Ethics of Suicide (tangent from "van lifer goes missing" thread)

No.

Sure, there’s a middle ground. And killing yourself is way, way, way, way outside of it. Killing yourself is an extreme action.

I gave you a nutshell view of ethics without any intention of writing a 1,000 page treatise on all the nuances of it and I’m not going to go down that path. You, @BigT have demonstrated you have zero intention of listening to me and your only concern is coercing me into changing my viewpoint to yours rather than agreeing to disagree.

I sure as hell did. And, for the record, if there is any suicide in my life I’m still angry at it’s not my sister (even if she did leave a three-page screed on how terrible we all were and how she was doing this to hurt specific people, so much for suicides never thinking about how they hurt others) it’s the little jackass who ended it all by waiting for a fully loaded passenger train to come around a bend, winding up splattered all over the front of said train. Showy, inconsiderate, and Og knows what eventually happened to the driver who, as I’ve already said, was sedated and carried off that train after the trauma of seeing a human being turned to chunky salsa literally in front of his eyes. That sort of action not only triggers grief in loved ones, it is enormously cruel to the person forced into the position of seeing someone about to die and being completely unable to do anything about it. THAT’s the one I’m still angry about.

This article says 55% of train drivers witinessing a suicide suffer from mental illness afterward.

The selfish young man who decided to use a passenger train to kill himself inflicted great mental anguish on at least one other person (I suspect some of the passengers were traumatized as well) that has a better than even chance of being life-long. That is selfish, saying your pain justifies inflicting pain and suffering on other people. It doesn’t.

Suicides where you force other people to be involved in your violent and gory death are worse than the sort where someone quietly goes off to OD on pills, for example. I think both actions are wrong, but one is far worse than the other.

If you ARE going to kill yourself please do it in a manner that does not involve your liquefied gore dripping down windows. That is a memory I’d be happy not to have.

Brian Laundrie at least had the decency to blow his head off where some other human didn’t have to scrub his brains off walls and floors or be traumatized by seeing it actually happen.

I get that someone so mentally disordered as to want to kill themself is not thinking of the agony they are about to inflict on those who find and have to clean up their mess, or what it will do to those they leave behind (or they have the mistaken notion that those they leave behind will somehow be glad to be rid of them - extremely unlikely). Their illness is prompting their actions, and they are not fully responsible for their actions.

For another analogy: I would really hate to have someone vomit on me. But I also know that someone that sick is not functioning normally and while I would hate the vomit I would not hate the person. I would do my best to get help for them.

I understand that someone suicidal is not functioning normally and while I might hate what their illness prompts them to do I do not hate the person.