Suicide = Murder?

Re: ok


Actually, I was thinking about it, and if if she had a terminal illness, this would probably be euthanasia.

But then you have the question of the baby. If the baby is healthy, some would consider this murder.

So when the guy drove the car off the bridge, he is committing suicide-murder-euthanasia, all in one act.

Pretty good. Or pretty bad, I mean.

No, I don't think it's murder, but I do think it's a selfish act. If you kill yourself, you no longer feel any pain, but the people you leave behind who care about you are the ones left to suffer. This alone would prevent me from ever killing myself.

No, you hadn't. No one had said anything that actually answered the question that this thread expressed. Any progress was purely tangential.



Some would say yes, and perhaps indeed it is definitionally. Your actions are playing a large causal role in your death.

Yet by the standard usage of the word, no it's not. Tripping and falling off a building would not be considered suicide by the majority of people, whereas jumping would. Thus by acceptation, no, accidental self-caused death is not suicide.

have you ever seen a tangelo, its a cross between a tangerine and another fruit (whose name I forgot, possibly after eating too many), your tangential word reminded me of it.

I see your point about the crash. Suicide / Murder / Euthanasia all depend on the context.

Would it be murder or euthanasia if:
You are on the operating table for a basic, non life threatening procedure.
An unnoticed error is made by a doctor, which causes a terminal disorder.
The doctor then 'puts you to sleep and you don't wake up' after you have given the OK, given that you find out that you have the new, lethal condition, but not that the doctor caused it.
Has The Doctor murdered you?

Nope. Can't say that I have, the word rings the faintests of bells so I may have heard it once or twice before.



Well the problem is that you're asking the wrong questions. I'm not trying to be offensive here and sorry if it's come off that way. It's just that these questions have been entirely linguistic. Every single one of them can be solved by opening a dictionary.

You've got all these preconceptions attached to these words and you seem to be attempting to see if those concepts apply under strange circumstances. (note: my "you" here refers to the debate in general, I'm not specifically targeting you makz).

All a murder is, is an unlawful killing. You seem to be trying to assign responsibility, but that's not really relevant to whether something is murder.

But when a person goes up against a jury, over someone who died, context is ultimately what the jury will base their decision on (or a large mafia pay-off). So in that sense murder / euthanasia are separated merely by context. There are also contextual differences within each category e.g. suicide is different if you (1) drive your car into a stobie-pole accidentally, or (2) slit your wrists. Also, simply looking in the dictionary will give you the theoretical perspective on each issue, but, like the Doctor / Patient question I asked before, you need to look deeper into the issue to come out with a proper understanding. I see where you're coming from, watchdog, but it sounds like you're going for the text-book approach rather than the analytical approach. I'm not saying you're wrong to do that, but you don't believe everything you see or read. I know one person who believes that 'The Bold And The Beautiful' is a reality show. This guy is not, by any means a moron, he just can't distinguish between between fact and fiction correctly (like when he asks why all the TV stations run a comedy sketch / fictitious short story show at the same time, and all we're watching is the evening news).

I had an idea whle I was writing too. 9-11 was a heinous act, but if all the people in the twin towers, and on the planes had been terminally ill, could you say the terrorists were euthanasing people?

I think the guidedog has answered the original question, so I'll respond instead to some of the other issues that have been mentioned.

I don't see suicide as being selfish, simply because people don't kill themselves with selfish motives. People tend to kill themselves because they are depressed, or mentally ill, not so that they can upset their parents as much as possible.

With this in mind, it would be inhumane to punish someone for attempted suicide. You wouldn't imprison a cancer patient for having cancer, you'd treat him for havign cancer. So why lock up depressed people and prolong their suffering? What about trying to help them?

Since punishing people for suicide is a ridiculous idea, there is no need for suicide to be illegal. As the guidedog has pointed out, suicide is not murder if it is legal. I believe that suicide should be legal and should not be treated as murder.