[ralish]

I'm sorry, but that's absolute rubbish. I rarely post on HN, but I feel compelled to do so here.

People rarely live in a vacuum, they engage with society, and those interactions have tangible results. I feel this is obvious, but it seems lost on people. When a person is systematically bullied, that negative interaction with society will inevitably have an impact, and if severe enough, suicide is a potential result. Aaron had the weight of a state on his shoulders, and while I'm glad to say I've never experienced that the prospects of it terrify me. As someone with a history of depression, I can quite confidently state, I'm unsure I'd survive through the experience, and can foresee it simply becoming too much.

To state that no one has responsibility for his death is to excuse the gross abuses of those who's interactions with Aaron led to it. You are giving a pass to disgraceful prosecution tactics including intimidation and overreach. You are giving a pass to institutions that abandoned morality by siding with an abusive prosecution instead of standing up for a member of their community. Most egregiously, you are encouraging a broad view that only the victim is at fault for their choice. There's so much wrong with this view it's hard to know where to start, but for one, it suggests they're in the position to even logically and rationally evaluate the choice. If you're depressed to the point of suicide, it's fairly safe to assume, you aren't thinking logically or rationally. How can you then be held at fault for the resultant choice?

Suicide is horrible, and I've known some who've taken that path. But blaming those who commit such an act is the easy way out. To reduce the instances of people taking their own lives, you need to understand why. This means fully comprehending the circumstances that led to their choice, and this means holding those to account that contributed to it.

[unreal37]

"But blaming those who commit such an act is the easy way out."

You have to admit that people that commit suicide are primarily responsible for their own deaths. That's like saying, people who drink alcohol are primarily responsible for getting drunk - it's just true prima face.

He killed himself, therefore he was responsible for his own death.

[roc]

> "You have to admit that people that commit suicide are primarily responsible for their own deaths. "

Perhaps in the same way that we might say someone who dies of cancer is responsible for their own deaths. That is: if we were in the habit of assigning blame to the suffering, for the medical problems they suffer.

Or if we are to outright deny what science has to say about it and instead further the US habit of denying mental health conditions as actual, legitimate medical issues.

[brenschluss]

"He killed himself, therefore he was responsible for his own death."

Would you say the same thing about a war veteran who has PTSD and commits suicide? Or a rape victim who commits suicide? Or a middle school kid who commits suicide after months of cyberbullying?

I doubt it.

[mpyne]

While I fall firmly in the 'words mean things' camp, I think it's important to note that this isn't an apples:apples comparison.

People undergo felony charges all the time without killing themselves.

A Federal charge sheet involving the possibility of a 'mere' 6-month sentence is not the equivalent of months of sustained cyberbullying.

To continue with your analogy somewhat, if a new sailor showed up to the boat and his divison said 'Hey look, it's the F.N.G.' on day 1, with no further hazing from there, and that new sailor hung himself, is his division to blame for 'cyberbullying'? Or is it appropriate to wonder whether the new sailor has something more going on inside that pre-dated his arrival?

[jlgreco]

> People undergo felony charges all the time without killing themselves.

Plenty of veterans don't kill themselves.

[mpyne]

Yes, that's pretty much exactly my point.

If we considered it the other way (that allowing someone to join the military or any difficult job is tantamount to cyber bullying) then imagine all the blame you'd have to spread around should a recruit or veteran kill themselves.

Then think about the possibility that the suicide many have been for reasons no different than they would have encountered, even if they had never joined at all.

[jlgreco]

I think it is pretty clear that the military and the involved politicians have the blood of dead solders on their hands. Whether they eventually succumb to PTSD, or died after contact with dioxin contaminated agent orange doesn't make much difference to me. The existence of veterans who have not died does not somehow absolve those who share responsibility for the death of others. The possibility that some may have committed suicide anyway does not absolve them. There is a lot of blame to be spread around.

[dllthomas]

I wonder what the ratios are...

[jlgreco]

> Would you say the same thing about a war veteran who has PTSD and commits suicide?

This example is absolutely great.

Surely nobody would blame a conscripted Vietnam veteran for succumbing to illness caused by Agent Orange, but it seems many here would blame that same veteran for succumbing to mental illness induced by the same war.

Really makes you think how poorly we deal with mental illness as a society...

[rdouble]

Aaron Swartz's situation was not like any of those things. His case was very similar to Bradley Manning's and Manning did not commit suicide. It's pretty clear from his blog and behavior that Aaron Swartz had untreated bipolar disorder which sadly has extremely high suicide rates.

[katbyte]

i was under the impression that Bradley Manning is under constant supervision in a SHU or something such that it would be almost impossible for him to kill himself.

