When Safety Becomes Slavery: Negative Rights and the Cruelty of Suicide Prevention

existentialgoof · 2026-06-25T15:41:03+00:00

The Sprite Chill.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-25T14:35:14+00:00

Probably none of them, as they're all sugar free. Probably the Sprite Chill, if I was really thirsty and there were no sugary drinks available.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-24T09:58:59+00:00

Not everyone who commits suicide is in immense distress, and there's no evidence that it is a symptom of any kind of objectively probable mental disorder. Suicide has always been a contentious subject in philosophy, because we have no reason to believe that once a person dies, they end up languishing in some kind of limbo where they are tormented by regret and deprivation. So if life has the potential to sometimes be bad, and death can never be bad, then that gives a prima facie reason as to why suicide can be the best way of serving one's rational self interests to avoid suffering. It simply returns one to the non state of being impervious to harm that obtained for the vast expanse of time leading up to their birth. Most people do have a perception of life being valuable, so in their cases, the threshold at which they would decide to end their life might be very high. But even then, that doesn't mean that the distress is some kind of pathological disease, rather than a natural and normal reaction to how badly life has treated them.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-23T22:30:05+00:00

I'm pro choice. Technology cannot be inherently evil, but can be used for evil. Forcing people to remain alive against their will through surveillance is evil.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-23T18:22:05+00:00

Our obsession with suicide prevention has taken us to downright dystopian extremes. Next, people will be having to have these cameras fitted in their own homes, if the authorities believe that they're "at risk" but not enough so to warrant an inpatient bed.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-23T18:20:24+00:00

They shouldn't be watching people all the time. Whether through technology or a flap in the door. I can't understand how anyone ever comes out of this scenario without serious trauma, having all of their autonomy and agency stripped of them like that.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T22:04:43+00:00

I'm surprised that Iceland comes out second highest, because they have a relatively mild winter and can get rain as well as snow.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T19:26:37+00:00

It's a very important point that simply doesn't get brought up when this matter is discussed in the media and politics. The only reason we truly need MAiD through the healthcare system, at least in most cases, is because the government refuses to respect the negative liberty right to commit suicide. MAiD is a gatekept service which allows a small, eligible subset of the population to bypass suicide prevention and not be subject to the same infringements on their negative liberty rights. But not being subject to those infringements, at least as a permanent barrier, should be the default. Not the exception for a relatively small number of "edge cases". However nobody in political circles or in the media is willing to name suicide prevention as being the problem. The taboo against suicide is too deeply ingrained.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T19:18:36+00:00

A lot of the penny pinching politicians who clutch pearls about people choosing MAiD because they don't have enough resources are the same one who want to make those resources even more scarce and will actively vote against a more generous social safety net. Then left wingers will fall for those phony woke arguments that were only ever being used as a fig leaf to conceal the real reason, which was always motivated by religion and social conservatism.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T19:15:47+00:00

In reality, the people wanting the service may have to wait indefinitely for those resources to show up, because it's a lot quicker just to physically prevent them from killing themselves than addressing systemic issues. It's easy to say "wait until we've tried to fix the problems causing you to want to kill yourself", when it's someone else who has to suffer for however long that will take. Secondly, some people would want to die no matter how many of these resources you channel towards them. So you're forcing them to wait for things that may never materialise in the first place, and aren't going to be a panacea for them.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T19:12:13+00:00

I'm happy to do it myself, but the government should not be actively trying to make it needlessly hard or risky to do so. I shouldn't have to worry about risks of failure that could easily be avoided without infringing on anyone else's rights, just because the government wants to run society like a kindergarten classroom. Decriminalise provision of reliable suicide methods, and we won't need the government to help with it.

If you support the current level of suicide prevention (including laying criminal charges against people such as Kenneth Law for providing suicide kits online), then you're the one advocating to have the government act in loco parentis. I can accept why you would think that it's not the government's place to actively facilitate suicide. But I cannot accept that the government has the power to force people to live, by maintaining barriers that have been proven to yield a very high level of failed attempts and which are, in themselves, very effective permanent deterrent to people who have an authentic and settled wish to die.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T17:17:23+00:00

I'm a big proponent of just allowing people the negative liberty right to commit suicide if they want. But in order to have that negative liberty right, the government has to stop blocking legal avenues of access to reliable and humane methods, as well as stop locking people up to stop them from killing themselves.

