Many people suffer, and some of them commit suicide. But many others do not. Does it follow that those who do not show a revealed preference for existence over non-existence? In some cases maybe, but I am sure that in many other cases they do not. Death is something most people are terribly afraid of. And people frequently procrastinate in the face of things that are unpleasant or causes of fear (how many among you file your income taxes at the time when it would be easiest to do so, as opposed to only when the impending deadline forces you to?) And for many people in addition, there are cultural and legal barriers to suicide, and the means of suicide are often difficult, which causes them to put it off still further.
But for the miserable, there is good news. No matter how high the barriers to your bringing about your own death, death will nonetheless come to claim you in the end. Any non-delusional adult knows this. Your suffering will end, even if you can never bring yourself to raise a hand against yourself. And the fact that people do know this, even if they don’t have it at the front of the consciousness) might actually make suicide less likely, as opposed to the strategy of waiting for death.
I wonder — because I have enough training in philosophy to wonder about such lunatic things — what might happen in a world in which some freak of nature or evil deity or mad scientist were to make people immortal. Not magically immortal, but at perhaps no longer prone to senescence and decline that are our inevitable lot now, so call people like this weak immortals. Were that to happen you could probably still wait for death — there would still be accidents, presumably. But you would probably have to wait a great deal longer. If you were suffering, you could expect to suffer a whole lot longer.
Who would like to bet that, at least ceteris paribus, we would actually see more suicide among weak immortals than we do among ordinary humans?
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Who would like to bet that, at least ceteris paribus, we would actually see more suicide among weak immortals than we do among ordinary humans?
I’m not sure that ceteres can be held pares. Weak immortal humans I’d bet would be less risk-taking, and would have fewer children. The aggregate attachment to family would be less, which may make suicide an easier exit (since the desire not to harm one’s loved ones contributes to preventing miserable people from killing themselves), but on the other hand, it would probably reduce suffering overall so fewer people would desire death to begin with. And if having children makes your life worse, then that’s another reason the weak immortals might suffer less than we do. Of course, it’s in general extremely difficult to speculate about what kind of society weak immortals would have, so it’s hard to estimate how much suicidality there’d be.
I generally have a hard time with hypothetical questions of the sort that change one major thing and then insist that everything else is the same. Changing that major thing can be inconsistent with keeping everything else the same. And if it’s declared that by magic it’s not inconsistent, then you’re describing a world in which I lack reason to trust in my intuition or even my reasoning. It’d be like asking whether a square peg could fit in a round hole if the square peg’s corners were truncated, but dictating that it’s still a square.
[…] to have to handwave on this one for the time being or maybe always, for the reason pointed out by JasonSL in a recent comment, that it’s hard to have anything resembling accurate intuitions about how people might […]