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Notes -
So I did consider animals when I wrote the definition, which I why I carefully worded the condition as: "want[ing] to die" instead of the more sophisticated "wishing to commit suicide", etc. For animals, I am working on the assumption that they will express a death wish as going crazy and just thrashing about / attacking people / etc.
It's not a perfect solution, but unfortunately once an entity is unable to communicate verbally, it's hard to definitively rule out that it is not in some kind of terrible agony (see also: "The anesthesia only partially worked. The patient is unable to control their body, but feels everything"), so I think this is the best we can do.
I didn't really consider babies. I don't think it is an oxymoron either. But I think my definition still works, because we can try and reasonably infer if it is in agony, primarily by asking if the thing we are doing to it is painful (and, as I mentioned, there is the caveat of if you love the entity and are trying to help it, so medical procedures on newborns is not torture) - this is even less cut-and-dry than the animal case, but again I think it's just a hard problem to evaluate suffering on a living thing that cannot communicate its thoughts (and in fact probably doesn't even have "thoughts" in the way normal humans do)
Actually this is an intended aspect of my definition. The primary goal of my definition is that I find it disturbing that intelligent beings are able to inflict extreme "unnatural" levels of pain on living things, and sometimes it is in their benefit to do so.
In general, it feels "unnatural" to ban a state from inflicting any kind of suffering on someone, because a "baseline" level of suffering just exists without states (people/animals starve to death, creatures get eaten by stronger ones, etc), so why just disallow inflicting suffering in just this particular kind of circumstance.
But for torture, this is a thing that only happens if you have civilisation (lions don't torture gazelles or other lions, they can't because they are too stupid) - so I think it should be considered always immoral to torture.
As you yourself have mentioned, sometimes there are good and necessary reasons to kill someone (a criminal just starts attacking people and refuses to surrender), so we can't go so far as to ban killing for any reason (plus what about killing animals, etc)
So my definition comes out as the best coherent imperative that can actually be adhered to in any circumstance, but also rules out a particularly egregious class of suffering: i.e. a fate worse than death (if whatever is happening to someone is truly a fate worse than death, under this rule, they have the right to choose death instead)
In your particular comparison - the strong willed person is personally experiencing whatever is happening to them as a fate not as bad as death. As long as they are always given the option of choosing death (consent can always be taken away at any point, etc, etc) - I don't think I can do any better without my axiom becoming non-universal.
I think you're right, I went too far with my previous statement. What I do believe is that this is less worrying than wanton suffering, but still, being able to actually act on the philosophy I propose for animals with a real animal, even for a useful purpose, is still worrying because he was able to ignore its suffering / lacked the empathy to realise its suffering.
I agree, it is quite slimy he lied that way. I already mentioned it was bad he covered up his rule breaking, but you're right he also went out of his way to mislead people into thinking he was pro animal rights by having a pet.
Though I think misleading people into thinking you hold a particular ideological stance is less egregious than actually breaking a rule (thought crimes vs physical crimes)... but I guess I'm biased, since (like many others on this forum, I imagine) I personally mislead the people around me to believe I am on-board with progressive ideology (but in my defence, I will say I have tried to keep this deception implicit, I don't go around with dyed hair and pronoun pins)
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