[tycho-newman]

No one should ask a suicidal person not to kill themselves.

If you believe in autonomy, every human has the right to decide when and how to end their lives. Slavery denies human autonomy by taking all control away.

Even when you think their decision is a bad one, it’s their life and their decision.

[daseiner1]

Asking isn’t forcing. And people who are suicidal are often in an unhealthy state of mind that doesn’t persist over an extended period of time. And we obviously place limits on autonomy in all sorts of ways.

[tycho-newman]

I don’t make the distinction between asking and forcing. To me, you can ask why someone wants to die. But stopping them? Or asking them to stop? Eh, not up to me.

[dijksterhuis]

asking

> The act of inquiring or requesting; a petition; solicitation.

forcing

> The accomplishing of any purpose violently, precipitately, prematurely, or with unusual expedition.

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unless you’re a psychopath, your 20 year old offspring calling you at 4am about to kill themselves is gonna result in you doing basically anything you can to save them.

it’s very easy to sit on the internet and take a perceived moral high ground. it’s much harder to retain that high ground when you get that phone call.

i used to have all sorts of bullshit “rules” like this [0]. but life ain’t binary man. absolutisms don’t really exist out there in the real world. i know it probably makes you feel “safer” knowing that you have a “rule” for this that you feel you can apply carte blanche — it used to for me — but it’s all bullshit man. it’s just the policeman in our own heads.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43803874

[tycho-newman]

I get why you see this as me having an inflexible black and white rule. I see it differently.

I see respecting individual autonomy as the best way to respond to the shades of grey in life.

This respect for autonomy goes all the way to the ultimate act of choosing if and when to end your own life.

Even if that decision is a mistake, I believe individuals are free to make fatal mistakes.

[grugagag]

Suicidal people are in a broken state, overcome by emotions and irrationality. When over that they’ll likely thank you for stopping them and likely to not understand themselves what the drive to kill themselves was except for remembering how cloudy they felt.

[tycho-newman]

That's all valid, but I'm going to stick to my autonomy rule. People are free to make fatal mistakes.