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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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There may be value in keeping suicide a crime. If you're suffering so much you want to commit suicide, perhaps you should at least be suffering so much that you're willing to commit the crime of doing it.

Suicide may or may not be technically criminalized, but it feels like a crime in the sense that it is an illegitimate action. We have a society, and society disapproves of your suicide. Suicide is selfish, antisocial, and transgressive; it is not part of the plan and not how the world is supposed to work. Suicidal people may be keenly aware of this, and it might cause them extra suffering. Not only do they bear the burden of ending their life, but also of traumatizing society by performing an illegitimate action. The illegitimacy of suicide makes it extra traumatic for everyone involved because the public and the individual recognize the marginal suicide as small atrocity.

However, the trauma may have some upsides. I will not even argue it effectively deters suicide: I do not know if it does. But even the suffering caused is unnecessary, it might not be useless. This is because as OP alludes to, carrying out the transgression and forcing it onto society makes the suicide mean something. It is an atrocity that demands attention. It might show something is deeply flawed in the mental health system, in modernity, in how we approach aging, so flawed that it would allow something so horrible and so illegitimate to happen. Intuitively it is obvious from a humanistic perspective that if the rate of suicide in society goes up, something is deeply wrong. It may be in the interest of society for everyone to suffer and behold the horror rather than develop means of softening it or defining it out of existence, so that we do not forget.

One might protest that forcing suicidals to suffer more than they otherwise would for the sake of society is cruel because they are victims, and therefore they do not deserve it. But most criminals are also victims, born into disadvantage one way or another, and yet we punish them anyway, because their actions are illegitimate. Punishing suicide attempts seems pretty ridiculous, and posthumously dishonoring suicide victims seems uncouth in this day and age, but insofar as one believes suicide is worthy of being considered socially criminal, for suicidals to reckon with that social standard and transgress it in order to carry the suicide out seems like an appropriate "punishment" for the "crime".

Euthanasia is the rejection of this. It asserts that some people are qualified to legitimately choose to die, and society should provide a legitimate channel to do so. This is detraumatizing because people legitimately choosing death is now part of the plan; that's just how the world is; we have a system for it. It reduces the suffering of sucidals, since they no longer have to commit a grave transgression and can simply go through the legitimate channels, and also of society, since some number of horrific suicides are now legitimate euthanasia cases (which can even be framed as a positive thing, since the marginal euthanasia is preferable to continuation of life after all). The extreme version of this is the argument that everyone has an unalienable right to end their own life e.g. due to bodily autonomy or revealed preferences, the natural implication being that we should provide trauma-minimizing legitimate channels for anyone to do so if they so choose. But even if we insist euthanasia be gatekept to those meeting some qualifications, it is easily imaginable that suicidal people on the margins will aspire to meet the qualifications rather than survive, and illegitimate suicides may be downgraded from "atrocity" to "should have went through the proper channels". Thus suicide is made bureaucratic banal, which is what OP does not want to happen, because we should remember that suicide is insane. If it is going to happen, it should at least happen for extreme and salient reasons, and we should feel it.

To elaborate on the legitimization of a former social crime, we can draw an analogy to one that has already happened: welfare. Welfare is, to put it in the meanest possible terms, the legitimization of being dead weight. Producing less than you consume is fundamentally antisocial since someone else must make up the difference, and you don't even have productive family willing to internalize your losses. When illegitimate, deadweights are extra socially traumatic: they starve, or riot, or steal. It is a small atrocity; things happen that aren't part of the plan and hurt everyone involved. But in modern society where we have wealth and compassion to spare, we make deadweights part of the plan on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds: we create a legitimate channel to be a deadweight, namely, welfare. You can produce less than you consume, just show you have the proper qualifications and do the paperwork. Since people on welfare no longer have to starve or riot or steal, and nor does society have to deal with them doing so, the amount of trauma and suffering is actually reduced. The number of deadweights might not have gone down, but the marginal welfare recipient is now a marginal contributor to a banal statistic, not a marginal atrocity.

But there is a big difference between welfare and euthanasia. When we put people on welfare, we are sponsoring the hope their situation might get better. The main qualification is that they are trying to find a job. When we euthanize people, we are sponsoring the concession that their situation will never get better. The main qualification is that they are not trying to survive. There are various arguments for why welfare is inevitable or even desirable, or that there is a endgame of post-scarcity UBI utopia as net productivity rises. While there may be some dissent and criticism, welfare has already been integrated into society's value system.

The prospect of that happening for euthanasia is troubling, to say the least. To demand to suicidal people DO IT YOURSELF may be a reasonable safeguard.

I am not actually categorically against euthanasia. Policy in real life is complicated. But I think it's important to consider the effect I described, because mere suffering reduction is too simplistic of a model in the face of value drift.

it does not make sense to me that people are not traumatized by someone around them that is suicidal, yet become traumatized when the suicidal person kills themselves. its like they dont care about the suffering of the suicidal person as long as he is living, but when he kills himself then they are affected. to me its selfish to require someone to continue living miserably when they would rather die.

I dunno, dealing with actively suicidal people is pretty traumatic.

My uncle died of COVID last December. His son had a psychotic break, convinced himself that he could trade their lives, and attempted suicide twice. From what I hear on the other side of the country, my aunt and cousins are spending as much time dealing with his commitment and the fallout as they are with my uncle’s actual death.

Even just hearing that someone you love has considered suicide is a weight. A challenge to find another way before an irreversible “mistake.” It’s not that people flip a switch and start caring. The main difference is what actions are even left to take.

A crime so heinous that death penalty is the only adequate punishment for the attempt.

If you're suffering so much you want to commit suicide, perhaps you should at least be suffering so much that you're willing to commit the crime of doing it.

How does this apply to people who are crippled by their illness, or people who have Alzheimer's and can't understand or act?

I don't know. OP made a reservation for people with locked-in syndrome and are physically incapable of suicide and I think I am onboard with that.

If they do not have enough mental agency to DO IT THEMSELVES, it seems creepy and problematic to me for the bureaucracy to determine their life is not worth living, or determine that they have the agency to consent to their life not being worth living. Forcing them to continue to live could of course also be creepy and problematic, it just doesn't have the risk of values drift.

A safeguard for those cases might be to require the consent of family. This is certainly a compromise on the front of bodily autonomy, but it makes the decision less banal.

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