This week I have been pondering the morality of suicide after we had that class lecture on Monday. Suicide is one of those very interesting “crimes”, at least to me it is. Unlike murder, or other crimes such as battery, suicide is unique because the individual is choosing to kill himself. How do we as a society have the authority to take away that right from the individual? Some states like Oregon have passed laws allowing people to undergo assisted suicide. This is where a licensed professional can legally kill a patient that has some kind of terminal condition. I believe that every person should have the right to choose when to kill himself when confronted with a terminal illness. However, when someone wants to kill themselves because of depression there should be more restrictions put into place. A lot of times it can be hard to judge why someone killed themselves. Many times the victim never showed signs of depression or at least never showed signs of severe depression. I think that a lot of this stems from our poor funding of mental health and especially our eagerness to dismiss it when it is brought up. Anyways all this thinking about suicide led me to think about all the social media sites that have been in the news because someone filmed themselves killing themselves. Should companies have the right to create algorithms that may be able to recognize when a person is planning on killing himself? This would probably involve parsing through the individual's private messages and posts. This would be a clear violation of privacy, but is it ethical if it leads to suicide prevention? This is a tough question and one to which I do not have the answer to. I believe that these tough questions must start being answered starting with our government and then transitioning to law.
5 Comments
Martin Almaraz
5/18/2017 07:05:06 pm
Hello Jose,
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James Barquera
5/20/2017 02:53:02 am
Hey jose! Nice blog post and I do believe companies like facebook need to find a way to stop people from committing suicide on live streams. As to how they can make sure this stops, I do not know.
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Jose Sanchez Garcia
5/20/2017 10:54:29 pm
Wow, it is crazy to know that this option exist. I personally am in favor of having doctor assisted suicide if it is something that the patient request. After all, it is their life that is on the line.
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5/20/2017 11:29:08 pm
Mental health is definitely not taken care of efficiently and still has such a big negative stigma towards it in the US. However I see that suicide should be considered a crime so the person can be detained and get help. Assisted suicide is such a delicate subject but I believe it should be up to family to make the decision as a whole, pain and suffering could be even more cruel. Suicide is an interesting topic in human behavior, you should google "call to the void".
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5/21/2017 12:46:35 am
I dont think the government should have any rights into what we do with our bodies and whether we decide to keep our life, Obviously something horrible must be going on forsomeone to decide they no longer want to live. The government need to fund more programs for people to get help instead of taking control of our lives.
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