X-Message-Number: 10136 Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1998 09:36:35 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10133 - #10134 To Charles Platt: This is not a direct answer or refutation of what you or Bob say here, but I will point out that there is a complexity. People can be depressed and want to die for that reason. While they are depressed, they can even be suicidal. The critical point here is that their depression comes provably from a derangement in their brain chemistry, not from the considered opinion of a fully healthy person that they wish to die. Yes, this causes lots of problems for those who believe in unbreakable human rights. To some extent, those who have decided not to make any attempt to live longer suffer from this condition. Just what we should or should not do with them is much harder to decide, even though they explicitly want to die. I myself think that our current philosophies are defective in failing to realize that such conditions can affect action and belief, and there's lots of need for rethinking. Eventually that rethinking may happen. For that matter, if someone you know is not a cryonicist, and DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW your reasons for wanting suspension, just what does that say about them? It's one thing to decide after getting all the information, quite another to refuse information. While I think Bob is being simplistic when he suggests (as he has doen on Cryonet several times) that there is some kind of objective morality, I also think that the issue of whether or not someone we know wants suspension or not is much more complex, morally, than a simple matter of "it's his/her right to do whatever they want with themselves". Perhaps in the end we will work out a morality which assumes automatically that we do not have "free will", and rather than that assumption judges our actions on the basis of their causes, which may be good or bad. Best wishes and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10136