Kill Yourself

[sleeplessdragn]

The problem with this theory is that every single human being has the <u>potencial</u> to contribute to society in some form. Every homeless person can work a low end job. If they were obligated to kill themselves, there would be no possibility of ever acquiring some form of social contribution from them. Think about it, if you were to sit on the street for a few days, acting homeless and completely leeching off of society, would you suddenly become obligated to commit suicide?

[hEaLiNgViSiOnAnGeLicMiX]

Every homeless person can work a low end job.

And what might I ask would a homeless person fill in on the resumé for 'Address'? Haha.. Okay on a more serious note...

I'm not blaming our society in any way for saying this. An average job, even a cheap 'low end' job like Macdonalds or a 7-11 USUALLY requires you to have a decent record. No crimes commited, and hopefully no 'issues' from previous jobs. How many people of today fit into that category? Millions. Millions of teenageers looking for low-end jobs to make a little bit of money. Now let's take it to these teenagers with a whole future ahead of them, versus these homeless people. If you're lucky enough to come across an understanding boss who understands WHO is in more need of the money, then my argument can be proved wrong. However, not every boss is like that. To be honest, only a very very small minority of them are like that. They want to hire people with experience, good work habits, and the most pathetic thing is that some places will hire one person instead of another based on the way they look and/or dress. How much of a chance do those who are living on welfare really stand?

I'm not saying that all homeless people are like that. Alot of them are still being hired. What I'm talking about are those who aren't being hired. They can't work, they obviously can't go to school (even if they found a free public school, school supplies + trips + technology fees etc... could still be a huge problem.) how are they supposed to gain the knowledge and experience they need to contribute to society? The fact that they can't 'do anything for us' is not entirely their fault when they were never given the chance to to begin with. If it's not entirely their fault, why should they result to suicide?

[hatakikakashi]

Wow you people are heartless... I like that.

I don't agree with you at all and I weep for the future when your in power and start WW3. Your like Hitler incarnate. Or perhaps the antichrist or Satan even. If your not christian than (insert evil person here). I get depressed sometimes and think about killing myself,( blahblahblah I'm worthless,blahblahblah I don't contribute) but then I just turn it into anger and hate everyone else, if I could I would destroy all life in the universe. Then I would cry about what I had done. I have mixed feelings, at times I love everyone but at the same time I hate everyone. I feel like I'm better than other people and then I envy them.

While what your saying may help society I don't think they should have a moral obligation, one because it's not moral, and two if they are the kind of trash your describing they don't care about society and wouldn't do it anyway. Then they're are alot of people that do kill them selves. What about the starving children in Africa if we didn't feed them they'd die, we donate millions and they're still dying, they don't contribute anything to us so why do we help them? We should let them all starve. We should kill every man woman and child in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and all the other people that hate us. Not only do they not contribute they are harming us, and costing us billions. Screw'em

We should take it to the maximum absurdity, they should have some kind of contribution aptitude exam that decides whether or not you get your license to live for the next calender year, if you fail you no longer have the right to live and can choose to die, enlist in the meatgrinder and fight of the hordes of invaders who don't like the new world we will create. Or donate your body to feed the artificially grown experimental super children,genetically engineered to be super productive.

[sleeplessdragn]

And what might I ask would a homeless person fill in on the resumé for 'Address'?

Haha, I've always wondered the same thing.

What Miss HVAM stated above is the realistic side of this issue. Many people are of no use to society because often society chooses not to give them a chance.

What I'm trying to push is the conceptual flaw in this thinking, which is that extinguishing these people eliminates even the slightest possibility of any form of contributions that the homeless could make. This is the reason why we have welfare policies in the first place; in fact, this is why the social attitude toward this concept of elimiation is considered so immoral. Fortunately(some would say), we don't live in a fully capitalistic system where the weak are eaten and the rich can laugh at the weak.

Hmmmm, maybe I should have joined the Red Army of Chardish.

[User6773]

Well that's why I didn't want to advocate government forcibly killing our Mr. X, but rather I wanted to debate if Mr. X should feel any moral obligation to kill himself.

It's a pretty verifiable fact that morals held by the majority of people inevitably become laws. So if you think that people should accept this moral, and people do, the government enforcing it can't be far behind.

Suicide in the name of those you love is admirable. If it is made in an effort to help them, people adore such martyrdom. We have celebrated many a hero who has sacrificed himself for the common good. The Catholic church does this all the time.

An uninformed and erroneous non-sequitur. The Church never advocates suicide. If you give up your life to save someone, that's different than suicide, and it's more comparable to spending your life finding a cure for a disease, or something like that. The martyrdom you think of is when people choose to be killed rather than renounce their faith. It is quite different than killing yourself because you find your life to be worthless; nay, that is a great offense against God, as it spurns the gift of life we are given.

