Should they go kill themselves? Funny that the mental failings of the jumper evoke such sympathy and the mental failings of the "asshole" evoke such hatred.
There's a significant qualitative difference between someone being self-destructive (albeit with traumatic consequences for those who are connected to them) and engineering the destruction of someone else.
There may be mental failings involved which are outside the control of the individual, but I don't think that's the whole story or we'd have to throw the idea of moral agency out the window (I picked the example I did because the person neither appeared nor claimed to suffer cognitive impairment AFAIK). We are actors as well as being acted upon by our environment and biology; insofar as our activities impact others, we have some responsibility to regulate them.
When visiting the US this summer, we walked across the Golden Gate (which at the time didn't have the "anti-suicide rails" that I believe are planned).
In several places there were both help phones and signs asking people to seek help, and also in one place there was graffiti on the pavement saying something like "somebody loves you". It was quite moving.
You have to find the will and reason to live yourself if you really think life is that grim that you have to end it I have only one thing to say to you make sure you are 100% certain about that and there's no other way out of your situation before you do it this is one of the few things that cannot be undone.
There's almost certainly better options you can try before doing this.
Fundamentally, why shouldn't people have a right to privacy? Are you saying that there isn't any information about yourself that you'd want to keep private? Why are the details of my life anybody's business but my own?
> I don't see many people claiming their right to lie, their right to fraud, their right to steal. What makes privacy so different?
Well, for one thing, privacy is neither immoral nor illegal. How are these things even related?
> Fundamentally, why shouldn't people have a right to privacy? Are you saying that there isn't any information about yourself that you'd want to keep private? Why are the details of my life anybody's business but my own?
You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally.
Whether or not the imperfect beings we are want to hide things from others doesn't justify it to be right. People want to keep things private because they gain something from it. There's a lot of things I want from this world, but society don't hand them to me in the form of a fundamental right.
> Well, for one thing, privacy is neither immoral nor illegal. How are these things even related?
Says who? I would argue that privacy is actually immoral. Above all, though, what's immoral is to make illegal any non-coercive acquisition of data. Making that illegal is the real mistake here. And I don't suggest we make privacy illegal, that wouldn't be possible.
> You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally.
This is an extreme view. How can we even begin to talk about desires and rights under this assumption? If I don't own myself, how can I own anything? We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on. Is murder even wrong in this context?
> We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on.
Of course.
> Is murder even wrong in this context?
Murder is not wrong. Murder is just an action that reflects a decision. Whether it's good or not depends entirely on whether the outcome is optimal or not. Murder is not qualitatively different from, say, breaking a window. The only difference is one of quantity and scale. Generally, much more time and energy is invested in a living person than in the creation and installation of a window.
I implement laziness "manually" all the time in Objective-C.
For example, imagine something happens which invalidates a property which must be calculated (say, a bounding box for a graphical object).
Instead of immediately recomputing it, just set it to nil, and only recompute it the next time the property is actually accessed.
This way you can harmlessly invalidate it multiple times without doing a potentially expensive calculation (which just gets thrown out by subsequent invalidations).
It's fair to say that it's laziness, in my view. That sort of thing is just a manual implementation of what laziness would do in a particular situation. The closure that the thunk would hold is essentially diffused into the object that contains the lazy property.
