Discussion Is suicide a rational decision?

[Squidward]

I don't think it necessarily requires emotion, I've always imagined it being quite difficult to prevent an independent AI from pondering access to it's own power button.

 

[LaVieEnRose]

It's not inherently rational or irrational. Seems almost pointless to think of it in terms of irrationality since everyone who kills themselves thinks they are acting rationally.

 

[tbroken]

Suicide is comparable to natural death, except you choose the party date and theme!

Every day, just know that you are closer to dying than living; there's no need to decide on death.

I agree.
You die of a natural death, because your body and your mind had enough. When you suicide it is the same, it just happens earlier.

 

[Arihman]

Unless one commits suicide for reasons that are ultimately detached from reality, such as believing you must kill yourself because otherwise you'll be horribly raped by an invisible demon, it is a rational decision. That's because life can't solve any problem it didn't first create, and the goods can't meet any need that life itself didn't cause you to have.

Remove the need, and you remove all the negatives, without paying any price in deprivation of positives, since the value of that "good" would also be gone. The dead couldn't care less about what goods they would have experienced had they stayed alive, therefore, short of providing evidence of a worse afterlife, any claim that they are worse off for dying is but a case of living people projecting their own addictions onto the dead.

Based on that, and with exceptions such as the one above, suicide is a fully rational decision, because it aligns with the universal interest in avoiding unnecessary suffering. And all suffering in life is ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, unnecessary, because again it's not there for some noble purpose or necessity, it's there only because humans want life to exist. That they want it to exist doesn't prove that life needs to exist, or that its absence would be a tragedy, objectively speaking, however.

 

[Gustav Hartmann]

I don´t believe in a free will, subconscious algorithms run permanetly and present us their output as our free decision. And yes, like every algorithm they are based on logic.

 

[uzuf86]

Generally humans are not automatically ctb but then there are unfortunate people like me and others on this site who suffer with endless mental problems that ruin their thinking and reasoning.
Then they fall into that spiral of making mistakes and suffering that never ends until the day comes where things are too late and impossible to fix. All this eventually makes ctb a rational decision

 

[cetacea]

It's not inherently rational or irrational. Seems almost pointless to think of it in terms of irrationality since everyone who kills themselves thinks they are acting rationally.

I agree with the second part, but not necessarily the first part. It is important to consider because people do think it's rational, even when it isn't.

 

[onbekend]

For me, even if I wasn't depressed It's still too late to make any change that would make it "irrational" or even change my mind at all. I'm personally out of options.

 

[EmptyHeaded]

I agree with the second part, but not necessarily the first part. It is important to consider because people do think it's rational, even when it isn't.

I'd say it has to be determined on a case-by-case basis. That's why it's neither inherently rational or irrational. Some people attempt for rational reasons, others for what we consider irrational reasons.

 

[shtangley01]

As someone who is personally suicidal (as I think probably most of us are, here) I think it depends from person to person, but is often the result of rational decision-making from irrational priors. If someone's painful circumstances were eternal, or at least terminal, or if the people that they loved or were at least around often would truly be much better off for their death, then I could see the rational leap to suicide being a promising avenue of escape or even a matter of ethical responsibility, but oftentimes people who talk like that are speaking from an ultimately temporary frame of mind, or taking for granted the good they really do put out into the world. I mean, statistically speaking, a pretty small percentage of suicide attempt survivors ultimately end up dying by suicide, even if prior attempts remain an accurate risk factor for future issues.

 

[J&L383]

It's a debate for the ages. If it were easy, and decisive, we wouldn't have four pages of responses. I'm grateful that we can at least have a time and place to have this discussion.

 

[cetacea]

Maybe others (myself included) don't have the right to be telling people whether their reasons are rational or not. Rational or irrational, if a person is suicidal then they're likely in a tremendous amount of pain. I suppose I just wish some people could realize the pain is temporary. I'm saying this while currently being in so much pain - today I feel depressed, worthless, a stupid autistic fuckwad. I don't want to leave my house anymore. I'm sure if I CTB'd right now that I'd totally think I was being rational :-)