[young_hope]

Let's be serious, you are seriously misguided.

Obviously you have very abstract viewpoints of society. Life, as a concept is a previlge. However, life as a viewpoint to society is a right. The circumstances of life can not be good enough to give life back to a person dying, so circumstances can not be bad enough to take life away; let alone one's own life. Any and all circumstances that appear bad in it's self, can be corrected... even third world countries. So the homeless situation that you speak of pales in comparison to the problems of some, and is only an excuse to commit sucide. Then you suggest a forced suicide, and that not right neither. You are basically impling that a non-conductive life of a HUMAN BEIGN, makes that HUMAN BEIGN a waste of space. I could inversly say that your life being productive is a waste of space to those who are tring to escape poverty because it's through you people of that nature must get a place of employment. So before you write again, be sure not to mix morals in with sin (the Christian cause of death), and assume that the misguided though you have should become a law. Life and liberty for all...

[blahblah18]

RE: Let

You kinda missed the point completely, but that's not a big deal. Don't forget property... Life, Libery, and Property for all.

[The_Q]

RE: Let

The martyrdom you think of is when people choose to be killed rather than renounce their faith.

If you have more comments let's discuss them elsewhere. Until then, allow me to clarify. The deaths of the martyrs enriched the faith of Christians and changed the faith of Gentiles. This, on the whole, benefits society (unless you disagree with God). The acts they commited might as well be suicide. Knowingly facing death or renouncing one's faith and choosing death is quite similar to suicide. You could claim that this is an example of justified suicide. The only catch is the semantics of the kind of killing.

Life, as a concept is a previlge.

You sound like an environmentalist. Ironically, you strongly believe in our Declaration of Independence. Most of the time, that kind of thinking is mutually exclusive to one another. Jefferson believed that he had a right to live, not only as an individual but in society. The oppresive government was restricting that right to the point where it became a privilage. Jefferson whined, a war was fought, and America allowed people to live. Environmentalists tend to believe that it is a privilage to live on this earth and therefore we should take care of it. I side with the founding fathers.

Back on topic, I believe that suicide is not really all that much of a thing that can be justified. The negative externalities of any single death, let alone a suicide, could tilt the cost-benefit scale quite a bit. The opportunity cost is absolutely astounding, too. There is no economically efficient suicide.

Don't forget property... Life, Libery, and Property for all.

John Locke is right. And I hope you realize that Jonathin Swift was not intending to be taken seriously.

Q

[blahblah18]

RE: Let

doin't say there is no economically efficient suicide, because you woudl definately agree there are economically efficient murders, and then suicide would just be that guy doing it...

Also in response to Q's response of Chardish, suicide has a certain connotation to it that differentiates it from what you're saying. Suicide implies an expresse desire to not wish to live anymore... a martyr dying is merely an inescapable consequence, NOT the goal behind the action

[deltro300111]

RE: Let

20 years ago my mom had a child, was out of work, and her husband didn't have the best of jobs- for a while she used foodstamps, she eventually got divorced from him, she went back to school, and now she is a doctor, and her daughter is working on getting a job with her buisness degree...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...books&n=507846

You fail, blahblah.

[hEaLiNgViSiOnAnGeLicMiX]

RE: Let

Suicide is a term used to define the act of killing oneself. The definition does not include the intention. To me, one who kills himself with an intention OTHER than bettering society is not necessarily a sign that he/she thinks that they are worthless. For example: The suicide bombings in Iraq. These people aren't killing themself to better the world, and they clearly do not think they are useless. Suicide bombings are done strictly to kill others, so in a way you could say that these people have some sense of accomplishment. Not only that, but they feel that they are doing the right thing. What is right and wrong is based one one's (or a group of people's) opinions. In this case, the person commiting suicide thinks what he is doing is perfectly correct. We might think it's wrong to be killing other innocent people in such a way, but he obviously doesn't. To me, this could also be called an example of 'selfless sacrifice' but with a slightly different outcome.

Okay so that was awfully offtopic, but I felt the need to add that since you were talking about the whole idea of what makes suicide okay and not okay. =\

[blahblah18]

RE: Let

deltro i don't fail, try and understand what i'm asking you fucktard i'm saying theoretically and morally, on the asusmption that they have no chance for improvement... *sigh* why didi I think intelligent debate could come from this source

ignore me i'm durnk

[deltro300111]

RE: Let

... the point of my post is that everyone has the potential to stop sucking, apparently you didn't get that from my post fucktard
learn to read engrish gooder.

