In an immortal society, could this be considered suicide?
Let’s pretend that mankind has achieved cheap, readily available and over-the-counter immortality. The only requirement to live longer than the Sun (barring a violent or stupid death) is to take a 2 dollar pill every 40 or so years. Failure to do so means you start to age normally, so even if you miss a dose or two you can go right back to being your young, healthy self so long as you haven’t leaped off the mortal coil.
Let’s say someone, after so many thousand years of taking said pill, decided they were simply done. They aren’t going to take the pill anymore. They’re not going to hang themselves, jump off a cliff or anything like that, they’re just going to continue their lives as normal, sans immortality.
Could that be considered a form of suicide?
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9 Answers
No. It would be allowing nature to proceed.
Yes, I think technically, it would be a form of suicide, given the context. In that context, that set of circumstance you have the choice to live or die, and you are choosing to die, rather than choosing to live. I think that’s what suicide is.
It technically would be, but I don’t see any problem with suicide as long as one is not harming anyone else. I would think that living would be intolerable to many after much more than a century. Some of us are tired of living at only a half-century.
No, I would not call that suicide. Refusing medical treatment is not suicide, and since the pill could be considered medical treatment for ageing it would be no different to refusing chemotherapy.
Choosing not to live forever is not the same as choosing to bring on your immediate death to escape physical or emotional suffering. With or without such a “miracle”, we are designed to wear out and run down until we stop running.
It would be passive suicide.
If you are killed by something else and did not intentionally kill yourself at your moment of death then I believe you are not committing suicide.Dying from a disease, infection,organ failure,natural breakdown of the body,wear/tear,etc.
I could see how you might mistake it for suicide because you know you will die but if you do not kill yourself and something else does it is not suicide.
I think the issue here is what we consider normal. This pill may make it onto lists of the basic needs of humans, along with food, hydration, and shelter. In that case, refusing the pill would be seen like starving to death (you must remember that at person taking 40 years to die would seem awfully quick to an immortal population), and therefore it would be passive suicide as @MacBean said.
Sure. That person would be knowingly choosing to have a mortal life, and therefore knowingly choosing death. I would call it just technical suicide, however. The primary intent for doing something like this probably isn’t death, unlike actual, full-blown, I-can’t-take-it-anymore suicide.
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