(originally posted here∞)


This sounds pretty scary to me. Who here is fit to determine what I really mean when I say that my desire is to take leave of the living world?

We have to go back to the notion of societal interest. In one corner, we see that homicide is accorded varying degrees of punishment because we want protection from it. For parallel reasons, we've developed a notion of "consent" not out of pity but because we believe it may protect us from matters of fraud, rape, suicide, and a few others. Having once been minors, we prevent them from being party to legal contracts. (Some of us) having been clinically depressed, we recognize that with treatment all such people will prefer emerging from their imbalanced state.

Some make the converse assumption that all suicides have an underlying desire to resume normal life. Science has brought into highlight the ways Major Depressive Disorder, Manic Depression, Dysthymia, etc. remove one's ordinary understanding of free will, but using those labels (or more likely, an overgeneralized notion of what mental illness "ought" to be) to in turn undermine the free choice to live or die is ironically fallacious.

Is there a Pfizer pill that would've had this German gentleman returning to productive society convinced that penises don't taste good? I take the opposite reaction as Slash, namely that the oddity of this case points against the likelihood he was actually a normal human underneath merely beseiged by a treatable illness. It may have been in society's interest to "save" him if it can shown that people of his disposition really do, somehow, desire salvation -- I doubt it -- but in the meantime there's nothing amoral about watching the great hand of Darwin march onward.


Even if I accept that the man was insane, whatever that means, you're still begging the question. Our experience tells us that some insane people should be protected from their first-level desires because, if able to review the situation once cured or lapsed, we would want the same for ourselves. Do you have any evidence that this logic applies to all forms of insanity, much less this case (which has already proven itself the exception to most rules of common sense)?