Some people don't even realise their lack of awareness. And the role empathy plays in building trust and maintaining good relationships. Communication.

[...]

There are other areas or spectrums of mental health issues but I've said enough.
Leaving it here, thanks. — Amity

The irony, oh the irony.

There seems to be a lack of imagination or empathy as to the effect on others. — Amity

This supposedly adverse effect on others is so often grossly overstated.

Sure, if those others have depended on the person financially or in some practical way (such as for cleaning and cooking), then, sure, if that person dies, for whatever reason, those dependents will suffer a loss.

But so often, it's precisely those "loving loved ones" who push someone into taking their own life. Not rarely, they even wish for it.

but the most obvious alternative to the unsatisfactory rat race of striving, struggling, and all that is to stop striving, stop struggling. Try to be more in the present moment rather than being busy trying to accomplish something in the future, or fretting over something not done in the past, because "now" is where you live. — BC

Spoken like a retired baby boomer.

For an increasing number of people, the struggling and the striving isn't a matter of too much ambition, but a matter of bare survival.

The sheer physical and mental exhaustion from work eventually makes one wonder why go on with it.

People of your age could at least hope to retire someday, they had something to look forward to. This is the case for fewer and fewer people nowadays.

Official psychology tends to be quite out of touch with the realities of life.

Where other people come in is that there's a presumption in your posts so far that the person considering suicide's suffering is more important than the suffering of those they leave behind. — fdrake

That's an awfully idealistic scenario. Not rarely, it's precisely those other people who want someone to die, and they even say so.

I guess this is a good a place as any. — Darkneos

No.

William Styron wrote "Darkness Visible", a short memoir of his depression. It struck me as conspicuously superficial, but with one point sticking out. Namely, he says words to the effect that the only thing that was worse than his depression was the medical treatment he received for it (he freely went to a mental institution). He writes how he then complied, superficially, with the treatment, just so as to get out of the institution.

It's important to understand that especially in modern Western society, existential topics 1. are tabooed, and 2. what the consequences of breaking this taboo are. Talk about these things at the wrong place, and you could get the police at your door, and then some.

There is a whole art to not talking about existential topics, and it's important to master it. Already simply because of the sheer amount of time and energy that can be wasted in the process if done wrongly.

Unlikely — T Clark

Pretty sure they don't do that. — Darkneos

Any discussion of suicide and the meaning of life has to take into consideration the legal status of euthanasia and assisted suicide in a particular country/jurisdiction. Individual countries differ greatly from one another in this regard, from those strictly opposed to them to those where they are legal.

Then there are other considerations to take into account, like insurance companies refusing to pay for the medical treatment of the terminally ill, but willing to cover the cost of euthanasia.

You should talk to a therapist — T Clark

A therapist, who just might suggest "euthanasia as a treatment option", as is slowly becoming the new normal in "civilized" societies?

if it makes you uncomfortable then perhaps you shouldn’t involve yourself. — Wayfarer

Duh. Oh, please. I'm trying to explain to you why you often get the negative reactions you do and how come there is so much bad blood between you and some others.

Despite what some Westerners like to believe, Buddhism is not a philosophy and is not intended to be discussed at philosophy forums, in the manner of Western secular academia.

What you're experiencing is a case of grasping the snake of the Dhamma at the wrong end, at the tail, and thus getting bitten. But you don't seem to understand that, and instead blame your opponents.

Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making.
— Joshs

Sorry, this is opaque to me. — J

While waiting for @Joshs --

The way I understand it is that empathy, love, and compassion as fundamental attitudes will inform how we make sense of other people's words and actions.

So that, for example, instead of interpreting a particular child's action as "evil" (and feeling justified and obligated to punish the child), one interprets it perhaps as a cry for help, or a consequence of parental neglect, or something else altogether.

It's important to note that often when people claim to exhibit empathy, love and compassion, they are actually practicing contempt, or at best, pity. They tell you they love you, but they still believe you're bad, wrong, and deserving punishment. In their mind, it's love, or compassion, if they don't criticize you or punish you when they believe they should do so.

Ethical striving toward empathy, love and compassion are derivative modes of sense-making. — Joshs

How do you explain that religions/spiritualities that focus heavily on love and compassion also "balance" this out with extreme violence, such as Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism (the Secondary Bodhisattva vows, where a person basically vows to kill, rape, and pillage in the name of compassion -- for the killed, raped, and pillaged person!!)?

My hypothetical is likely too far afield from Benj's pattern: 'is truth owed if it diminishes free will'. — Nils Loc

It's the idea that truth is somehow objective, neutral, and completely independent from the person who utters it that is problematic.

I had to look up "virtue signaling." Could you explain how it connects to meta-ethics? I'm not seeing it. — J

People are often prone to give socially desirable answers.

