No, they are not. You have defined it that way, but it needn’t be so. People might commit suicide for any number of reasons, many of which are related to the facts of existence-- getting old, or contracting a disease. There is nothing objectively ethical about eliminating those diseases as opposed to spending limited resources on other human needs/desires.
Your whole system is simply circular reasoning. There is no reason to assume that suicide is a metric of an ethical society.
None of those metrics are votes to leave the system.
Murder is a vote to kick someone out of the system, but murder is not a vote that such person doesn’t deserve to be in the system, it often has secondary motives, so murder is not a good metric for checking whether the system is more or less ethical.
Suicide is always an evaluation for the subject that the system is no longer ethical to occupy given the circumstances, murder is not often a statement that the person is too unethical to be in the system. Using homicide rates is not as accurate a measure as using suicide rates when gauging how much purpose the system represents.
Suicide is actually a compromise. There is homicidal tension, which is the purpose that others represent to you in the environment and the implements which make it easier or harder to kill someone, but the problem with measuring purpose for absolutely low suicidal and homicidal tension is that someone will destroy the entire species including themselves, which I find somewhat problematic, say, a 2 year old killing everyone on earth… obviously there are some serious issues that emerge with homicidal tension that don’t with suicidal tension. Focusing on suicidal tension allows people to stay in the system which letting those that want to opt out a way out… that’s why I call it a compromise.
And to get those suicide rates down (someone voting out of life because of their condition), we would figure out ways to not make getting old induce suicide, we would cure those diseases, etc… Some soldier bites a cyanide capsule because they were caught (so we try to end war) etc…
Anytime, you can get the suicide rates lower, it becomes better to live here for more and more people.
And? That doesn’t disqualify them from being “possible metric[s] to gauge ethics from”, which do indeed exist. The idea that ethics can only be measured in relation to people exiting the system, as opposed to how they act within the system, is another assumption.
It’s fine: murder is very bad, so systems/societies with a lot of murders are bad, as their tolerance for murder indicates a low value for human life, which is unethical. How one treats others is a more important ethical concern that how one treats themselves, because a large amount self-interest is hardwired in us already.
You presume that it’s always that, but it’s by no means clear that it is.
Won’t suicide tension always be lower, because there’s no second party trying to save themselves, as in a homicide?
One of the main reasons people leave the system is because of how people act within the system. Of course it’s important how you act within the system.
I would venture to guess more people would have an easier time killing someone besides themselves, so actually homicidal tension is probably lower, but I understand your point, the idea that just because they can “try” (my word) to defend themselves doesn’t work too well… you’d have an easier time right now releasing that resistant strain of small pox and killing the whole population than you’d have trying to induce suicide in everyone.
Oh, but I think you must!
One can’t make such an outrageous, unqualified statement and not be willing to back it up, especially if one wants to be taken seriously.
I missed this, perhaps because you edited it. Well… mental illness would qualify as something that society can handle better, I think lots of people who deal with mental illness stay and lots, because they suffer much, leave, and I don’t consider people who leave to be irrational. I think one thing that is irrational, is that we live in a society in America where it is illegal to say that you are suicidal… the police will come to your house, take you to a hospital, chain you to a bed, and inject drugs into you for months, if you lie and tell them you are no longer suicidal, they will let you leave. Good ol USA for you.
I don’t know what you think is an “irrational impulse” when it comes to suicide, that sounds like some type of rhetorical propaganda spewed from someone who thinks that a person doesn’t have the right to end their own life.
Cultural Norms evolve, however, suicide is pretty universal.
I will repeat, that these are votes out of the system, that’s what suicides are… it could just be that someone is tired of dealing with a neurological disorder, that nobody has a cure for, and so they leave… now they can stick around for a supposed cure, but the odds are really against them. They voted out of the system by weighing their pain against the odds that it will be alleviated. Granted, not everyone suffers problems the same, everyone is different.
Lots of people stay. The thing about suicide that is unique as a metric is that it is a CONTEXTUAL voting for a negative ethical value for their continued life here. The only way you CAN measure positive ethics here (the good), is to get those numbers to zero while having it be as easy as possible. If you make it hard, you basically have issued a cover-up - like a conspiracy - to inflate the system and try to make it look more ethical than it really is, and then the sewage main breaks because nobody wanted to use the only metric that exists for sentient life-forms to evaluate how well they are collectively participating in this side of the equation (I’m not making any comments on an after-life because I don’t know). I can only speak to this side, and the only metric for this side is suicide, easy, instant, painless, messless suicide.
If you have it so easy, and nobody does it, you have a system many orders better than the system we have today on EVERY possible metric that can be conceived.
