What are you going to do to make suicide illegal? Sentence them to death??
Clayton -
@nirgraham: Lucretius lays the smack down on the fear of death:
Lucretius – On the Nature of Things (excerpt)
Therefore death to us
Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least,
Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.
And just as in the ages gone before
We felt no touch of ill, when all sides round
To battle came the Carthaginian host,
And the times, shaken by tumultuous war,
Under the aery coasts of arching heaven
Shuddered and trembled, and all humankind
Doubted to which the empery should fall
By land and sea, thus when we are no more,
When comes that sundering of our body and soul
Through which we’re fashioned to a single state,
Verily naught to us, us then no more,
Can come to pass, naught move our senses then-
No, not if earth confounded were with sea,
And sea with heaven. But if indeed do feel
The nature of mind and energy of soul,
After their severance from this body of ours,
Yet nothing 'tis to us who in the bonds
And wedlock of the soul and body live,
Through which we’re fashioned to a single state.
And, even if time collected after death
The matter of our frames and set it all
Again in place as now, and if again
To us the light of life were given, O yet
That process too would not concern us aught,
When once the self-succession of our sense
Has been asunder broken. And now and here,
Little enough we’re busied with the selves
We were aforetime, nor, concerning them,
Suffer a sore distress. For shouldst thou gaze
Backwards across all yesterdays of time
The immeasurable, thinking how manifold
The motions of matter are, then couldst thou well
Credit this too: often these very seeds
(From which we are to-day) of old were set
In the same order as they are to-day-
Yet this we can’t to consciousness recall
Through the remembering mind. For there hath been
An interposed pause of life, and wide
Have all the motions wandered everywhere
From these our senses. For if woe and ail
Perchance are toward, then the man to whom
The bane can happen must himself be there
At that same time. But death precludeth this,
Forbidding life to him on whom might crowd
Such irk and care; and granted 'tis to know:
Nothing for us there is to dread in death,
No wretchedness for him who is no more,
The same estate as if ne’er born before,
When death immortal hath ta’en the mortal life.
Hence, where thou seest a man to grieve because
When dead he rots with body laid away,
Or perishes in flames or jaws of beasts,
Know well: he rings not true, and that beneath
Still works an unseen sting upon his heart,
However he deny that he believes.
His shall be aught of feeling after death.
For he, I fancy, grants not what he says,
Nor what that presupposes, and he fails
To pluck himself with all his roots from life
And cast that self away, quite unawares
Feigning that some remainder’s left behind.
For when in life one pictures to oneself
His body dead by beasts and vultures torn,
He pities his state, dividing not himself
Therefrom, removing not the self enough
From the body flung away, imagining
Himself that body, and projecting there
His own sense, as he stands beside it: hence
He grieves that he is mortal born, nor marks
That in true death there is no second self
Alive and able to sorrow for self destroyed,
Or stand lamenting that the self lies there
Mangled or burning. For if it an evil is
Dead to be jerked about by jaw and fang
Of the wild brutes, I see not why 'twere not
Bitter to lie on fires and roast in flames,
Or suffocate in honey, and, reclined
On the smooth oblong of an icy slab,
Grow stiff in cold, or sink with load of earth
Down-crushing from above.
I hope you guys realise that ‘impala76’ is actually mustang19, aka troll19. He’s not asking these questions to actually get a good answer, he’s just trolling and doesn’t care what you say.
Why do you feel the need to point that out? It’s already clear that the people here are big-government paternalists who oppose my right to sell myself into slavery.
Lol, the idea is that it’s metaphysically impossible to sell yourself into slavery, more than opposing some silly right to do so.
All libertarians would recognize your right to trade your work for the cost of living, that can be arranged contractually. But that’s not slavery. Slavery always means a state of coercion. Thus, how can one willingly be coerced? It’s not possible, because A cannot be both A and B at the same time. One is either coerced, directly or indirectly, or engages voluntarily.
But I guess you’re still just trolling.