In social science research, social-desirability bias is a type of response bias that is the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others.[1] It can take the form of over-reporting "good behavior" or under-reporting "bad", or undesirable behavior. The tendency poses a serious problem with conducting research with self-reports. This bias interferes with the interpretation of average tendencies as well as individual differences.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias

What this means for discussing ethics, among other things, is that in discussions of ethics, people can present and defend socially desirable views in order to appear ethical to others (ie., they signal their virtue), when in fact they don't actually hold those views, or at least not as strongly or as consistently as they claim.

This then leads to those strange situations where, for example, someone talks about the importance of empathy or the importance of interacting with others in good faith, but their own behavior (even in those very discussions) indicates that they don't actually believe in those things. So one has to wonder what is really going on.

I think that at least some (if not many) traditional problems of ethics are born precisely out of this virtue signaling, creating artificial ethical problems that nobody actually has or cares about, but they just want to make themselves look good.

A naive and goodwilled person can waste a lot of time and energy on those problems, failing to realize they are artificial and merely there for the purpose of keeping up appearances.

Constructivism applies to the ways in which we see things but not to what we see. — Janus

This is what a realist says, yes.

Sure, and I understand (roughly) how Ethics is taught. But this literally foregoes any meaningful answer to the question, and returns to circularity. I'm not particularly intending to further some philosophical position but to address why I think the question itself is a bit moot. "X is good" requires my bolded to be sorted through. "You should do X" requires the previous sentence to be adequately addressed. So, I think this is prima facie a pretty unhelpful way to think about what to do in life.

Ignoring that "good" and "right" can come apart readily, I can't see how this conceptualisation is anything more than paternalism, rather than learning how to think and assess claims — AmadeusD

For the most part, ethics and the discussion of ethics are about controlling people, about getting them to do what one stakeholder wants them to do. But in order to avoid the controlling from becoming too obvious and too easy to rebel against, the discourse of ethics is often formulated in objective terms, as if indepedent from the people who promote it. "It's not I who wants you to do that, it's God." "It's not I who wants you to do that, it's simply how things really are."

This is one of the reasons why the discourse of ethics so often goes nowhere and why it logically doesn't add up.

/.../ The other falls short of our ethical standards due to a failing of ‘integrity’, a ‘character flaw’ , dishonesty, evil intent , selfishness, etc. In doing so, we erase the difference between their world and ours, and turn our failure to fathom into their moral failure.
— Joshs

I find this particularly interesting. Does it follow from this frame that no one is ever knowingly dishonest or has evil intent and that the matter can always be understood as arising from incommensurate perspectives? — Tom Storm

It doesn't follow.

A person can be dishonest, act with evil intent. The point of contention is that it's not up to the other person to decide that.

Usually, people are eager to ascribe motivations to others, to project into them. They consider it their right, a matter of their self-confidence. But what they are basically saying is:

"You feel whatever I say that you feel.
You think whatever I say that you think.
Your intentions are whatever I say that your intentions are.
I am the boss of you.
If you in any way disagree, you are bad, evil, deserving punishment."

That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions. — Joshs

You're so optimistic!

A problem arises when, even presented with the truth, a certain part of the population will prefer comforting lies. — Questioner

A popular projection. Frequently found in religious/spiritual aplogetics. A projection that absolves the projector from empathy and responsibilty for what they say, since all the responsibility and blame and conveniently shifted on the other person.

If we were to believe that the North Korean peoples ought to be liberated — Nils Loc

Liberated from what? Liberated into what? Into something like, Come, destroy your economy by outsourcing all the basic industry like production of food, clothing, shelter, and medicines to some piss poor third world country, and focus on producing an illusion of wealth and wellbeing, and no more than a mere illusion of it.


And why should the North Koreans believe you?
Do you trust a street preacher? Why not?

Am not saying that we should, but we are not being hard pressed to convey "truth" (truth bearing information) to North Koreans for the sake of potentially expanding or eroding their free will. The problem is the consequences of reorganizing a state, waging war, fomenting coups, changing social identity, are likely always worse than leaving it be.

The Western, and specifically, American, savior complex ...

Insofar as it is mind-created it is delusory. Mysticism proper is seeing through what the mind creates. There’s a term for that in Buddhism, called ‘prapanca’, meaning ‘conceptual proliferation’, detailed in a text delightfully called the Honeyball Sutta. — Wayfarer

But unless one is enlightened, one cannot talk about these things with any kind of integrity, nor demand respect from others as if one in fact knew what one is talking about.

What so often happens in discussions of transcendental and mystical topics is that people admit to being unenlightened, but then they still tell others how to become enlightened, and then they take umbrage at other people not being impressed or convinced.

