Suicide with the Sole Purpose of Improving Personal Experience of Life Is, in Itself, Never Immoral

In defence and reinforcement of my established arguments, I will now address the points just presented by my opponent. I could not go into full detail due to character count restraints, however, so I apologize for brevity in some areas, as I had to cut out a lot. As the Con party challenged claims regarding abiogenesis, I will provide a few sources. I would summarize what they say, but I don't have the character count. Now, the origin of all matter is said to be a result of the Big Bang in which the abrupt appearance of condensed matter in the universe resulted in heat and energy. The matter then expanded due to this and, because of the nature of space and gravity, drifted outwards and formed cosmological bodies in various directions. Ergo, we have the universe. Of course, this is all based on some fundamental assumptions, but so are all other beliefs, and this is the predominant model for the origin of the universe, and for that I feel it is worth extra consideration. But I digress. This debate is about suicide. To the next point suggested by the opponent, that my stating that life has never had purpose violates evolution, I respond simply by saying it does not. I believe evolution occurs because DNA changes. Purpose does not need to exist for anything else to happen. “Why” does not and, in my opinion, should not override “how”. If the theories I believe in are true, and it is possible that they are, then the world just happened. There’s nothing else to it. If “why” is asked enough, everything boils down to “what created reality?” to which the answer would be that reality must exist for anything else to exist, and so reality is not a product of anything within itself. Time is supposedly infinite, so there was not necessarily a beginning. No purpose is involved whatsoever, just a series of natural processes. That is a possibility. I ask that that be acknowledged. The opponent proceeds to state that my arguments implicate personal worthlessness and status as “a complete waste of space unworthy of existing”. The latter is in no way encompassed by the meaning I had intended, nor do I feel that my phrasing suggests it. The kind of purpose that life lacks is one that would apply to all persons, and that could only have been provided by something deliberately creating an origin for all such persons. Again, I don’t believe that’s the case. This would not mean that life is a “waste”; it just means that life has no universal purpose that would define moral value. Still, that doesn’t mean that life has no morality to it. Purpose does not constitute morality. There are other sources of moral guidelines besides fulfilling a purpose something else wants of you. A very significant question asked by the opponent is “what is the point…?” I would say there is none. We have innate drives and urges, such as to eat and reproduce, and we follow these impulses, thus driving life forward. Why do we do this? Because we want to, that’s why. It’s by design. Now about the definition of a person: a human and a person are not necessarily synonymous. The definition of a person is provided in the first post. The Con party’s arguments are not supposed to be limited to totally proven and existing scenarios, but hypothetical ones as well. Since the opponent has so far avoided scenarios overall and seems to prefer a more absolute stance, this is largely irrelevant and does not apply. I sincerely apologize for the offense; I worded my statement poorly: “life must conclude eventually, and when it does, everything achieved during it is lost”. What I had meant is that in my beliefs (and I was talking about my own death in the quote, not anyone in general who could have conflicting beliefs), I will not bring my accomplishments with me at death. I did not mean to imply in that same statement that I would not leave a legacy behind, because that is indeed true, as the opponent has also said. In fact, that is my point: we leave everything behind and life yields nothing for the person in the endpoint. If death would be preferable, then for that person, life could be a waste of time. Then there’s the issue of why people strive to improve and ‘make the world a better place’. Again, it’s inherent: an inbuilt desire to better the odds of human survival. Humanity makes living conditions more favourable and reproduces knowing their offspring will do the same, as will their offspring and so forth. We do this with the knowledge that there will not be an ultimate generation whose existence will satisfy all our purposes, but we do it anyway, because it’s what we do. The opponent asked what is meant by the following: “The endpoint remains the same, and of the infinite points in between, there were a few more spent in death”. We all die and when we do, no matter when or how, we will be dead in the same way. If by suicide, then there will logically be more time spent in this state of death. To be honest, it is important to me how I die. I do value dying by my own hand and terms. I don’t want my deathbed to be a borrowed, foul-smelling hospital bed, in which I would lie in fatal regrets. In my last breath, I want to sigh in relief as the fingers of a god, angel, or my own mind carry me off to that infinite place from which I once came so long ago. The next point of the opponent seems to be based on an idea explained above. Again, purpose and morality are not derived from each other. Just because I don’t think there’s purpose does not mean something has no morality to it. And I do not believe that it is immoral for persons to be born, but it is immoral to uphold an automatic sort of moral contract preventing people from morally committing suicide. Imagine a person who, for whatever reason, does not want to live. Well, he is born anyway, because no one asked him. Then he is told that he mustn’t commit suicide, even though he doesn’t want to live. The opponent later mentions that one cannot like death per se because they would need to first experience it. I completely agree, but one may still think they like death. They can think, they can assume, and they can believe. I could make a pie for a friend, and I would be moral. If I then accidentally dropped the pie on my friend, but my intention was to let her eat it, I’d still say that I would be moral. The opposition also asked that I attend to the matter of how death could improve experience. A simple situation would be being guaranteed that living hereafter would result in being tortured for the rest of one’s life. Life would then arguably be a burden and negative by virtually all moral standards. Thus choosing to not be tortured and conclude one’s existence would be an improvement to one’s experience. There could also be religious scenarios and philosophical ones, but in the interests of time and character count, one should suffice. http://www.youtube.com... http://www.genmay.com... http://www.sciencedaily.com...