond certain design parameters, and they become briefly irrational – or, if the pain is not brief, perhaps more than that.
(The analogy with other kinds of suffering seems obvious, and fits my own experiences, but is difficult to test experimentally.)
>Many are not sad when the very old die; they think that they lived a full life and that they would not have had many years left anyway.
That would be because people are idiots.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Rational” doesn’t mean “evolutionarily rational”, but if you want to take that tack — historically speaking, what percentage of men reproduce? IIRC it’s something like 40%. Our society probably has a higher rate than the human norm, but there’s a good portion of people (more men than women) who are, from a Darwinian perspective, already dead.
What happens if the pain shows no sign of going away? At what point does it become “rational”?
LikeLike
The arguments in your post are fairly rational, but I’m…. not very sure that your premises are. Some commenters have made good points to that extent.
LikeLike