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Your framing of the problem is wrong.
In a suicide, the fault for the death ultimately lies with the one who pulls the trigger.
Overdose deaths are suicides.
That was their choice to make, and an isolated demand for rigor: if we actually cared about this for human beings more generally, cryopreservation would be a much larger industry.
Philosophy question: to what extent do we as people owe each other to stop suicide attempts? Discuss.
On one hand, we've put up nets and installed phones and nationwide hotlines and circulated narcan. On the other, some Western states have legalized euthanasia for increasingly minor medical issues. To me, the former feels reasonable (although I find OPs argument about narcan to be at least darkly intriguing), and the latter feels like it starts reasonably but quickly slides down the slippery slope. I know some moral codes (Catholicism, for one) are blanket-opposed to aiding suicide.
I'm interested to hear other opinions on where the line should be.
Suicide is a form of murder: self-murder. We make efforts to stop murders, we should make efforts to stop suicide. Overall, society must signal disapproval of suicide. Cultures that honor or otherwise approve (even the implied approval of not bothering to do anything about it) fall into failure modes that our current society doesn't, without much obvious benefit. See Imperial Japan, for instance, which continued fighting long past the point where there was no hope of victory because their culture venerated honorable death over defeat. It did their society active harm. Their suicide rate remained high up until around 2010, when it began to drop and has continued to drop until today, where the suicide rate is actually a little less than the United States (it went from a high of 25.6 per 100K people in 2003 to around 12.2 today, compared to the US's 14.5).
Why did suicide rates drop so significantly in Japan? Well, in 2007 the government released a nine-step plan to lower suicide rates. Since then they funded suicide prevent services, suicide toll lines, mental health screenings for postpartum mothers, counseling services for depression, and in 2021 created a Ministry of Loneliness whose job is to reduce social isolation. In other words, when the Japanese government tried to make a societal effort towards preventing suicide, suicide rates dropped.
Which is good, because Japan needs every citizen it can get. Population is still dropping, and everyone who kills themselves can no longer contribute to society nor create and raise society's next generation.
Those people don't owe Japan their lives. Maybe if Japan wants them to contribute to society or create and raise society's next generation, it can make doing those things seem better than literal oblivion.
People owe the societies they live in, actually. If you want to go live in the woods with wolves and bears for neighbors then more power too you, that’s the condition for opting out.
If the world owes you nothing, you owe nothing to the world.
What a strange thing to believe. Do you believe parents have no duties to their children, and that children have no duties to their parents?
Quite the opposite. (Note that statement starts with 'If'.)
I've seen the argument that people should suffer for society far too much, with the condescending, sneering reply of 'Just go live in the wilderness, see how you like it' in response to people having issues with parts of current society to the point it's almost a cliché.
I'm a firm believer that door swings both ways - that society has an obligation to the people therein, and that people have an obligation to the society, but only when this operates in a fair, back and forth, equitable fashion. If society has gotten to the point where a sizable portion of people are going 'Fuck this, I'm out', then something about society has been broken fundamentally and needs to be addressed.
My argument is the statement of 'people owe the societies they live in', without any caveats, and the follow up of 'if you want to go live in the woods with wolves and bears for neighbors' with the implied threat therein, is just blind adherence, bordering on slavery.
Either it goes both ways, or it doesn't go at all.
Hence my reply of 'If the world owes you nothing, you owe nothing to the world'. Because if society owes you nothing, you owe nothing to society.
(Yes, there's the fair debate of how much society owes the individual, but let's not go into that right now...)
That makes a great deal of sense, and I would broadly agree. Thanks for clarifying.
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