If you think suicide is irrational, consider this hypothetical. Let’s assume you could aquire 10^5 additional average (not superhappy, just average) human life-years for yourself, but as a cost, you have to agree to be personally tortured severely (all with probability 1).
Would you take the offer?
This is relevant for anyone who claims suicide is irrational, while the decision of staying alive is not. I’d argue that, for any one person on the planet, the probability increase per year of continued survival for severe torture-like suffering, is higher than 10^-5.
So if you wouldn’t accept the above offer, you shouldn’t accept the conclusion that suicide is irrational, either.
(If you disagree with the probabilities, just adjust them in your mind. I assumed the statistical murder rate as a very crude proxy, which is actually higher than 10^-5 per person per year in the US and Europe.)
Are you still convinced suicide is always irrational? What would you say to a person who insists on rejecting the above offer and wants to aquire a good suicide method based on this argument? “You are objectively wrong about your preference not to be tortured”?
How long does the torture last? Presumably much less than 100000 years, since those are specified to be average-happy. For reasonable values of torture time: HELL YES.
What’s your method? If it’s something like “isolation so that nobody can murder you”, it’s not very fair because you get tortured all the time, and you can’t be prevented from killing yourself in the middle of it (which is pretty likely due to discounting and limits to willpower).
And… yeah, kiddo, you’re objectively wrong about your preference not to be stabbed with a needle, just stick it out and enjoy your extra years of healthy life and your lollipop.
And… yeah, kiddo, you’re objectively wrong about your preference not to be stabbed with a needle, just stick it out and enjoy your extra years of healthy life and your lollipop.
Downvoted for disrespectful communication style and misrepresentation.
I’m assuming you don’t mean that the preference is objectively wrong—that makes no sense. Your meaning is that that the actual preferences are not understood?
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?
The length of time that the torture lasts is undeterminable by you until the torture is over, every second is agony, and you can tap out at any time and choose to lose out on those happy-years. That’s the offer on the table for your suicidal person. It’s an easy thing to say you would take this offer, but I’m pretty skeptical that the average person would actually be able to make it.
If you think suicide is irrational, consider this hypothetical. Let’s assume you could aquire 10^5 additional average (not superhappy, just average) human life-years for yourself, but as a cost, you have to agree to be personally tortured severely (all with probability 1).
Would you take the offer?
This is relevant for anyone who claims suicide is irrational, while the decision of staying alive is not. I’d argue that, for any one person on the planet, the probability increase per year of continued survival for severe torture-like suffering, is higher than 10^-5.
So if you wouldn’t accept the above offer, you shouldn’t accept the conclusion that suicide is irrational, either.
(If you disagree with the probabilities, just adjust them in your mind. I assumed the statistical murder rate as a very crude proxy, which is actually higher than 10^-5 per person per year in the US and Europe.)
Are you still convinced suicide is always irrational? What would you say to a person who insists on rejecting the above offer and wants to aquire a good suicide method based on this argument? “You are objectively wrong about your preference not to be tortured”?
How long does the torture last? Presumably much less than 100000 years, since those are specified to be average-happy. For reasonable values of torture time: HELL YES.
What’s your method? If it’s something like “isolation so that nobody can murder you”, it’s not very fair because you get tortured all the time, and you can’t be prevented from killing yourself in the middle of it (which is pretty likely due to discounting and limits to willpower).
And… yeah, kiddo, you’re objectively wrong about your preference not to be stabbed with a needle, just stick it out and enjoy your extra years of healthy life and your lollipop.
Downvoted for disrespectful communication style and misrepresentation.
Bwuh? What’s wrong with “pain for long life is worth it, whether the scale is ‘vaccine’ or ‘longevity for torture’”?
We don’t use ‘And… yeah, kiddo’ as a status move here. We need to be more subtle.
I’m assuming you don’t mean that the preference is objectively wrong—that makes no sense. Your meaning is that that the actual preferences are not understood?
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?
The length of time that the torture lasts is undeterminable by you until the torture is over, every second is agony, and you can tap out at any time and choose to lose out on those happy-years. That’s the offer on the table for your suicidal person. It’s an easy thing to say you would take this offer, but I’m pretty skeptical that the average person would actually be able to make it.