[mpyne]

For a some period of time at the beginning, yes. I think it was 7 months or so that he spent in alternating variants of suicide watch or prevention of injury status.

But for most of his pre-trial confinement he has been kept in the general population, and hasn't killed himself. Even after he plead guilty to charges that would have guaranteed him a sentence far worse than what Swartz would have received (even if Swartz had gone for a trial), Manning didn't kill himself.

[philwelch]

Schoolchildren are too young to be held truly responsible for any of their decisions, so in the last example I would hold the parents responsible. In the other cases--yes, it's certainly one's own decision and one's own responsibility to commit suicide.

[bmcfeeley]

You've established here that there exist reasons (i.e. immaturity, lack of empathy, or whatever you prefer to call it) for which we should absolve individuals of blame in situations resulting in suicide. The only way this doesn't directly contradict your grandparent comment is if you also feel mental illness (diagnosed or otherwise) is not in this set of reasons. I think this is the crux of what others have disagreed with; mental illnesses quite literally alter your brain's ability to function properly and reason through these choices. How is this impairment any different than the "impairment" of a child's lack of development?

EDIT: grammar

[philwelch]

We only blame suicide on mental illness because suicide is itself considered a symptom of mental illness. It's a circular argument. Perhaps Aaron was a fundamentally irrational person who couldn't be held responsible for his own actions, but that doesn't pin the blame back on anyone else. Aaron's the only person who could possibly hold responsibility for his suicide.

[bmcfeeley]

Your use of 'blame' vs. 'responsibility' is confounding here. It's possible you answered the question I posed at the end of my reply but if you did I'm not seeing an answer here. Please enlighten me if I've missed it.

In response to this, by your own logic you've claimed that either 1) Aaron holds sole responsibility for his actions or 2) We can't assign responsibility to anyone. I disagree with both these conclusions because I don't think responsibility must be fully distributed to a single party. In what world are our actions absolved of any connection to outside influences? If I'm unconscious, and a doctor tests my knee reflex with one of those little hammers, and my leg moves - who has agency in causing the leg to move? (I in no way mean to insinuate this is an apples:apples comparison, just trying to tease out the implications of your logic.)

[thezilch]

Wait, I thought we blame the parents for the actions of their untrained children? And only children are indirectly villainous and subsequently their parents; never corporate or government institutions and their "upbringing."

Whatever drives our argument, I guess.

[Ygg2]

For all intents and purposes, state of a mind someone deciding suicide is different and can be easily remedied by giving some time to further reflect (morbidly enough if you for example hide the gun from a man that wants to commit suicide, all chances are that he will give up on suicide).

Aaron did the deed, but the circumstances in which he found himself were extremely dire. Government and MIT have a lot of stake in that death, even they aren't the one who pulled the trigger.

Imagine if you would have the prospect of spending your best years in a prison, and the terrible prospect of joblessness once you left prison. Worse yet, his torment wouldn't end with prison, and adapting to life outside bars, I'm sure government would make him suffer for all the things he supposedly did. He would be under constant supervision, he wouldn't be able to stay true to himself. Even slightest doubt of activism would probably return him to a jail cell. He only could look forward to more fear and terror.

[jlgreco]

Does an abusive father have no moral responsibility for his children falling into alcoholism?

[unreal37]

The abusive father should definitely be responsible for being abusive and if that abuse breaks some type of law, then they should be punished for their actions. But should the father be responsible for every bad thing their kid does as an adult?

If adults who were abused as children become alcoholics, and then they drove drunk and killed someone, it's the kid who should be arrested and not the father.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have support systems in place for people to go get help, but moral responsibility has a clear line to me.

[philwelch]

By your logic, a culture that teaches people they aren't responsible for their own actions would bear responsibility as well.

[mistercow]

You are presenting a false dichotomy. There is lots of room in between "no responsibility" and "sole responsibility".

[jlgreco]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129181

[kazagistar]

I think we have different ideas about the meaning of responsibility. I don't care much for responsibility in the "who is the one who we should blame" sense. I prefer responsibility in the "what can we do to prevent this in the future" sense. Saying "he could have not hung himself" is not a complete or particularly effective solution. The prosecution being overzealous, the laws being unjust, and MIT taking a poor stance on the issue... these are the problems that can be solved. Those are the people who can be "responsible" for preventing similar needless tragedy in the future.