That’s the uniqueness of suicide for a sentient species, it is always a voting system for this side of the equation… and when people leave, the system has corruptions, problems etc… and those problems get worse with time. Any other metric you hold up cannot compare to the fact that suicide is the only self-vote-out for the system, and the only metric this system can use to judge right from wrong.
If marriages increase suicides, marriage is wrong, if marriage decreases suicides, marriage is right. etc…
You don’t say…
I’ve heard worse ideas. A world with a low suicide rate is a better world than one with a high suicide rate, if all else is equal.
One of the best things about the industrialized nations is that we put some effort into treating mental illness. Another good thing is that our culture and economies are so rich and varied that there is a pretty good chance for everyone to find something to make them happy. We have more individual freedom than in many other less-industrialized economies.
Alas, though, I have to agree with Human Action: suicide isn’t so much a rational rejection of the world as it is an irrational response, largely based on mental illness. Only very rare cases are intelligently intended or morally informed. When the Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Saigon to protest U.S. support for the Diem regime…that was deliberate and planned. It had at least some element of rationality. There was a specific goal in mind: to horrify the world, and to bring the issue to everyone’s attention.
There’s a lot you don’t know then… hmmm…
I’ll try to keep this brief. The number one cause of suicide is sex, and the number one reason people commit suicide is because of female sexuality, the males commit more suicide each year than all the deaths from wars and homicides combined, in fact so many men commit suicide each year, that it almost totals all the deaths from war, homicide and female suicide each year… we’re talking numbers close to a million with a difference of 70.000!
It’s actually very easy to prove this! You can take any reproductive species in the world and tag the very aggressive ones with one color dye and the less aggressive ones with another color dye. All you have to do to increase aggression for both genders (one gender in this example) is to always split them up whenever someone tries to mate with a less aggressive member of the species. When they mate with a more aggressive member, you leave them alone. Eventually, the less aggressive members will realize that if they act more aggressively, they are more likely to be selected and they will NEVER be split apart when someone tries to mate with them, so they will start to act more aggressive. You can do the opposite to make the more aggressive members less aggressive.
You will find that all the other species are exactly like the human species (and this is a very hard experiment to do with humans of course), which is that when the least aggressive members of the species receive the most sexual choice the entire species will have less stress and depression (females in our species have less stress and aggression because males de-select ornate, conspicuous consumption aggression in our species.) In human populations, this not only shows up as stress, it shows up as suicidal ideation and suicide proper. Suicide is the end of the continuum of the suffering scale. More people have committed suicide by FAR in this species per capita because of female sexual choice than they have because of concentration camps, prisons and gulags. It is actually worse to be a female than a Nazi, on average, and that’s not even counting that female sexuality caused Nazi-ism.
It’s just how the species sexual selection process works, we could have had any number of variables which would have made males the worst members of the species and the females, even given the di-morphism problem, the most aggressive members of the species. I can actually talk for days about this topic, I know it is fact, just like I know that suicidal tension is real, without conducting the studies.
The truth is, 10% of the males get 90% of the female sexual choice and variety, and the other 90% of males only get 10% of the female sexual choice and variety… while 90% of women are getting about an equal number of sexual choice and variety from those 10% of males, and sexual neglect is the worst thing you can actually do to a human in terms of developing suicidality (it’s so much more detailed than this!!!, but I’m trying to be brief), the kicker, is that the 10% of males who get the most sex are the ones that do rape, positively re-enforce rape (by approaching women, which re-enforces rape because of the di-morphism problem and women always showing minute signs of discomfort that men tend not to show when women approach them (there are exceptions) which allows the subliminal environment to constantly blast the message that for women “No” means “yes” and "Women want sexually what they complain about (all men know that the nice guys never approach women, which is why we have the phrase “nice guys finish last” (they actually don’t finish at all…) and actually “don’t hate the player hate the game” means “don’t hate the player, hate the women”, we also call “dickheads” (doing stuff to get sex as a male… a synonym for asshole, I’m really not going into this topic to the depth it deserves… but I’m just covering some basic stuff), positively re-enforce conflict, tribalism, war, homicide, social stratification, bigotry, under-development of technology and environmental degradation, and you can prove it in every instance. The odds of a male who prevents all of these things getting sex from a human female are 0%. When these men are sexually neglected for trying to prevent these things, their emotional bodies take on all of the suffering that this behavior in women causes, which is the entire suffering of the cosmos, which is too much for one being to hold at once, and so they suicide. Female suicides are secondary, because of the abuse men do to them, because of female sexuality… male suicides tend to be primary, from the source of sexual neglect of good behavior, and it is often a more severe suffering than the female one by far even though females eventually commit suicide as well. Actually, people try to argue that increased testosterone in men accounts for these rasher decisions of suicide and increased violence as well, but this is not true, because males who have genetic abnormalities that makes their testosterone levels over 3 times the male sexual peak tend to be very passive people, and the male suicide attempt rate would be higher than the female suicide attempt rate if this were true. What’s actually going on is that males tend to rescue depression in women, which is really the only reason women attempt suicide (and sometimes accidentally they succeed), while women tend to rescue bullying, trying to change the bully into the perfect man, which has the side effect of re-enforcing the bullying… and because men don’t get sexually rescued for being depressed that their sexual rejection is causing all of the abuse in the human species, they ACTUALLY suicide.