[bigsleytheoaf]

uh

blahblah,

I am writing this post in the sincere hope that you will read through it, consider my points objectively, and respond to them in a level headed manner. I hope that I have not used forceful language, rhetoric, or made any implications on your character in this passage and further I hope that you do not take offense to anything that I have said. If you do, I assure you that I did not intend it. I think that you (just like everyone else here) have valid opinions. I disagree with you, but by that I mean that either we have different assumptions (which I think we do), not that you or I are better. I personally think that your assumptions might not be quite correct, but am interested in hearing more about your theory in order to more strongly base my conclusions.

Note: I use caps in the following, but I do not mean them as shouting - I mean them as emphasis - I just didn't see the "bold" button above before I got through with writing the thing.

---

Now, let me go point by point:

"You should just kill yourself."

What's your definition of "should" here? "Should" can mean many different things. For instance:

"If you want to own a cat, you should buy one."
- In this sentence, "should" means a causal obligation - you "should" buy one because without performing this action you will not have a cat.

"If you want to make yourself happy, you should earn money."
- In this sentence, "should" still means a causal obligation but also has the implicit assumption associated with it that earning money will make you happy. Since in this sentence "should" has an associated causal assumption we can call it a "value relation." I.e. it relates values - your happiness (a value) is implicitly related to money (a value) by the word should. Since you are an individual, this type of relation is also often Objective, meaning that it can be explicitly evaluated -

"If you want to be unhappy, you should cut off your foot."
- In this sentence, "should" implies a relation between negative values. Again, this is object because from a general standpoint cutting off one's food makes one less happy.

The above 2 statements have to do with a form of morality based around objective valuations of actions w/r/t personal happiness. This is the definition of a system of ethics and is my own personal moral system. I believe that it is well defined and consistent and therefore is a helpful tool (though obviously not the only one) in helping me determine what I "should" do (see, I've defined my terms clearly!).

Let's consider a statement of the type you've made:

"[If you're homeless/worthless/etc.] You should just kill yourself."

Well, now there are three ways I can personally think that you mean "should" (since you haven't clarified this point)

- 1) You mean should in the personal happiness sense I used above (i.e. the homeless person will gain personal happiness by killing himself or herself). In this case, I think that your statement is incorrect. Personally, I do not gain a great deal of happiness from maximizing societal utility. I think that society kind of sucks at the moment and, even if it didn't, I have no interest in how happy the average person is or any other statistic related to societal happiness (except insofar as it effects me - for instance, I'll give to a worthy charity if I think that it will make a change since this will probably make everyone's, including my own, quality of life better). If a homeless person really cares about societal happiness statistics then by all means you are correct (however, I don't think this is what you meant by "should")

- 2) The second case is that you mean "should" in the utilitarian sense (i.e. one should do that which maximizes global utility of society over a long or indefinite period of time). In this case, I think that you mean to imply a value relation between a person killing themself and society's utility. In short, you mean to imply that the death of the homeless person will increase the utility of society (or some other measure of societal "goodness" such as average happiness, average productivity, number of babies, etc.). Well, if this is your meaning of "should" (and I think that it is based on your statements) I have to disagree with you on a few grounds:

a) In terms of actual utility of society - I don't believe that the actual utility of society or the effect of any action on it is actually possible to determine. Your claim is that homeless people are leeches on society, but if you step back for a moment and consider the bigger picture, there are many many many many much bigger leeches than homeless people - e.g. the US government, e.g. charities that lie and run away with profits, e.g. criminals, etc. etc. etc. There is no proof that a homeless person's suicide will provide positive benefit (maybe the smile on a homeless man's face There are a lot of costs to homeless-person suicide as well - society has to clean up/dispose of the bodies, society has to manage disease control procedures (since dead people rot), society has to deal with the psychological impact of seeing murders on the street, etc. etc.

b) Even if we had some sort of societal-benefit-function f(ACTION) which maps actions to a number representing a gain or loss of global societal benefit (i.e. f is the first derivative of some global utility function GU(ACTION) -> net gain of society in terms of utility), and even assuming that this function were known to be positive when homeless people killed themselves, this is not to say that we can say ANYTHING about the behavior of the function outside of an incredibly small time period (what I'm trying to say here is that while the death of a homeless person might give society benefit for a short while there may be long term fringe effects which you have not considered - and I'm not saying that this is a flaw with your reasoning, what I am saying is that these fringe effects are incredibly difficult to figure out relative to the value of the function I described since they are essentially the same as predicting the future). An example of a fringe effect that homeless person suicide could have which is bad is the fact that homeless person suicide would most likely drop the property value in an area (who wants to live in a place that smells like rotting flesh, where you have to see suicide often, etc. homeless people are unpleasant, but dead homeless people are really unpleasant). This drop in property value would probably lead to conditions which would cause more people to become homeless -> global impact of the action = bad.