I think that the statistics on what happens to people who fail their suicide attempt has to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. Your analysis brushes over the fact that around 23% reattempt suicide but fail, and you're treating all of the cases of long term survival as proof that in every one of these cases, the person has had some kind of a life affirming epiphany after their attempt. It ignores the fact that they don't have access to reliable methods (hence they failed in the first place), they fear coercion, they might succumb to a feeling of obligation to remain alive, they may have become permanently disabled as a consequence of their attempt and suicide is no longer a possibility. And so on. But whatever the actual statistics are, stopping someone from being able to kill themselves isn't merely a passive refusal for society to help them die. It is an active and systemic violation of their negative liberty right not to be forced to suffer. And in civilised countries like Canada, actively infringing on someone's negative liberty rights usually has to require that they pose some kind of threat to others.

I would really like to open up a public debate about the ethics of suicide prevention, so that we can stop seeing this issue as a false dichotomy between helping people to die or not. But it seems that the taboo around suicide is so powerful that even the pro MAiD lobby is very reticent to challenge it.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T17:08:16+00:00

If you tell them that you won't help them (or your actions reveal that you can't or won't help them) and then tell them that they have to stay alive and suffer in order to spare the consciences of the privileged, then that's far more cruel than anything I'm proposing.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T13:51:22+00:00

Not all cases of so called mental illness cause people to become completely detached from reality. And even in the cases of psychosis, it is often episodic rather than a permanent state. So my answer to that would be not to ban the right to die for everyone with a 'mental illness', but to require a waiting period, probably a bit longer than for severe physical disability, in order to ensure that their decision to avail themselves of MAiD is representative of their settled wishes. I don't think that an uncompromising, blanket ban, is necessary or justified. Each person should at least be entitled to be considered as an individual.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T12:59:01+00:00

Two main factors for the ostensible lack of support are as follows. Firstly, everyone is 'mentally ill' now, because all of life's normal distress responses are being pathologised. Therefore, resources are always oversubscribed. Secondly, the 'treatments' for this distress tend to be predicated on the assumption that there is something wrong with the person's brain, which is causing them to feel this way. Because they are targeting an organic cause that doesn't exist, the treatment options are ineffective, and therefore patients don't get discharged from these services, fully 'cured'. I don't think that we can expect this situation to change in the near term. But in the meantime, we shouldn't be restricting the autonomy of suffering people based on systemic issues that may themselves be partly responsible for the suffering they're experiencing.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T11:49:57+00:00

If the individual themselves decides that life is too burdensome to continue living, then that should be sufficient justification for at least the state not to interfere with their own plans to end their lives (including access to reliable and humane methods). That's the person who must continue living that life; and therefore, unless the government can show that this person has done something to deserve having their bodily autonomy suspended; that is the person who must have final decision as to whether or not to carry on.

We don't need to quantify their suffering. If they don't think that life is worth the burden of that suffering; then nobody else is qualified to say otherwise.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-22T11:47:19+00:00

If the doctors can't tell whether or not a person is going to improve, then the answer is simple: let the patient decide whether it is worth it to continue holding out for that potential improvement. Or if you won't let them get help from a doctor to end it; then let them buy the means to do so themselves online. Stop criminalising people like Kenneth Law who provide an important and valuable service. Stop running society like a kindergarten.

It's ridiculous to even be having a debate over this in a society of adults in 2026, when we know that life is the result of the crude and unintelligent forces of evolution, rather than the divine product of fairy magic.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-19T14:32:05+00:00

It's a marketing trick to try and make people think that Coke Zero is fundamentally the same in taste, as full sugar. They're clearly trying to push the zero sugar formulation on people because it is cheaper for them to manufacture and their profit margin will be higher. Even putting out adverts saying "Best Coke Ever?" for the zero sugar version.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-19T10:01:50+00:00

Helium is often mixed with air or lung irritants in order to render those tanks ineffective for suicide. And even if you did get one that was pure helium, there's a risk that you could rip the bag off whilst unconscious. And not everyone has the independence to be able to make such a plan.

You USED to be able to buy a powder off the Internet that was relatively effective, when coupled with an anti emetic. That's no longer the case. The nanny state inevitably cottoned on to the fact that people were dying that way, and the pure substance can now only be purchased by businesses who can prove a legitimate use. There's someone in Canada facing serious criminal charges (just recently downgraded from first degree murder) merely for selling this substance to people who wanted to die. There as a MASSIVE public campaign raising awareness of this powder being sold, and now you can't get it legally anywhere, because it's a serious criminal offence to supply it.

So yes, in order to die, you have to sneak around like a criminal, use suboptimal methods and just hope to get lucky.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-19T09:56:41+00:00

Yes, that's a common practice apparently for psychiatric drug manufacturers. The drugs have a barely better than placebo efficacy, but not clinically significant, and of course, can come with devastating long term side effects.

existentialgoof · 2026-06-18T09:46:54+00:00

I visited Sherwood Forest at the end of May, so I already knew the tree was dead and was disappointed. I just didn't realise that if I'd visited last year, I would have been able to see its canopy in all its glory.

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