I’m not. Slavery is just a lifelong labor contract. Technically, slavery might involve becoming someone else’s property under some definitions, but for all practical purposes, it’s equivalent to a lifelong labor contract with certain restrictions on the person’s body (like euthanasia) and ability to make further contracts.
Practical example: Someone agrees to turn over control of their daily activities (their labor), their body, and any earnings they make to someone else for a given period of time. What right have you to deny them this contract?
Not so. I see that your definition is faulty. A labor contract is an exchange of value, labor for X, where X could be money or just the costs of living like housing and food. That would not be slavery, that would be an exchange generally known as employment.
In such an arrangement, you would be able to break the contract, decide you don’t want to work anymore, and the recourse of the other party would only be to stop providing you with living expenses. They could not force you into labor, whip you, etc.
One of the main designators of slavery is that a slave is human property and cannot themselves own property. It is not merely a lifelong labor contract, it’s much more than that. It implies that a human life is subsumed under the property rights of another human being, rights which include the ability to dispose of your own property as you see fit, thus the very life of the slave was greatly devalued if not totally worthless as a slave, which is not true of a lifelong labor contract.
They can do that just fine, and none of us would oppose them. I’ll tell you when we will step in. The minute that person wants to end the contract and the employer attempts to prevent them from leaving, as such prevention would be an act of aggression against them.
Yes, suicide should be legal, though I’m not in favor of it.
If the person agreed to be put into labor and whipped under the contract, you have no right to deny them that.
If the person agreed to turn over their current and future property to somone else, you have no right to deny them that either. You’re using a specific, narrow definition of “slavery”. Giving control of one’s life (as with euthanasia), liberty (daily labor), and fortune to someone else is an entirely legitimate contract. The difference is that you believe they should be able to leave the contract at any time.
But this denies people the right to have their contracts enforced. Under your reasoning, anyone can break a contract at any time and the other party’s only recourse is to discontinue their part of the contract. That makes the right to form contracts almost meaningless. If an employer contracts an employee for a certain amount of work, and the employee doesn’t do the work, the employer has no recourse to ensure the employee maintains their part of the contract.
It’s not a contract if it is slavery. That’s the point he is trying to make. Slavery cannot be contracted, at least I don’t see how it could be, seeing as how contracts can end, be broken. And as far as I’m concerned, no one has a right to have their contract enforced, as by a governing body. One has a right to try to enforce their own contracts, and even use a private arbiter or court that is agreeable by both parties. As for your example with an employer and employee contract, most of them today are what is called “at-will,” where the employer has a right to terminate the employment at any time and so does the employee. You’re being ridiculous with your attempt to stretch definitions on contracts, or you have misunderstood them.
If you want to end your life, how is it aggression? Maybe you shouldn’t equivocate so much.
I’d be upset if one of my family members chose to commit suicide (assuming he wasn’t suffering from some terminal illness). However, it’s his life, not mine.
I would say so, yes. Problem?
Points taken. I still think contracts are meaningless if they can be ended at any time. Employment contracts are currently at-will, but that’s only the case in our current welfare statist system.
I personally believe that I have no right to deny them this contract. Nor do I see this as a reductio ad absurdum, if that’s your point.
No, there is nothing wrong with an at-will contract. Contracts can be set up with these terms. Almost all contracts are this way, in one way or another. If I contract you to build my house and pay you for materials plus whatever you decide your hourly rate is, and you don’t build it, that’s too bad for me. I can find someone else that will want to earn my business. I have no need, much less no right, to force you to build it. Stop with the ridiculousness. You do not understand contracts, or are intentionally misrepresenting what their purpose is, are you not?
The problem is that you’re operating under the welfare-statist paradigm of contracting. Under a system of truely enforced contracts both parties would have to keep their word.
Please do go on.
Who will enforce? Not a central authority. you’re the statist here.
Free market legal agencies following a true version of natural law that enforces contracts. Otherwise, one has no guarantee that contracts will be kept.