The point: It’s not irrational.
Oh… and for people who said I was a one trick pony, besides solving ethics which is one trick, and then war, suicide, homicide, bigotry, environmental degradation, tribalism, under-development of technology and the like which is trick 2! I will show you trick three, actually I have about 30 tricks by now, but those will come later!
I have disproved Cantors argument that all the reals cannot be counted, I can prove that Cantors disproof is false.
But first, I’ll show you an unpublished way to count all of the rationals!
The way it works is that the first ten numbers are counted just as themselves and their negatives (except zero which has no negative):
0,1, -1,2, -2,3, -3,4, -4,5, -5,6, -6,7, -7,8, -8,9, -9
Then after that you count 10 and then the next number is the mirror of 10, which is 01 and then you move the decimal point in once to get the 12th number being 0.1, then the thirteenth number (not counting the negatives which are numbered every other) is 0.(1 repeating). These steps continue until you reach three digit numbers and higher. Once you count 100, you then count the next number as 0.01, then 0.0(1 repeating) then 0.(01 repeating), then you count 101 and it’s mirror. If you keep marching in the decimal point when the number that’s about to be mirrored ends in zero it causes infinite overlap. The number 100 ends in a zero, so after you mirror it you only march the decimal in for one place to the right, if you march it two places to the right, you end up with 00.1, which is the same mirror that you get when the number 10 is mirrored, and will occur an infinite number of times as the zeros expand and you keep marching in the decimal point (which will give you infinite overlap as the sequence expands).
However, if the number doesn’t end in a zero, you keep marching in the decimal point, say the number 102. The next number is mirroring it, so it’s 2.01, then you do the repeating decimals by next counting 2.0(1 repeating) and then 2.(01 repeating), then you march the decimal point in once more to get 20.1, and then you do the repeating decimals by having 20.(1 repeating). Then you count the number 103 and then mirror it and do this forever.
If you follow these steps you will count all of the rationals only once without any overlap. Currently, I am looking to prove or disprove a conjecture which exceeds anything that Cantor looked at, which is that there is or isn’t a way to count all of the reals using infinite lists in infinite dimensions per list. Cantor only proved that you can’t count all the reals in one list with one dimension, but in using multiple dimensions, it is trivial for me to add the diagonals. Cantor also never found the limit for one list with one dimension, which I have found, so really he didn’t find much of anything!I have a better disproof for this than Cantors but I won’t go into it here. Needless to say, it might be possible to list all the reals using a coordinate system, say “list number 187538, dimension 9873264, number 8726043978638” etc… Actually, the numbers get very exotic when exploring certain branches of infinity and I might have to add a fourth coordinate where every number itself has an infinite number of dimensions.
When I solve this, my next step is to begin isolating the consciousness signatures of every being on earth and creating a mobile ap where we can search anyone’s memories and thoughts and intentions.
I don’t disagree with you, but I think it might be unwise to think of suicide as one singular phenomenon. Sure, all suicides have common features, by definition, but I think it likely that any statement that defines suicide as this-and-such, is probably incomplete at best.
Suicide is where we detect illness in our species, where this side of the equation cannot represent enough purpose for some to continue, and when someone doesn’t continue, they have decided in context, to vote against this system.
We’ve spoken before MGO. Of course, I’m 13 years older and have processed an amazing amount of information since then… truly I am a completely different person. Cognitively, I have aged exponentially.
Not brief, not evidence. You’ve taken a complex issue and attempt to give a simple solution, relate everything to suicide. To justify this, you’ve taken a complex issue and attempted to give it a simple solution, relate suicide mainly to female sexuality. Even if sex was the number one cause, an assumption I’m not accepting based on such poor evidence as your attempts at thinking it so, that still leaves all the other causes, which you’ve done nothing to prove are insignificant.
Or in brief. You assume too much.
The first major flaw in your argument is highlighted in this sentence.
Suicide is one way to detect illness in our species, without a doubt.
