Discussion Is suicide murder?

[Niko]

I was just thinking about the fact that it's really unfathomable for me to ever consider hurting somebody else, but i have no problem entertaining the idea of hurting myself.

and then i heard a quote somewhere "suicide is a shy person's way of committing murder"

i'm not sure how i feel about that..
on the one hand, it's my life to live or not so i think ctb is it's own separate category away from murder. i'm a believer in letting people make their own choices and also letting them feel the results of those choices, and just letting everyone do things their way because i don't think i or anybody else has all the answers.

but on the other hand there is a person who, for some fucking reason, people i know do seem to care about. people i myself truly care about do love this person, and worry about them and just want to see them happy in this world; but i hate that person, or at least i hate the life that person is living; that person is me.

and right now i'm thinkin of taking 'this person'(myself) away forever from all the people who love him. I don't think it's a selfish act to ctb, and i don't think you owe it to anybody to suffer for their sake forever. but there is the plain and simple fact that, if i were to ctb, i would be crushing the people around me that i love so much in a way that feels so much like a murder.

i hope this doesn't sound like i have multiple personality disorder lol, not that there's anything wrong with that, because i'm really just trying to go through a thought experiment.

there is a being in this world that we all on this forum have come to believe, or at least consider, isn't worth maintaining: ourselves. it's just a weird way to think about it i guess and i was curious to know what you guys feel?

 

[thetwilightzone]

Technically no. If assisted suicide was legalized then by definition, it cannot be considered murder since murder is the unlawful killing of someone.

I suppose it would go under "justifiable homicides".

I still don't get this point people make. No one makes a big deal when cancer or HIV kills someone. Don't think I've heard someone saying "it's nature's way of murder"

 

[BurningLights]

Technically no. If assisted suicide was legalized then by definition, it cannot be considered murder since murder is the unlawful killing of someone.

I suppose it would go under "justifiable homicides".

I still don't get this point people make. No one makes a big deal when cancer or HIV kills someone. Don't think I've heard someone saying "it's nature's way of murder"

I always saw things like that as natures own population control. But as we find more ways to combat it, nature is having to get creative!

 

[Deleted member 1768]

I was just thinking about the fact that it's really unfathomable for me to ever consider hurting somebody else, but i have no problem entertaining the idea of hurting myself.

and then i heard a quote somewhere "suicide is a shy person's way of committing murder"

i'm not sure how i feel about that..
on the one hand, it's my life to live or not so i think ctb is it's own separate category away from murder. i'm a believer in letting people make their own choices and also letting them feel the results of those choices, and just letting everyone do things their way because i don't think i or anybody else has all the answers.

but on the other hand there is a person who, for some fucking reason, people i know do seem to care about. people i myself truly care about do love this person, and worry about them and just want to see them happy in this world; but i hate that person, or at least i hate the life that person is living; that person is me.

and right now i'm thinkin of taking 'this person'(myself) away forever from all the people who love him. I don't think it's a selfish act to ctb, and i don't think you owe it to anybody to suffer for their sake forever. but there is the plain and simple fact that, if i were to ctb, i would be crushing the people around me that i love so much in a way that feels so much like a murder.

i hope this doesn't sound like i have multiple personality disorder lol, not that there's anything wrong with that, because i'm really just trying to go through a thought experiment.

there is a being in this world that we all on this forum have come to believe, or at least consider, isn't worth maintaining: ourselves. it's just a weird way to think about it i guess and i was curious to know what you guys feel?

I do not consider suicide as self harm. It is annihilation. An end to suffering not the beginning. What people believe depends greatly on the importance placed on quality vs quantity of life. I am interested in quality...and I have precious little of that. I understand the quandary though. My eldest brother died of suicide and it was very hard for us, but none of us thought of it as murder. Nor would I ever. In time his death was just one more in a series of those I loved dying. Those left behind will always grieve, and it leaves a hole in the heart, but such is living. Cancer, heart attack, stroke, accident...all can lead to same end. The difference is the feeling each one has for you in life. No one can say how another really feels, or how they will react.
I do not see myself as unworthy of maintaining. I have simply had enough.

 

[Sayo]

In some senses yes, but mostly no. I see what you're saying - that an existence impacts more than itself and, like in the case of murder, a wilful act causes its removal -, but there are all kinds of killings we agree are not murder because they lack a key element. Manslaughter is commonly differentiated from murder because it lacks the same wilfulness or culpability, for example, even though some manslaughters people would absolutely say were murders.

