PHIL 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Virtue Ethics, Pollyanna Principle, Hedonism
25 Aug 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
In our modern western culture, we either look at suicide as immoral or as pathological (mental illness: was illegal for a while we had the phrase suicidal depression . For benatar, normal situations, suicide may still be rational . His focus: paradigmatic cases where somebody kills himself because he takes that to be in his own interests (as the best thing for him/her) He"s also going to assume that there is no afterlife and that death is the end . I"m going to go over these rather quickly. Defining murder as intentionally killing an innocent person begs the question of why it is wrong. No need to assert that we also have the right to die, including suicide as a human right: suicide is simply waiving one"s right to life. Bringing god no solution, since this argument suffers from the usual sorts of problems faced by religious arguments : indeed just take a course in philosophy of religion!