It's not that those others are too materialistic, or have too much of the proverbial dust in their eyes. Their negative reaction to unenlightened people teaching about enlightenment is perfectly normal and justified: it's only normal not to want to take lessons from someone who admits to not having realized them.


(Notice how it is a rule for Theravada monks not to teach people other than in a few specific situations.)

The Nihilsum attempts to challenge the understanding of existence and being by occupying a space that is neither fully ‘something’ or ‘nothing.’ It resists the either/or of categories that we people have used to define existence. Rather than being a specific state of being, it exists as a construct, that of which is meta-logical and transcends these boundaries. Its existence lies not in what we can categorize, but in its inherent ability to defy those categories. By existing in this paradoxical ‘state,’ the Nihilsum forces us to rethink ontological frameworks, where opposites are often required to be mutually exclusive. — mlles

This actually very much resembles Buddhist ideas of nirvana and what an "enlightened being" is.

/.../
"And so, Anuradha — when you can't pin down the Tathagata as a truth or reality even in the present life — is it proper for you to declare, 'Friends, the Tathagata — the supreme man, the superlative man, attainer of the superlative attainment — being described, is described otherwise than with these four positions: The Tathagata exists after death, does not exist after death, both does & does not exist after death, neither exists nor does not exist after death'?"
/.../

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.002.than.html

By contrast, the post-humanist work of writers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida rejects the idea of a righteous path of emancipation and the moralizing that goes along with it. They work not from grand narratives of emancipation, but within particular discursive systems to reveal openings for re-invention and alternative forms of interchange. — Joshs

But where do such alternative forms of interchange actually work?
Certainly not at university, nor any level or form of formal education, not in most businesses.

I suppose a freelancer in some fancy abstract
mostly artistic type of work-livelihood could practice those alternative forms of interchange. But for everyone else, I can't see how they could be anything other than socioeconomic suicide.

Postmodern fear of knowledge — jkop

What projection, and so authoritarian!

Other people feel whatever you say that they feel ...

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior? — Joshs

Relativism of the postmodern kind does not work at university level, where people are expected to live up to certain standards and produce work that can be assigned monetary value.

Universities are, essentially, capitalist endeavors, with competition, standardization, normativization. And as long the people there, faculty and students, are business-minded, conservative, things work.

To place bread in front of someone who is hungry does not involve me in any "oughts", just "is's," and yet we know exactly what the person will do. The common person knows why: you ought to eat when you are hungry. — Leontiskos

The real world is not so simple.

There's a reason for the saying, No good deed remains unpunished. So often, doing "good" ends badly somehow. Just look at the hunger relief attempts in Africa. They have failed in so many ways, and created numerous new problems.

And secondly, once a person's trust has been betrayed enough times, they don't behave in the neat predictable way that you assume in your bread giving example (which is more about social trust than anything else).

In fact, "growing up", "maturing" is about overcoming a childish, naive belief in goodness and honesty.

What people deem to be good is predictable. — Leontiskos

This is a truism. Yes, ideally, it is true, but it is often useless in real-world application.
Real-world situations are usually so complex that more than simple truisms are needed in order to navigate those situations without damage to oneself or others.

As an atheist by practice and agnostic by believe how can I define whats good from evil?
I have had this question for a long time, but only recently that I gave it serious thought. So I decide to build my own set of rules and values, this is my first attempt and I will need your help, so where should I begin? What question should I make? — Matias Isoo

For all practical intents and purposes, "good" is whatever those in a position of more power than you believe is "good".

If something is Good, it's because you have personally understood/decided it is good. You couldn't support that with any extrinsic facts.

The 'right' action is to do with achieving something. That something must be arbitrary, at base. So, i don't get hte question. — AmadeusD

In my experience, this (bolded part) is not how ethics is usually taught. Instead, teaching ethics goes something like this:

"You don't know what is good and right and so you need to be told so.
X is good and right.
You should do X."


If anything, the direct answer to "Why ought one do that which is good?" is "Because one is bad" and perhaps with the addition "so that by doing good, one may become good as well."

"Virtue signalling" is not an argument. It is the libertarian's attempt to stop a conversation they find uncomfortable. — Banno

Talk about virtue signalling and stopping a conversation!

If there was a collaborative effort to drop informational goods, flash drives and pamphlets over North Korea to inform North Koreans about how life is elsewhere as "truth owed", that effort might come with considerable state backlash (harm to its citizens). — Nils Loc

Really? If you were to tell the North Koreans about, say, the homeless in the US or the suicide rates in Switzerland, the government there would punish them?

What would be that "truth" you would tell them, and how complete would it be?

And what is good for the individual cannot be divorced from what is good for the species. — Questioner

Take capital punishment, for example. Killing some people might be good for society, or the species, but how is it good for the individuals who are killed?