The key difference between murder and suicide is obviously that the suicidal person chooses to end their own life, whereas the murdered person has no say whatsoever. In practice these boundaries could be blurred, but I think it's a really important distinction to maintain, because if the person who ends their life really, truly wishes to die rather than simply having no other options, and couldn't come to enjoy life instead, it's a tragedy if they're forced to suffer. And similarly, if they really, truly wish to live and could live if they were supported (whether by themselves or others) but instead end up dying due to a lack of options other than 'choosing' to die, that's also a tragedy, just like most murders. A murder primarily is the wilful removal of that person's life from them, particularly against their wishes -- not from their loved ones. And that's an experience that the suicidal might also share something similar to some extent for directly related reasons, but they also might not.

Part of loving someone and sharing the world with them is accepting one day one of you will have to grieve for the other. It's impossible to change that loss exists, and so I'd rather accept it as a fundamental element of life/death and community, rather than problematising suicide by calling it murder. Similarly, we can understand death as having victims without having to categorise them in a way that obscures their commonalities.

Of course, because suicide is viewed as a full choice and analysed that way, the emotions that are experienced are different from murder, which is also an issue. Suicide itself has to be viewed differently and understood better, and accepted for what it is. But in prioritising the experiences of the mourning we might diminish or take away from that, and from people who might be suicidal in the future.

While I view existences as very precious for traditionally individualistic reasons, I am not really an individualist in the philosophical sense of the word. And I do not view all choices to die as the same. So, when I say 'in some senses yes', I mean in the sense that many people's deaths are multivariate. While nobody chose to kill them other than them themselves, it's important to recognise that they also didn't always have full agency and control over their lives (for a lot of reasons). If someone ends their own life in the context of a terminal illness that's about to kill them, it's useful to understand that that's suicide but also that they died in huge part due to their disease. That's an easy example, but still. The same can be said of many other factors that lead someone to take their own lives; they tend to be too complex to summarise, but it's also a good part of why people aren't just typically satisfied with the surface reasons.

That doesn't mean you should kill yourself because some circumstances are out of your control, or that it's not up to you to make the most rational response to things possible, just that when we look at a lot of suicides there are a lot of beings that weren't adequately maintained by their worlds and communities and doctors and social systems, disproportionately to other types of deaths.

After 9/11, the public, and accordingly sociologists who studied suicide, spent a long time debating whether the people who jumped to escape the fire in the towers had died of suicide (they weren't ruled that way). After all, they were almost certain to die from the fire, and they did not so much choose to take their life so much as they were driven to escape from the fire in any way possible. I found that really profoundly illustrative of what we view suicide to be. I won't ramble on about it forever, but there were a lot of political reasons to rule it a suicide or not a suicide. (Initial anger from the public at their actions, negative stigma around suicide, religious doctrine, etc.)

 

[ParamitePie]

"suicide is a shy person's way of committing murder"

What about suicide bombings?

In all seriousness, calling suicide self-murder is removing the agency of the individual actor in question, which everyone can agree is a fundamental factor of suicide. Since the actor is the being acted upon, and has full awareness of the consequence of their actions, it's inherently separate from murder (willing actor, unwilling acted upon) or manslaughter (unwilling actor, unwilling acted upon). The cultural and religious stigma attached to suicide is due to the volition of the deceased. People don't like the idea that death (something they're awfully afraid of) was somehow preferable to life, and so they'll create any number of excuses, accusations, rationalizations and justifications to support their viewpoint.

 

[Niko]

I appreciate the feedback here, and I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying.

Going off of what @poof was saying, I was remembering when Anthony Bourdain passed away a lot of people were basically questioning publicly why he would dislike himself enough to end his own life. The assumption seemed to be that the person who 'commits' the act had something wrong with them or something they hated about themselves.

But maybe they're not the problem! maybe it's just the world, their circumstances, the people around them etc.. and they just thought 'fuck it' and had enough. I think the people left behind don't like to think that way, because the implication would be the World they are apart of may be the source of negativity, instead of the individual.

Also the illustration you provide @Sayo from 9/11 is illuminating; Who could blame someone for trying to escape a place on fire?

 

[Trashcan]

Murder is the unlawful killing of someone, so no.

 

[Roph]

I don't consider it murder.

 

[wanttodie]

agree Murder is the unlawful killing of someone, so no.