Reification and Suicide

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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7 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

If life is the standard by which we measure all actions we take, and that’s how we decide if something is rational or not, then any action that takes you in the opposite direction is either rational, or you exist completely outside the domain of life.

That is because “we” are the ones who want to live. There are the “we” that don’t want to live for (I claim) proper reasons. The holdup here may be what we mean by rational. I mean “well reasoned”. I don’t mean be rational and make a mistake. I mean think in a correct manner and come up with that conclusion.

Irrational would mean to not think in the correct manner. Implication is that a conclusion that “suicide is the best of all choices” indicates an incorrect way of thinking. But what if it is in fact the best of all choices?

I suppose that “life” is two broad a statement. It should be a “worthwhile life” is the standard rather than just mere vegetative survival.

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18 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

Intrinsicism would be that you are always in the domain of life by virtue of being alive, that’s where I disagree with him.

Please elaborate, I don’t understand this. We are dead when we are dead. The domain of life is temporary.

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2 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Altruism would be if he sacrificing himself for a duty to the neighbors kid that he never met, based on some sense of duty.

It doesn’t matter if it was duty, altruism is sacrificing yourself in some way for someone else, even your own kid. To knowingly die for a value means that the value is worth more than your own life - that is altruism. 

2 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

But what if it is in fact the best of all choices?

You would need a different standard of value. Or no standard at all. 

2 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

The domain of life is temporary.

Certain emergency scenarios, dictatorships, and inability to use your mind at all. And death of course. I only think suicide makes sense in the last example. Robin Williams would fall into this last category. In his last days, he couldn’t even think anymore. The illness he had gradually destroyed his mind. 

2 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

It should be a “worthwhile life” is the standard rather than just mere vegetative survival.

If vegetative survival is all you have, or you are in effect a dead man walking (say, if every important value of yours was destroyed), then there is no best choice. 

If you go back to the rest of the thread, I basically talk about how most often, people are wrong about when life becomes impossible. If you think you can’t stand your life if your wife and kid were murdered, you should think again. Neil Peart from Rush, his kid died in a tragic car accident, then his wife died less than a year later from cancer. He didn’t think life was pointless after that - he lived a wonderfully good life for 23 more years until he died of cancer a few months ago. 

Don’t bother responding to the previous quotes. Respond to anything else in the thread, because my opinions on this haven’t changed since I last spoke about this.

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3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

7 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Altruism would be if he sacrificing himself for a duty to the neighbors kid that he never met, based on some sense of duty.

It doesn’t matter if it was duty, altruism is sacrificing yourself in some way for someone else, even your own kid. To knowingly die for a value means that the value is worth more than your own life - that is altruism. 

Altruism is the negation of self interest. In practice it would be almost impossible to do, but it is possible to believe in it and to create policies based on it. It can be to your self interest to die. Even to die for someone else. As long as it is to your self interest, as long as it is not due to something you were taught regarding “the good”, which when examined (rationally) by yourself HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR SELF INTEREST, then it is altruistic.

The issue is that with any choice, with every choice, there a benefit and risk calculation. Sometimes it is acceptable or even necessary to do what will have a large amount of risk to your life. Some people win big with those bets. But one can nevertheless consider those choices as not prudent, not self interested.

Hanging on to life, as survival, can be counterproductive in creating a life worth living.

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1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

Even to die for someone else.

Anything you do should be ultimately for yourself. You can get gifts for someone because the relationship with them is far more valuable than the money or the gift itself. Your life is somehow altered, improved, or anything else. If you give your life for someone, nothing about your life is improved, because you completely ended it, for the benefit of someone else. 

You’re welcome to talk more about the examples I gave, I was trying to show that any example you give of a choice between an unbearable life and death, there is someone who has endured and thrived in those same circumstances. Rommel is a bad example because he fought for Germany when he knew better. You could say even he didn’t deserve to live, and that he ruined his own life by fighting for the Nazis. 

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7 hours ago, Eiuol said:

To knowingly die for a value means that the value is worth more than your own life - that is altruism. 

I’m looking at this in relation to a comment referencing Roark in OPAR, tenth paragraph in, disregarding the quote:

He may love another person and even decide that he does not care to live without his beloved ; but he chooses his love as a complement to his work, and he chooses by his own rational standards, for the sake of his own happiness.

I’ve heard this cited in the past, and your post brought it to mind. Would this be altruism, or a contextual exception?

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5 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Anything you do should be ultimately for yourself. 

Speaking objectively, descriptively, anything you do is ultimately for yourself, no matter what you do. Motivation simply means doing it for you. There is no escaping that. Anything you do, (first person), requires a payoff. There is no such thing as sacrifice (descriptively).