But your argument relies on it being the *only *way to detect illness in our species. It proceeds from that assumption, and as such it proceeds from an hasty induction. There are plenty of ill people who never commit suicide. there are plenty of desperately unhappy people who won’t commit suicide. There are many, possibly billions, of people who will never commit suicide because of religious convictions. Doesn’t matter how unhappy or ill they are.
As such your argument is based upon a provable logical fallacy. One we change “Suicide is where we detect illness in our species” to “Suicide is where we *might *detect illness in our species”, your argument is no longer cohesive.
Do you accept that it is perfectly possible to have a society, say within a monastery, of devout Catholics who all converted to Catholicism of their free will while of sound mind, all entered the monastery of their free will while of sound mind, and who are all desperately unhappy and mentally ill, yet who would refuse to commit suicide for religious reasons?
And do you concede that it is possible to have a population of the same size and demographic makeup outside the monastery who are, on the whole, much more happy, yet with with a much higher suicide rate because they have no religious or ethical objection to suicide?
If you don’t accept those two scenarios as plausible, can you explain why?
And if you do accept them as plausible, then you must accept that your premises are flawed. It is possible to have societies with equal freedom of choice where suicide rates are lower amongst the less happy society. And this is precisely because of the choices made by the individuals.
The only way I can foresee you countering this is arguing that someone who freely chose to embrace a religious philosophy that forbids suicide is not truly free. This would, of course, be a True Scotsman. Freedom to decide *not *to do something is a necessary requisite for freedom to exist in any meaningful sense.
And of course, once we accept that suicide fails to detect illness in some societies, then we are forced to concede that it may fail to detect illness in *all *societies. At that stage, you will need to present some evidence that suicide is a reliable metric for detecting illness. Otherwise your are simply begging the question. And I doubt that you can provide evidence to that suicide predicts rate of illness.
And this sentence highlights the next flaw in your system,. which is that it is, at heart, a false dilemma.
The members of the Heaven’s gate cult chose not to continue. But they didn’t do it as a vote *against *this system. They did it as a vote for the next system. There is no evidence that the members of this cult were in any way unhappy. There is no evidence that any conceivable societal “improvement” would have prevented their suicide. These people were not in any sense voting against this system. They were simply voting for an alternative that could only be reached through death. Unless your are proposing that a society could be engineered to produce the paradise-like conditions and alien contact that the people were voting for, then this one example falsifies your claim that when someone doesn’t continue they are voting against this system.
And once again, once we concede that suicide is note a vote against the system in one society, then we must accept that it may not be a vote against the system in any society. And once again, you will need to produce evidence for your position.
And ultimately, this si what will kill your position. You are attempting to argue from a purely logical basis. But that requires that all your premises are universally true. As soon as *one *of your premises have been shown to be false in even *one *instance, you then need to produce argument to prove that they are not false in every instance. And then your argument will collapse because you will need to provide facts and figures which, of course, you can not have.
All else being equal, serrated knives increase the propensity for suicide. (You stated this.) Solution: End serrated knives. Is that a correct application of your logic, and if not, why not?
I know exactly where you’re coming from. I felt exactly the same way last night when I made the discovery that:
1 part Southern Comfort
1 part Amaretto
2 parts Vodka
Shake and strain, dress with orange peel, makes for a fantastic martini cocktail.
However, this morning, I awoke only to realize that my discovery has certain drawbacks.
I thought he was saying that the most ethical thing to do was to make suicide as easy as possible.
Isn’t emigration a better metric of people “voting to leave a system”? It certainly is another metric, and one that is more sensitive to smaller changes. It takes a lot more for people to kill themselves than to simply pack up and move.
Also, suicide rates vary by age and gender. That makes them suspect in terms of being an even option across the population.
So why not focus on that, instead of a highly indirect, secondary effect like suicide?
Actually, if you look at those charts I linked to, many nations have a suicide rate higher than their homicide rate.
Mental illness can make a person do irrational things, that’s the nature of mental illness.
It’s not illegal. It can be indicative of mental illness, however. A mentally ill person killing themselves isn’t a rational vote to reject the world, it’s an adverse outcome of an illness.
For one, being prone to suicide is heritable.
For two, 90% of suicides are committed by persons with a mental illness.
For three, (same cite), there are observable neurobiological characteristics in the brains of the suicidal. It appears to be a flaw in the brain, an particularly in the part of the brain that regulates inhibition. Most suicides are impulsive, momentary decisions, and not considered, rational, acts.
Yet the rates vary dramatically, even between nations with comparable material circumstances (like the U.S. and Japan). Clearly, there is a cultural factor.
That’s probably true of some suicides, but not many. I encourage you to do some more research on this subject, you’ve made a lot of assumptions that aren’t supported by evidence.