c) Even if we knew that f(homeless person suicide) lead to an overall rise in the global utility function of society for all of time, your supposition that a homeless person "should" kill themself relies on a definition of morality that I do not quite understand - why should a homeless (or any other) person do anything to benefit society? You have not given a reason for this. And besides, what if that person ends up hurting society by giving some poor little girl a disease?

d) One thing that you have to realize is that a large large number of homeless people (in the United States) are insane, suffer from a disease, and/or are addicted to drugs. This implies that we could lower the number of homeless people by trying to treat these problems before they take the dignity away from a person. This isn't an argument against your statement per se, but is moreover a fact which should be potentially included in your assessment of the situation.

- 3) You intend "should" in a way that I don't understand - please explain it.

Now, here's where I really disagree with you:
I do not think that ANYONE should have an obligation to help homeless people. I.e. I don't think that you should be taxed and have that money given to homeless people. This actually does make the homeless into a leech (via the government) on society. However, if individual people want to give money to charitable organizations or directly to the homeless then more power to them. Those people are doing what they want with their money and are supporting others (which is the central theme of a capitalist society). So even assuming your doctrine of morality, it is shown that homeless people aren't a "leech" like social security, the War on Drugs, the CIA, etc. etc. etc.

---

"Moreso you should have an Obligation to society to kill yourself."

You posit the existence of societal obligation. I would be very interested in hearing your explanation of how that works. What does it mean to be obligated to society and when is one obligated to society?

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"First of all, you're draining from society and giving nothing back in return."

Here you're messing with the activity of your verbs to give credence to your statement (logical fallacy). That is to say there is a difference between the following scenarios:

i) I killed Jim with a butcher knife.

ii) I couldn't help Jim because it would cost me $1000 and I needed the money.

In both cases, I "killed" jim, but in the second case my role is much more passive. I think that this is the same case with homeless people. They are not "draining" society actively, they are doing it passively - i.e. people are freely giving them money. Further, the question comes up of whether things like your precious computer is a "drain" on society since that money could be going to make someone else much much happier than it makes you (see how the subjectivity of the universal societal utility function makes utilitarianism a floppy theory?)

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"No one will miss you since you have no one to miss, and probably most importantly, you've broken your part of the Social Contract."

What's the social contract?
I never signed no damned contract - well, except maybe for implicitly the constitution, but I'll be damned if there's anything related to societal obligation in there.

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"Government is protecting you and keeping you alive practically, and you're giving NOTHING back in return..."

Same with subsistence farmers - note that income tax is a modern invention (c. ~1910) and government (and the protection it gave its citizens) existed before then - i.e. you don't pay taxes for government protection, it has other ways of getting money.

(technically, you pay money for the government to protect your contracts, but that's a whole other question in itself).

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A personal anecdote - I live in Cambridge and go to the Boston Commons sometimes. There are homeless people there and one time one of them approached me. He was an alcoholic 8-10 years ago and had recently rebuilt his life by doing labor for people who offered to pay him and by taking donations from people. Eventually, he got his act together, got sober, went to live in a dry hostel (a place where you can go to live if you're homeless but have given up alcohol), and is now doing charity work to help other homeless people like himself who had a bad run of luck, fell into alcoholism, and want to recover. I thought that his story was especially touching and reflects the fact that homeless people are usually very sad but can be helped if you have the right method - I'll grant you that giving money to some homeless guy on the street isn't a good solution and neither is welfare, but there are good solutions (like dry hostels, places which find homeless people work, etc.)

---

I hope to hear from you. I am genuinely interested in your responses and do not mean you any disrespect by my response to your question. I think that you have a system which a number of people adopt in some form or another, but I am not assuming that your system is the same as theirs and will give you the benefit of the doubt (for instance, I could say that your system is the same as Utilitarianism, but that wouldn't be giving you the credit you are due - besides, I don't know that your system is the same, maybe you have completely different arguments for your points that I have not considered).

Bigsley

[hatakikakashi]

RE: uh

Damn man, you should write a book! A book on drunk government hobos.

The homeless people that you say should kill themselves should just get jobs instead. That's what I've done, I hate working. Working is allmost as bad of a punishment as killing yourself and they would be benifiting society as well. If they work enough maybe they can dig there way out of the hole there in. Like killing two birds with one shotgun.