[flaviusb]

You are equivocating over the word 'responsible'. His actions were the proximate cause of his death (a meaning for the word 'responsibility' which does not imply moral judgement), but others are culpable for his death (another meaning for the word 'responsibility' which does not imply proximate cause, but does imply moral judgement). So, it is perfectly meaningful to say that people who commit suicide are primarily responsible for their own deaths in the first sense, but primarily not responsible for their deaths in the second sense.

[ajb]

Responsibility is not mutually exclusive.

[angersock]

"This means fully comprehending the circumstances that led to their choice, and this means holding those to account that contributed to it."

"their choice" is the key bit here.

We can (and should!) look at circumstances as you've described, but it does a disservice to everyone to accept a suicide as the result of anything other than the individual's choice--this cheapens the act.

[CamperBob2]

Not only that, but the arguments in this thread ("Oh, he was depressed/bipolar/any number of other Internet-based psychiatric diagnoses -- he couldn't help it!") also serve to deflect blame from MIT and their useful idiots in the prosecutor's office. To read the comments in this thread, anything down to and including a parking ticket might have pushed him over the edge.

It seems hard for people to grasp that the actions of Aaron's antagonists need to be judged independently of his decision to end his own life. We really don't want to start assigning responsibility for other peoples' suicides.

[philwelch]

His prosecutors are surely responsible for their actions--namely, over zealously prosecuting a man beyond the legitimate interests of justice--but that does not relieve Aaron of responsibility for his actions.

People can be provoked into suicide by a number of things. If a woman divorces her husband and he commits suicide, the woman may be blamed for the manner of the divorce, whatever that may be, but it was not her choice for the man to die. Conversely, if Aaron didn't commit suicide, the prosecutors would be no less responsible for their cruelty and injustice towards him.

Your moral responsibility for what you do to me has nothing to do with how I choose to react to it. I am not exonerating Aaron's prosecutors, though the logical conclusion of your argument is that you would exonerate them, had Aaron reacted differently.

[mistercow]

I think if a woman sets out to destroy a man's life via a nasty and aggressive divorce, especially if she knows he has a history of depression, then yes, she does bear some responsibility for his death if he kills himself.

People have a responsibility to diligently consider the consequences of their actions, and to act based on their expectations of those consequences. "Consequence" isn't hard to define here; it's "what things are likely to happen after X, versus what things are likely to happen after ~X". There's no "will it be my fault?" There is only "will it be more or less likely depending on what I do?"

After the fact, the matter of responsibility is a function of whether the person took reasonable measures to obtain information, and whether the person acted in a way that would maximize the utility of the expected outcome based on that information.

Note that responsibility need not be a conserved quantity. Had the prosecutor not been informed that Swartz was a suicide risk, he would bear exactly the same amount of responsibility for his own death. The prosecutor would have just born less.

[philwelch]

She bears responsibility for setting out to destroy a man's life via a nasty and aggressive divorce, but his reaction to that is his own.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're ignoring the evidentiary value of his decision. If someone is pushed over the edge, that is good evidence that some antagonist has been doing more than the acceptable amount of pushing.

[mistercow]

I feel like you didn't read past the first sentence of my comment.

[philwelch]

I don't accept that one is responsible for how others react to their actions, no, at least not in the way that you suggest. That's the difference between moral agents and the amoral (natural) world. Aaron Swartz, to put it crudely, bears moral responsibility for what gravity and the rope did to him because gravity and rope are not moral agents. Carmen Ortiz doesn't bear moral responsibility for what Aaron did, because Aaron is a moral agent. Her responsibility begins and ends with her own actions, which were equally reprehensible whether or not Aaron chose to hang himself over them.

[antoko]

I'm sorry, but that's absolute rubbish. I rarely post on HN, but I feel compelled to do so here.

Thanks for this, you should post more, a community is only as good as its active members.

[Torrents]

Very well said, thank you for the response. It's disheartening to read people act like the prospect of a future in federal prison (over a "crime" where no one was hurt! And where the "victims" (JSTOR) don't even want prosecution!) is a negligible factor in pushing someone into suicide.

Arguably life in our modern prison system is one of the most horrific experiences you can have, some of the most miserable living conditions on the planet. The effect on your psyche of having a group of highly empowered, well funded government agents seeking zealously to place you in that cage over what is really a silly reason cannot be overestimated.

Yes it's tragic that Aaron committed suicide. But the real tragedy is that we as a people let our government cage non-violent offenders in a veritable hell all the time for stupid stupid reasons. It's an atrocity that it happens, and for MIT to take a position of neutrality on whether or not a human should be caged up for downloading documents is at the very least condoning that atrocity.

[Zikes]

If depression and suicidal thoughts are not logical or rational, how can anyone outside of the condition hope to interact with someone suffering from it?