If you’ve agreed to perform an act and commit suicide before following through, you’ve certainly breached contract.
What if you agreed to a contract, and died of emphysema, due to smoking?
What if you die of heart attack from eating cheeseburgers?
What if you die from brain injury caused by an automobile accident?
I think that people who commit suicide deserve the death penalty. Write that into ‘common law’ please. Thanks.
If physician assisted suicide was available to anyone who wanted it, it would solve all my problems. Nothing wrong with it and there’s nothing immoral about it. It’s a rational choice.
Believing something is immoral should not lead one to the conclusion that it should therefore be made illegal.
Considering morals are subjective choices, anyway… I believe this whole argument is invalid, that “suicide is immoral, thus it’s wrong”. That’s only a preference.
It’s inconsistent with the property rights axioms. If you call yourself a libertarian, then one would hope you’d stay consistent in everything, despite ones own opinions.
Hell, I think suicide is the cowards way out. If Hell existed, Earth would be it. One must be willing to ride this turdstorm to the very end, for better or worse.
I think is making the same confusion as before between an objective morality and subjective ethics (or vice versa, I’m really not sure which of the phrases “morals” and “ethics” is more suitable for the subjective part and which is most suitable for the objective part).
Violating someone’s property (e.g. through theft, trespass, assault etc.) is believed to be immoral by libertarians. And these things should be seen as illegal, although I do see it as possible and moral for individuals to establish a society whereupon these acts are legal, so long as this is done within an overall framework of respect for rights (i.e. these societies could violate individual liberties within themselves, but must respect the property of other societies).
Killing onesself, smoking, one’s sexual activities, one’s religious ideals and activities are all issues to do with subjective ethics. On my property, I can do whatever I want in this category, and indeed in a libertarian society the overall framework would be one of respect for others’ opinions and proclivities. This goes both ways – we believe in rights not license, and so I couldn’t come onto your property and perform acts you believe disgusting or immoral. These shouldn’t be seen as illegal, although they could become illegal in certain societies.
I never said that activities could not be both immoral and illegal; only that the first does not lead one to automatically assume the second.
With suicide you get decide the time of your death it is a deliberate breach of any outstanding debts, but the estate will pay what it can of those. It’s still a toss of the dice with the above questions.
I’m in agreement now though. Suicide is not morally wrong.
Values are subjective, Morals are not. I think the two get confused. It is morally wrong to murder someone. I may not value the behavior implied with that moral and choose to murder, but it doesn’t change the fact that murder is morally wrong. Does this make sense?
Or they just exist naturally among humans and are valued subjectively among those humans.
As to my confusion earlier here is this.
Suicide can not be morally wrong because it is merely destruction of personal property. If suicide is morally wrong then slavery is morally right. Can anyone put that more elegantly?
Well, lets say I did agree with you that suicide is morally wrong.
I think that it is more important to have the freedom to make the wrong choices. If we are forced to make the right choices we are no longer moral agents.
A society that is coerced into acting moral is not a moral society.
If you are christian → god didn’t put us here on this earth so that other men could make our choices for us
If you are not christian → god didn’t put us here on this earth. hehe.
On man’s morals is another man’s belly laugh.
Morals change over time, why slavery was in the Bible, etc. People assign their own subjective morals to various things, but they are not absolute.
Killing is wrong in most people’s minds, and yet there are situations where a person may kill another person and feel morally justified. There are no one-size-fits-all morals that are always true, absolutely.
It’s only immoral if you follow the property right axioms. Which is just preferences, anyway.
I do have principles that I push, but I don’t believe that they’re objectively moral, I just believe they’re the best principles for individuals to use.
Actually, it should IFF when we say “immoral” we mean “violates the rights of another”. Any other usage of the term “immoral” is, in fact, invalid.
I would say that there are moral truths. It is true that murder is wrong. I didn’t say killing was wrong, but murder.
I understand subjective preferences, and also how one can learn that the only way to gain resources is through violence in all its various forms. What I am saying is that regardless of learned behavior, murder and its corollaries are moral wrongs. An individual can be taught murder is morally right, but the logic fails. I gain more through cooperation with my neighbor than I do by stealing from him. I am calculating all resources here. (Money, Good Will, Time, etc…) Stealing just does not make sense. Many develop their own valuations of moral truths and adapt them to violence, but that doesn’t mean that the moral truth in effect becomes a subjective preference. Rather it means that the valuation of a specific moral truth differs through time and geography.
The truth is always the truth whether it is known by all, or by none.
I am not claiming to know the truth of all things. I am claiming that murder is wrong is the truth.
Then how do you explain Charlie Manson, the Christian and Muslim Crusades, the poverty stricken mother who steals a loaf of bread to feed her starving 3 year old, Reverend Jim of Guyana (cult of the damned), or what about socialism, which espouses private, personal property to be wrong?
Better yet: Would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081011101836AArbYgN – Apparently, a lot of people feel morally justified in doing so.
how are they explained? they have metaphysical freedom to do evil and they do.
they are wrong.
you are asking whether someone would selfishly act badly. maybe they would act badly. if in a certain situation someone would act badly. does that mean they were not acting badly? is it supposed to be a reductio about ‘badness’?
so you know who to watch out for if the food starts to run out.
It’s explained in my first reply. Just because sociopaths don’t recognize a moral truth doesn’t mean that truth doesn’t exist.
Yes. It is still morally wrong.
You guys still have not proven to me that morals are absolute, or universal. They are still subjective forces. They are mere preferences people use because they benefit them, they can still change on a whim.
We can’t know anything with absolute certainty. And whether you believe you can or not, that doesn’t change the fact that you can’t.
Why is murder wrong? You never actually stated why it was wrong.
The only thing you stated is that “Murder doesn’t work logically if you want things to work better for everyone.” but then that’s stating that for some reason that’s “good”
Explain why that premise is “morally” good rather than just a preference.
It certainly can lead to that kind of conclusion. That doesn’t mean it has to be in all cases one can imagine. To demand that everything that is immoral (correctly or not) should be made illegal and punished under all circumstances and by all means via an entitled agency is however absurd.
Actually I think that human conduct is guided by social norms and values AND NOT by what is written into legal acts.
Just a little bit of clarification…
Asking people to explain their ethics requires them to give a rationalist account of ethics. This presupposes that ethics are formulated rationally. This does not follow from any ethical definitions. I believe your point is, and I agree, that when people say moral they mean their preferred way of acting.
You mean that they are saying murder is bad not because murder is intrinsically wrong but because it creates some other even. I.e. they are being consequentalist about murder.