I think this is an interesting question, cause, it could be considered that they can't die, so they can't really kill themselves, ya know?
So answer me yae or nae
Posted Jan 2, 2023, 4:45 AM UTC
I think this is one of those mens rea situations in ethics, where intentions matter.
Are they hoping that their immortality will fail? Are they trying to experience as many different ways to die as possible for personal experiential gain? Does dieing feel good to them?
Also, the specific mechanics of this theoretical are going to play heavily. Does everyone have this ability? Do others continue when someone dies, or is it a groundhogs day world reset? Does their dead body continue to exist, and they get a new one, or do they magically reassemble from the parts and then come back to life?
If theyre constantly traumatizing witnesses, and forcing society to deal with the aftermath (cleanup) who have no idea they'll be fine, thats a lot worse than if their death triggers a reset, or if no one has to clean up the scene, or remembers the event happened.
If everyone has this ability, 'death' ceases to have the same meaning, implication, and morality. (Do police shoot on site, tske the bodies into custody, then interrogate the suspects when they reanimate)
If you believe in heaven, are they choking up the afterlife with clone souls?
All in all, it's an interesting concept, but with too many variables to provide any blanket statement on.
This is based on a story I'm reading, where everytime the main character dies, the get sent back in time until before they died,
and it's only the main character,
they don't hope it will fail, they are counting on it not failing, they kill themselves to change things,
they are trying to kill themselves in as many different ways as possible to find the quickest/least painful,
they do enjoy the dying but specify, they wouldn't do it without the power,
but sometimes they kill themselves without a purpose
Also, no one remembers a thing, even if they die Infront of someone else
So. At least to me, the action doesn't fit the definition of suicide, because it neither results in, nor is intended to, end their life.
Certain things could be considered suicidal for certain people but not others, (eg a person with a peanut allergy purposefully eating peanuts.) This person isn't suicidal, their mortality just follows different rules, and they know it. The rest just sounds like they're exploring the parameters of their unique ability.
I flatly don't know and refuse to answer you with either yae or nae. You've handed me one of the hardest questions I've ever seen.
I'm reading a book called Permutation City that deals with just such beguiling issues.
The problem concerns population ethics, the ethics of simulated minds, the ethics of the hard problem of consciousness, and the grounding problem of ethics. It's fucking HARD.
You can crank out dozens of wickedly hard, intuition-breaking, ethical-theory trashing problems by considering high science fiction and imaginative fantasy thought experiments like this.
Like, in Groundhog's Day, when Bill Murry gets to the end of the day and it loops, do all the other people die? If Murry does the exact same thing for two days in a row, are both days' people counted?
This is like, Rick and Morty troll ethics and it's annoying and important and terribly hard to grapple with. If you treat it as a joke you don't much care about solving it and that's just a classic stupidity-class coping mechanism. If you treat it as a puzzle it loses all ethical weight and cognitive distance causes problems with your seeing it straight. If you take it seriously and literally and regard it as a crucial type of problem to solve, well, that's when you start having recurring nightmares of skinless muscle figures staring blindly along autonomous slaughterhouses run by superinteligent aliens who are also you. And worse. Ask me how I know.
It's the kind of thing that keeps philosophy of ethics doctorate students awake at night.
I'm going to have to refer you to Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons.
What do you think?
I hadn't thought about all of this, it is very interesting, I'll definitely check out the reasons and person's