Causality and Ethics, pt 3: Slavery and "Suicide"

Previous posts in series: Pt 1, Pt 2

Relevant reading: Paul’s Case [ <9K words ], planecrash [ <1M words ]

I.

It’s a true story, whether or not it actually happens: when ensnared hopelessly in a trap, but only by one leg, even the simple fox understands that it should chew off that leg to get out.

In accordance with the telling, Man is portrayed as wiser or weaker: the unperturbable self-surgeon, baring his own guts to extract a bullet or an appendix that would otherwise be deadly, vs the samsaric monkey that has closed its fist within the hole and begrudges the universe its prize.

But whichever contrast is drawn between Man and the fox, the fox is understood to be right. Earthly survival, and not legs, is something to which Earthly animals are assumed to assign prime value, so an Earthly animal would need a very strangely contorted preference gradient over realities in order for steadfastly choosing not to chew off its leg, and instead wasting in the trap, to constitute a winning choice.

II.

It was explained to me when I was very young - less than 10 years old - in Catholic after-school religious education, that suicide, like homicide, is prohibited. I never found the explanations satisfying. I kept asking variations on “Why?” and hearing back variations on “Because it is God’s will” until the teachers stopped talking to me. I never did understand.

III.

In preparation for writing this essay, I asked several acquaintances - very different people - whether their experience, if any, in Christian religious ed, had been similar.

At least two people said it had made perfect sense to them as kids that God had to prohibit suicide: otherwise, everyone [who was saved, or indulged, or otherwise qualified] would kill themselves and go to Heaven immediately.

“But that explains nothing”, I said. “Why would it be a problem if we all went to Heaven right now?”

Of course I’d have realized, if I’d thought to think about it, that I was just re-posing to my interlocutors the age-old Problem of Evil. “Why can’t we all just die and go to Heaven right now, if God wants us not to suffer and admission into Heaven [as child!me had been repeatedly assured] instantly alleviates all suffering?” is “just a special case” of “if God has total control over the fabric of reality, and desires justice and freedom from suffering, then why is the reality we see around us unjust, and why do we suffer?”

It’s such a fertile question there’s a field-word for it: Theodicy. It’s historied. Has luminaries. Not easy answers.

The most promising hard answer, has to do with free will. God, I was told, in middle school Catholic religious ed - and in all the books I was reading around that time, that referred to Protestant theology - wouldn’t have valued automata. Otherwise He’d have just created simple animals. He wanted children who were like Him enough to truly love Him and be one with Him - and in order to qualify as truly loving Him, they would have to have been offered a chance to choose differently. Hence the Garden of Eden. Well, around that point in the explanation, class-clown middle-schoolers were raising their hands to ask aloofly, “But God knows everything, even before it happens. Didn’t He know Eve would choose to eat the apple?” And implicitly: Couldn’t He have set it up, just so that she didn’t?

Our stern teacher, who had as little interest in them as they had in her, shook her head and told them lives [of people, it was implied, braver than they would ever be] had been lost arguing about it, and careers [of people, it was implied, smarter than they would ever be] had been made, so they weren’t going to get anywhere. It, she said, was just difficult for humans to understand. The troublemaking 12-year-olds - accustomed to being given such answers by adults - went back to lobbing trash at each other, having noticed nothing strange.

But anyway, the “free will” answer doesn’t cover the “suicide” case.

Q: If I, Mack, would choose to join Him in Heaven, right now - why are the gates closed?

A: “I”, “Mack”, am considered to have already made my choice, as Eve [or Adam, depending on what flag your church flies]. Now is the time to pay my penance for it, not to demand a second chance, to choose differently.

Or, if your church doesn’t hold with Original Sin - and some of them don’t, particularly - the explanation given is simply that at least one of ( Earthly reality, your body ) belongs to God.

IV.

Consider a fox in a very slow leg-trap. It has a master, and it does something that its master values - producing fur, or getting the marrow out of bones, or sniffing for drugs, or the like. One day, says its master, the trap will cut off your leg, and then I will let you out, and give you a new leg, and you will live a happy life. Don’t worry about being deceived by me, because foxes were always the clever ones in your childhood bedtime stories. And they were especially clever when they listened to their masters. The fox asks, “What if I chew off my own leg?” The master answers, “Then I will hunt you down and do something very bad to you.” The fox asks, “Why?” The master answers, “Because your grandfather ate my chickens, and anyway I own you.”

V.

I’m not saying “go out and kill yourself right now because that will make anything better somehow”. I’ve questioned whether it’s somehow the case, that that general conclusion can validly be drawn, from my line of reasoning above, and I just don’t see it. What my line of reasoning above is, is a refutation of fully general objections to “suicide” and “suicide threats” as possibly-rational/-winning moves.

Another analogy: You may have played the web game agar.io. The goal is to get as big as possible. You start out small and grow by eating pellets and other players. As you grow, you move slower, until it becomes prohibitively difficult to catch and eat smaller and faster players by chasing them no matter how agilely you maneuver. But you can split yourself in two. This will both let your smaller halves move faster, and give one of them a brief burst of speed that will let it overtake a smaller prey. The self-splitting method is also useful if you are being overtaken or cornered by larger players; you split yourself, reducing your integrity and in some ways making yourself an easier target, for a chance that at least one half of you will escape worse danger, or a trap.

I read somewhere recently about a psychologist - I think it was Durkheim? but I could be wrong - who was really trying to understand suicide. He used the rare and valiant “ethnographic” method, i.e. actually interviewing patients, more or less taking them seriously, and attempting to draw conclusions from their words that he hadn’t started out intending to draw. It was said that he came to one conclusion very quickly: that suicide was almost universally about preserving the integrity of the self. At first I thought it must be narcissistic postmodern pablum. Of course suicide isn’t “about preserving the integrity of the self”, you insufferable windbag, any more than homophobia is “about being a closeted queer”. Suicide plainly does the exact opposite of “preserving the integrity of the self”. Even if “quantum immortality” is true, killing yourself still leaves you with less “realityfluid”. Probably way less. Homophobes aren’t ~secretly gay~; suicides aren’t ~secretly sane~. Sometimes people just do crazy shit because they’re irrational.

Well, first the psychologist was smarter than me by recognizing that “because they’re irrational” isn’t a sufficient explanation for any particular, recurring pattern of [alleged] irrationality.

And secondly, the psychologist implicitly recognized that disrupting the self on one level - like splitting your player-blob in agar.io - can preserve its integrity on another level - like freeing the player from predicted consumption by more powerful players.