On the other hand, speaking normatively, prescriptively, (Which Rand emphasizes regarding selfishness) anything you do “should” be for yourself, requires a thought process. You first have to identity what is yourself. Who are you? What are your boundaries? What is what you want vs. what they want? Sometimes they are the same and sometimes they diverge.

Your definition of life ends up being “having a warm (live) body”. Anything you do to destroy the “warm body” is unethical. Ethics starts and ends with the “warm body”. You are simply looking at life as quantity of time rather the quality of it, the worth.

Sometimes that is clear enough for guidance. But it is not all encompassing.

The only way that one can identify an altruistic act is when it has NO benefit at all for oneself. None at all. For that to happen, the motive has to be supernatural, unnatural, something that does not belong in this world, it is from out of this world. That is the essence of the “irrationality”, it is an “out of this world thinking”.

That can be a god that will reward you after you die, it can be a belief in karma in the next life, it can be a categorical imperative, it can be your favorite guru telling you what to want and believe, or it can be the culture and parents teaching you to grow up to give your kidney to your brother.

It is believing that “I don’t have a right to live my life the way I want to live it”. There’s the sacrifice. (also an absence of self esteem)

To say you can’t commit suicide in effect is going to be altruistic. It is a belief that you can’t live your life the you want. In effect, you are the perpetrator of altruism in this context.

IN this case, you are not basing going against your self interest on an arbitrary commandment, you are basing it on a mystical idea.

By “life” having this absolute and mystical intrinsic value, i.e. this intrinsic value that does not exist, you are encouraging “out of this world thinking”. Yet you claim you are being rational. Do you see the problem?

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11 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

I’ve heard this cited in the past, and your post brought it to mind. Would this be altruism, or a contextual exception?

As far as the sentiment, it’s fine. “I couldn’t live without you!” expresses pretty well willingness to risk your life for someone. This would become altruism if someone means they literally cannot live without another person. That the quality of their life would be zero after that. Knowing human adversity, it is very rare that life cannot be great again tragedy. 

8 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

Do you see the problem?

Just give me an example of a case where achieving values is no longer possible. It doesn’t matter if you get to live life how you “want” to. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/marieke-vervoort-death-assisted-suicide-euthanasia-paralympics-a9239641.html

or just tell me your thoughts on this.

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A quick scan of the general topic in multiple threads raised, couldn’t do justice to some searching thinking going on, that I’ve seen. Excuse me if this has been covered, but my first thought is there aren’t any O’ist categorical imperatives. One is “given” life. Fine, what next? Ought one to act to keep it? (isn’t that what’s meant by “a pre-moral choice”?). If one deems life as good - next: good for whom and for what purpose? (Objectivist response: me and my purpose). Fine, once answered, and one chooses life, then one ought to live it by the standard of man’s nature; the hypothetical imperative IF - then…

 Just having a pulse doesn’t suffice, it is man’s life (qua man) that is the objective standard of value. Given this, could there be any Objectivist justification for suicide - one in which giving up life is not a self-sacrifice? Very broadly, and I’ve seen and heard examples of the sort of debilitation, tragedy, loss of freedom and suffering, i.e. the loss of values with no prospect of recovery - of re-establishing value in living - I believe there is. The kind of unremitting pain which blocks a once highly rational person’s mental processes, is way up there as an example of spiritual pain. Shades of “rather die on your feet than live on your knees”, living proper to man. 

To be clear, the distinction must be made among the value systems, raised partly here. I am not speaking of subjectivist disvalue (the sad, unnecessary cause of most suicides in the general community, imo) or (I agree with ET above) intrinsic value (suffer on: you owe your life to God, or some other entity or men, it’s not yours to take since who can know his/their continuing purpose for you?)  which bedevils most people. The objective value one becomes finely cognizant of would definitely preclude suicide in anything but the most radically extreme circumstances for Objectivists, I’d think. Simply, one knows intimately that as long as one has life there is always further value to be found (made, etc.) The “source” of value  lives to ‘fight’ another day.

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17 hours ago, Eiuol said:

an unbearable life and death, there is someone who has endured and thrived in those same circumstances

There seemed to be agreement that a prospect of continuous intolerable pain is a justification for suicide, but maybe not.

A tsunami of molten lava is coming at you.

We don’t owe it to the universe to survive.

If it was absolutely true that (incessant intolerable pain) was the future, would that justify suicide?

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3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

just tell me your thoughts on this.

The argument seems to boils down to:

“if there is an infinitesimal (or more) chance of having a life worth living” it is irrational to give up the “warm body”.

Is that the case? (I ask to see if that is the argument I should focus on)