Should you continue for your future self?

Great Debates
1

I started to think about this during the debate on euthanasia.

Do you think that your present actions should be (in part morally) affected by the possibilities that will be incurred in the future?

Let me give you a scenario. Kid A is a depressed teenager, one who wishes to kill their self. Now without going into the rights and wrongs of suicide let me continue. Let us say that if they do not commit suicide they will grow up to be a successful person who will have a child who will lead to a cure for cancer, or AIDS etc. etc.

Does Kid A have a moral obligation to continue living with this as a future possibility?

What if they only went on to be a happy person? Does this change the circumstances by which they are able to persue their present course of action? Do the rights of the present outweigh the rights of the future?

2

If that future self exists (as it must because you are saying it has properties) then the kid does not kill themselves.

If the kid does kill themselves then there is no future self for them to continue for.

The future can either exist in some way or not exist in anyway, like all things. You can’t make arguments based on violating the future because that demands an existing future which in turns demands that that future state will be reached.

I don’t like arguments from potential or playing future what if games, and not just because of the logic. I think they distract from what really matters, fixing what is actually wrong. In this case the person needs to be convinced of life’s current worth not convinced that they are morally obligated to fulfill some hypothetical future.

3

Man, you could argue that one all day without getting anywhere.

“What if your future child cures AIDS?”

“Yeah, but what if my future child becomes a serial rapist, murderer, and child molester?”

“But what if your future child brings about world peace?”

“But what if my future child is the second coming of Adolf Hitler?”

Given the circumstances, I am inclined to consider this one a non-issue.

4

I agree. The future is not set in stone or predetermined.

If the future is already set in place, then the individual does not have any free will or freedom of choice. Therefore, that person cannot choose to kill themselves or not; they will or they won’t, depending on what’s meant to be.

5

This sounds like the reasoning in the abortion debate.

You can’t base your decisions on a hopeful what if we live in the now.

6

I think that if I want to act morally, I have to consider the effects of my actions on future events. So, within your scenario, I have a moral obligation to continue living because I can’t predict the future.

I also believe that the choice to live or not live is tremendously important. I think that a human being has to make that choice consciously before he or she is truly aware and alive. I think that this choice is a profoundly subjective one based on something unique within each of us. It is not based on reason, morality, or religion; it is based on belief (or faith, if you will accept that faith doesn’t have to be religious faith).

Finally, I will say that, having attempted suicide in the past, I can assure you that morality or reason has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Don’t expect someone who is contemplating suicide to consider the effect on others, or the effect on their own future, or anything else. The experience of near-suicide taught me that we are a lot stranger inside than we may think.

7

I second the, but what if you were to become the next Hitler? Would you have a moral obligation to kill yourself, even not knowing it?

The only reason I’m still alive is because I’m too curious what the future will be like. As someone with an eye to history, it is like new material every day, instead of watching reruns, and it is fascinating. This may seem selfish, but I was actually getting worried that I wouldn’t see any historical events during my life. Well, OK, the fall of the Soviet Union, but that was distant. It is kinda fascinating seeing history happen. So in a way, I’ve enjoyed Bush’s presidency a lot more than Clinton’s. Maybe that makes me a bad person on a level, but I think of it more like a structural engineer being a little excited when there is an earthquake.

…

OK, there was this girl I dated in college that helped, too.

I also second the thoughts like this having little to do with keeping you from preventing suicide if you are truly suicidal. I’ve been making attempts and threats since I was around 12, though I’m much better medicated now.

In the end, your only responsibility is to yourself. Your acts may have influences on those around you, but you are responsible to them only because you like them. If you are truly suicidal, there isn’t much that you like, or think likes so, so the point becomes rather irrelevant. In fact, frequently, suicidal thoughts are done exactly to hurt people around you, so the point becomes even more moot. In fact, it may even become negative - knowing that you may have a child who will save humanity might make you actually want to suicide in order to deny that.

The other point I want to make is this - there is not one single person who will magically cure AIDS or all cancer or rise to the top of a political system. It takes a tremendous team of people to do any of that. Someone doesn’t have to be Hitler or Jesus (taking Jesus as a historical prohpet, not the son of a god) in order to affect the world - they can be Goering or Peter, if you get my meaning. Jesus and Hitler were just people, not one man dyanomos.

OK, maybe Washington would have been a better example than Jesus, but I just can’t avoid trying to make some conflict. :wink:

8

OK, I’ve got a cease and desist order from my lawyer to prevent the slandering of my name and portraying me as a depressed teenager. From here on out please use a different such as Kid B. Thank you.

9

Suppose I offer you a bet: Play Russian Roulette, if you don’t blow your brains out, I’ll give you $100. Do you take it?

Any bet has to deal with mathematical expectation: the odds of the outcome multiplied by the value of the outcome. If I say that absent any other variables, the odds of me fathering an Eisntein or an Euler are one-in-three-million, then the value of said Euler is significantly reduced, just as the value of the $100 you’d get for winning Russian Roulette is reduced.

This kid has every reason to expect that, if he can even manage to have a child, that the child will be a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety putz. Indeed, since he’s depressed, he has even less reason to think he’ll father a Gauss. So while he bears moral responsibility to the future, the cost of blowing his brains out are pretty low. Especially considering that his pain today is significant!

There seems to be a thought that people kill themselves in a willy-nilly fashion. That’s bullshit. The immoral person is the one who doesn’t consider the fact that this suicidal teenager is in real and meaningful pain.