Many questions are never asked in these articles.
Is suicide bad? Is it immoral? Is it a crime? Should it not be permitted? If it is wrong, immoral, and a crime, should people who attempt it be punished?
Is suicide bad? Is it immoral? Is it a crime? Should it not be permitted? If it is wrong, immoral, and a crime, should people who attempt it be punished?
Regardless, these questions are asked all of the time. A news article about a new feature on a social media site isn't an appropriate forum for discussing such a ridiculously complex topic as the ethics of suicide. The only way your comment could be less appropriate is if you were advocating for a discussion on the ethics of murder on an article about a murder suicide.
Edit: I suggest checking out the article on suicide on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Encyclopedia as a whole is a great resource, and this article is no different:
Strictly speaking, I don't think that necessarily means that these people are better off surviving. One could imagine that they are in pain that is temporary, but severe enough that they are better off dieing immediately, even taking into account that they are missing out on the life that would otherwise have come after the pain.
By making them stay alive, we are perhaps forcing them into the worse option.
Similarly, suicide mostly seems to be impulsive -- if access to a certain method of attempting suicide is reduced, the corresponding decrease in suicide attempts via that method is not reflected in a corresponding rise in suicide attempts via other methods.
Lastly, suicide rarely occurs in the depths of depression. People who attempt to take their own life are much more likely to be heading into or out of a depressive episode.
While these aren't the only reasons that we should attempt to prevent suicides, I feel they provide sufficient counter-evidence to your argument. I will say that I am in favor of physician-assisted suicide, and there is definitely a contingent of people who are hell-bent on killing themselves, but for the most part most people who are suicidal will later be thankful to be alive.
If you'd like to know more, I suggest reading the article on suicide on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/
Edit: Section 3.4 (Libertarian Views and the Right to Suicide) responds to your criticism very directly[1]
If you find that interesting (of if you still find yourself unable to sympathize with those who believe they should attempt to prevent suicides), I'd suggest taking a course on either biomedical ethics, or ethics in general. These topics have been debated for centuries at this point, and there are a number of very compelling arguments on both sides.
[1] This position is open to at least two objections. First, it does not seem to follow from having a right to life that a person has a right to death, i.e., a right to take her own life. Because others are morally prohibited from killing me, it does not follow that anyone else, including myself, is permitted to kill me. This conclusion is made stronger if the right to life is inalienable, since in order for me to kill myself, I must first renounce my inalienable right to life, which I cannot do (Feinberg 1978). It is at least possible that no one has the right to determine the circumstances of a person's death! Furthermore, as with the property-based argument, the right to self-determination is presumably circumscribed by the possibility of harm to others.
No one chose to exist, but I think everyone is entitled to not exist, regardless of their reasons. Even if someone is thankful that they were prevented from taking their own life, that's essentially an argument of the form "the ends justifies the means."
As Camus said, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." I think it's up to everyone to decide that for themselves. Preventing people from doing such is unethical, imho.
You have completely misrepresented my argument. Nowhere did I present anything that could even remotely be construed as a consequentialist argument.
I provided that point as a direct rebuttal to your point that if we look at agent-focused moral systems, and ignore agent-neutral moral systems, preventing people from committing suicide doesn't make sense.
> I think it's up to everyone to decide that for themselves. Preventing people from doing such is unethical, imho.
Your opinion is indefensible and insane. What you have implied constitutes prevention is absurdly broad. For instance, from a consequentialist standpoint, calling a friend you fear may be suicidal and asking them to hang out would constitute prevention at least some of the time. Ignoring that issue, the evidence I've presented effectively argues against the idea that most people who attempt suicide wish to kill themselves. Most suicidal individuals are impulsively responding to what the French might call L'appel du vide, or the call of the void. If they were rational, they would not attempt suicide in the first place.
I cannot imagine you actually understand the points Camus is trying to make if this is the conclusion you have come to. Please seek out further education on the subject. Your knowledge of ethics and philosophy is appalling, and ultimately harmful.
I'm sorry you find my ethics so abhorrent, though I often feel that way about the ethics of others.
What else would justify the means? There's nothing wrong with that form of argument.
There are arguments of that form that are wrong, but not because of the form, rather, because either the ends don't justify the means, or because the means produce additional unaccounted costs which offset the value they have in producing the ends. Or, because there are less-costly means to the ends, or because the means don't actually produce the ends used to justify them.
I've never seen a valid argument of that form and I use this particular phrase as a heuristic for validating arguments. If you have examples of arguments that best take that form, I'd be happy to entertain them.
If you want to make the point that certain means are categorically unacceptable, make that argument (which will very quickly, I suspect, get to a root moral axiom on which no debate is possible, simply agreement or disagreement) rather than raising irrelevancies about the form of the argument.
That's not a mental issue, it's cultural.
Not all suicides are the result of mental anguish or impulsive decisions.
Whether or not it's a right can tend to be something of an abstract discussion. But when someone commits suicide, it's not abstract. They die.
And it's not abstract to me, because I've helped prevent the suicides of two friends, and failed to prevent that of a neighbor.
I think there are conditions in which someone can live that is worse than death, and the problem is finding where you draw that line for yourself. For instance, I would prefer death to slavery or permanent incarceration.
This feature provides the pretext for such force.
I generally believe that government shouldn't protect people from themselves. Again, I'm only arguing against using force of law to prevent someone from taking their own life, not talking someone down from the ledge.
I find it gruesome. Revoking the right for someone to end their life is torture for some. It's not without reason that's what happens with prison: They keep you forcefully alive. It's also what happens when you're medically assisted and you can't go for euthanasia. It also happens when you're deep in the failure of life: The living will check on you so you don't commit suicide. There are anti-suicide barriers everywhere. There's pretty much no place to commit suicide anymore. And now facebook.
Our civilization relies on removing the right of people from resigning from life. We want them to produce.
Not true. many societies have had the concept of ritual suicide as a matter of honour.
Nowhere in this discussion is there an implication that suicide is wrong, immoral, or a crime, or that the people should be punished; I don't understand why you're even bringing that up.