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

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