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The Suicide Himself Initiates the Use of Force
Joe, you seem to be making two weird assumptions; first, that I want to (relish the idea of) initiating violence against a person who has failed in committing suicide. Of course! I didn't realize it, I'm just a sadist, it wasn't the person who wanted to kill himself that wanted to commit violence against himself - it was me all along! This is just silly. As I have said repeatedly, suicide is a meta-ethical choice, not a political right. This is perhaps not something that the conventional person on the street might grasp without hours of explanation - but the continued conventionalism of the thought here by my opponents is astounding. Even the fact that people are confused that the word suicide has two senses: (1) The act of killing oneself intentionally, (2) A person who does this, also astounds me.
Second, people seem to be assuming that suicides are all otherwise happy, rational, non-self-destructive, non-dangerous Randian heroes whom I want to deprive of the ability to end their own lives when all reason points to that course of action. That's not the case at all. A terminally ill person suffering great pain can easily kill himself privately on the first try without having to involve other people. It is the dramatic, desperate, public, reckless lover's leap type of suicide who is at question here. Do you deny that this type exists? Do you deny that they often turn out to be Cho's or Atta's or Yates's? Are you telling me that these people are actually misunderstood rational egoists who should be left alone to self destruct no matter whom they might happen to take down with them?
As for Kevorkian, in wikipedia:
Early in his medical career, he showed a recurrent interest in the subject of death: In 1956, he published a journal article, "The Fundus Oculi and the Determination of Death", about his attempt to photograph the eyes of patients at the moment of death--a paper that first won him the nickname "Doctor Death". A paper he presented in December 1958 that advocated consensual experiments on convicts during executions led the University of Michigan to ask him to terminate his residency. A 1961 article in The American Journal of Clinical Pathology described his efforts to transfuse blood from dead bodies into living patients.
"...Between 1990 and 1998, Kevorkian assisted in the deaths of nearly one hundred allegedly terminally ill people, according to his lawyer Geoffrey Fieger. (Later autopsies on several of the individuals Kevorkian assisted in killing revealed that there were no signs of any terminal illness, and that the individual's main motivation to die was due to depression.)"
None of Kevorkian's so-called patients lacked the means to kill themselves without his aid. His entire career was a morbid fascination, and his following were not people who were desperate for relief, but for publicity, notoriety, human contact, and the sanction of others for their actions. In any case, these patients did not seem to be a danger to others, only sad cases. Yet neither they nor your average public suicide is a rational actor nor a harmless curiosity. If a person is emotionally suicidal then he may be happy to take down others with him, Nicholas Bartha, (above) or may plan to kill others like Toolan, a Wall Street Executive who stabbed his girlfriend of six week to death two days after being stopped from leaping to his death in Manhattan:
"During the defense questioning, it came out that when Toolan was 19, he attempted suicide by ingesting a large quantity of Valium and drinking vodka after a girlfriend broke up with him. He was rushed to a hospital when he was found sitting unconscious in his parked car."
People such as these are dangerous, does anyone deny this?
I find the level of argument on this thread extremely conventional, as if no one here had ever thought through the implications of Rand's theory of rights being based on the nature of the needs of man's life in a social context. Who said: If you chose not to live you have no need of morality? I have asserted that suicide is a metaethical choice, not a political right. No one has even either challenged this, or admitted that it is correct. I am not interested in replying to arguments addressed against straw men, let alone one sentence irrelevenacies that ain atlas points while my attempts to speak like an Objectivist bring forth shrieks of outrage. (E.g., "So, even if you're doing something that the state judges is suicidal," or the contention that I must be against legalized alcohol, cigarettes, or people driving cars because cars are dangerous. Come on!) I don't see how I could be any more clear, or any more orthodoxly Objectivist.
Suicide is a meta-ethical choice.
There is no political right to suicide per se, although there is certainly a right to own the means to commit suicide.
Successful suicides are beyond punishment.
Unsuccessful private suicides can do as they will, quit or try again. If their action is truly private, it is not subject to political notice.
Public failed suicides have by their own acts demonstrated that they are a danger to themselves and others.
Such people are a threat to society. They should be treated like the mentally ill, if not like dangerous animals. There are trained professionals who can judge how best to treat such people.
And if it is appropriate to have legalized assisted suicide, what, pray tell, is the difference between that and execution?
Ted Keer
(Edited by Ted Keer
on 6/19, 2:10pm)
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