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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

It was Aaron's choice to kill himself. He wasn't a victim of anything but his own mind.

Aren't you just repeating the first few words of the grandparent comment?

I hardly think "suicide is a choice" is an appropriate thing to say. Take recent suicide rates in the military. Do all those soldiers decide to become so depressed as to kill themselves, or does environment have something to do with it?

Suicide is a choice. I fully agree that MIT acted abominably and in an ethically, if not legally, questionable manner with regards to giving evidence and support to the prosecution but not defense. But you can't blame them for his decision to take his life. It was an incredibly selfish act given the intense pain it caused his family.

Another word-for-word echo of the top comment in this thread.

Seriously? I'm not blaming MIT. What did I say that indicated this? I'm arguing about "suicide is a choice." It's not. Choice has something to do with it, but to say it is choice is asinine. To say that is to never have been depressed or truly known another person who was depressed or suffering from another mental illness.

Also, is it not selfish of a family to expect a person with mental illness (or other serious problems) to suffer for the rest of his/her life just so they can delay the loss?

You must have some pretty radical libertarian free will convictions if you don't even grant that mental illness can impair free will--a concept that even in the absence of illness is philosophically highly debatable.

The concept of selfishness is not applicable here, since the individual does not gain anything by suicide, nor does it have anything to do with excessive self love. Suicide is simply an act deemed pathological by society, any other value judgment is bound to be derived from philosophically arbitrary and subjective ethical convictions.

I can guarantee by your quip; you have never dealt with our legal system.

You couldn't use that argument against the thousands of people who have dealt with our legal system in as bad or worse scenarios and did not commit suicide.

This is a thoroughly dumb argument. You might as well say that cancer is perfectly nice given that most people survive, and that the ones who don't have something wrong with them.

The mistake you're making is that responsibility isn't zero-sum. Is Swartz responsible for killing himself? Sure. But if prosecutors are unjustly harsh with a lot of people in a way that causes the suicide rate in that group to jump, are they responsible too? Yes indeed.

If multiple factors cause something, multiple people can be responsible, and the responsibility of one does not diminish the responsibility of the other.

But now the mistake you're making is that if everyone is responsible then no one is responsible, which is an even worse state of affairs.

He didn't say everyone was responsible. But even if we were it would not follow that no one is since responsibility is not something that depends on others not having any.

> He didn't say everyone was responsible.

Didn't say it directly, but follow the logic.

If the prosecutors are now responsible for only proferring charges on suspects who won't kill themselves then it obviously follows that we need to ensure that no one appoints prosecutors who would do this (it's life and death after all!).

So now the person appointing the prosecutor potentially has blood on their hands. Likewise for the person appointing the person appointing the prosecutor. And God only forbid the population as a whole votes for someone in this chain, could you live with yourself if you had voted for the person who appointed Ortiz or Heymann?

That is insanity and I refuse to go down that path.

Instead point your finger at the person (or even persons) responsible, but don't act like simply being a big mean jerk is by itself tantamount to putting a noose around a man's neck. If that were really the case the vast majority of humanity would at some point be liable for manslaughter or attempted manslaughter.

Responsibility is not a binary property where any given individual is either responsible or not. There are varying degrees of responsibility. Obviously each step in your absurd slippery slope argument corresponds to a drastic decrease in the degree of responsibility. You aren't following the logic, you're evading logic entirely.

And yet people here are holding MIT and the prosecution team more responsible than Aaron himself for Aaron's own actions. I'll definitely agree with you that responsibility is not binary but I won't agree that the slippery slope argument isn't exactly what many of the HN'ers are on right now.

If it wasn't the legal system it would have been literally any other reason, big or small, that Aaron felt was terminally wrong with his life.

This is incredibly insulting. How could you possibly know this?

Because depressed, suicidal people kill themselves, usually when they're not facing prison?

In 2007 Schwartz posted what was believed to be a suicide note after being fired from reddit: http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150

Right.. but people tend to become depressed and suicidal when faced with prison time.

Being fired is also high on the depression list.

You're pointing out two dark moments in someones life. I've had far more than two and I don't by any means consider myself depressed.

> I've had far more than two and I don't by any means consider myself depressed.

That's actually the point... it is depression that kills, not merely subjecting someone to a "dark moment" in their life. We wouldn't have blamed Alexis and the rest of Team Reddit if Aaron had killed himself after being fired, we would have blamed his depression.

You could have easily said "I don't know that for sure" instead of posting irrelevant information.

Obviously false, or he would've killed himself years ago over someone buying the wrong kind of toilet paper.

Seriously, please educate yourself before offering embarrassing opinions. Clinical depression does not mean automatic suicide, it just makes you more prone to considering suicide when things are bad.

Are we referring to the same legal system that routinely has people cycle through it without killing themselves?

Comparing rates of attempted and completed suicide between the prison and general population is tricky, partly because access to means and methods should be much harder in prison.

But why are the rates of attempted or completed suicide so high?

I think mpyne was saying that there are plenty of people that go through the legal system and don't kill themselves. I don't think it had anything to do with comparing suicide rates in prison with other people. But instead pointing out that many, many, many people who are facing prison do not kill themselves. Some do. (adding my own opinion) But some people also kill themselves when facing divorce. Or job loss. Or Christmas. Depression is an illness. Depression lies.

Choice is probably not the right word, in that a suicidal person isn't thinking clearly (even if in his own mind he thinks he is). But it was his doing, not anyone else's.

Let's keep in mind that there is a pretty good example of external pressure and/or threat of persecution elevating suicide rates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth

If you also consider the differential susceptibility thesis (which seems to apply to Aaron rather well) then it's easy to argue that the government's conduct most likely did significantly contribute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_susceptibility_hyp...

Did you see people throwing themselves out of the World Trade Center not wanting to be burnt alive? Was it their choice to kill themselves? Were they victims of their own minds? Think about your stupid comment for a while.

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