"You will be killed for your own good, so now be happy with it" ...??

Or how about the state and medical professionals offering euthanasia as a "treatment option" ??

Metaethics and virtue signaling go hand in hand.
— baker
The retort "you are virtue signalling" is quite insipid. It is much the same as the child's outraged cry of "You can't tell me what to do!" — Banno

*sigh*
Oh, the irony. Now who's here for not having his views challenged.


I'm saying that when discussing metaethics, it's normal that people have concerns over how they present themselves and how they are perceived by others in such discussions. I argue that a number of classical problems in ethics (such as the one in the OP) are actually at least partly due to a failure to acknowledge this, and instead taking everything at face value, naively.

To properly discuss problems of ethics, we'd need to clearly distinguish between the actual ethical problem at hand and the virtue signalling that may accompany some people's approaches to discussing it.

Now, the question "Why should we?" might be answered by: Because we want to belong to the group. Because we want to live in peace. Because we want safety and security. — Questioner

And "we" don't care if all these peace, safety, and security come at the expense of the other group.

There is, indeed, a big difference between the ancient times and today when it comes to the bombardment of our life with social media. — L'éléphant

I don't think this is a relevant difference at all. What is different is that the range of socially acceptable means of responding to this "bombardment" is dismally small. People aren't supposed to spit at others, throw shoes at them, not even call them names. (Unless they are rich and powerrful, of course.)

At the same time, the level of political discourse, as well ad general interpersonal discourse, is dismally low and shallow.

What has been your experience with stoicism, or what do you think is the issue here? — Shawn

Back then, stoicism was mostly a matter of the upper class. Being part of the upper class is a whole other category of existing, with quite different challenges and goals in life in comparison to being lower class.

Ancient societies were systemically classist and openly so. While nowadays, we live in socioeconomic systems of merely nominally equity and equality before the law and state. This brings along a lot of problems that people, especially upper class people, simply didn't have, while lower class people are left to the mercy of them.

As far as I can reconstruct, the ancient Stoics actually had enormous pride. It seems to me they were haughty and contemptuous. These are personal characteristics that make life a lot easier, especially when in combination with at least a solid socio-economic status.


In summary, if nowadays, you wouldn't take life advice from an upper class person, chances are you shouldn't take it from the Stoics either. Because it simply won't be applicable in your life.

As one such antinatalist, I would propose that there can be communal catharsis, things I've proposed many times before and people have in various ways disagreed with because various attachments to work and relationships and modern living have made it seem like I am just not giving a balanced report. Inherent and contingent forms of suffering aren't taken seriously.

And then, when something tragic happens, only then, maybe existential issues are entertained. — schopenhauer1

And in most cases, also quickly enough forgotten.

First off, I am proposing an even more extreme version in the Schopenhauer brand of asceticism. I am claiming that in his version, even the Middle Way of the Buddhist (Theravadans or otherwise), is not enough. — schopenhauer1

In Schopenhauer's time, the foundational text of Buddhism, the Pali Canon, was not yet conveniently compiled and translated, so he can be excused for having a spotty knowledge of it and thus for his conclusions based on it being off-base. However, the same cannot be said for modern people, who do have relatively easy and cheap access to the Pali Canon.

In short, the Buddhism of the Pali Canon stands and falls with rebirth, merely dying in terms of bodily death solves nothing. Which is also why asceticism per se doesn't solve anything. The Middle Way for monastics isn't there because of some recognition or appreciation that material comforts are good, or that people are social beings and need human contact etc. It's there because a person needs a measure of strength and social connection in order to practice the Noble Eightfold Path at all. And the purpose of this practice is to end rebirth.

In the early Buddhist perspective, a Schopenhauerian ascetic will be reborn, probably as a dog or some other lowly animal, and then, after many many rebirths in the lower realms, might again get a human birth, and suffer all over again.
From this perspective, Schopenhauer is actually naively idealistic, with his belief that death of the body means an end to suffering.

And audio books are a great way to use time for instance when you doing something like driving long distance, jogging etc. — ssu

Do you listen to audiobooks that way? If yes, how do you retain any of the heard (given that you can't make notes when driving or jogging)?

@Tom Storm
How do you measure "wisdom"?

What are we wanting people to "do" here? Why procreate more people here? — schopenhauer1

To fight, to be strong, to rule. People love to fight, to rule.

Suffering (with a capital "S") is simply the label I give all this negative understanding (self-awareness). Bed bugs, diseases, emotional trauma, and cancer are often situational and contingent.
[...]
/boredom/ — schopenhauer1

Why do you call these "negative"? Based on what standards? Why those standards?

Other animals do indeed feel pains and are harmed, but don't have the contingent-thinking to know that "something could be different". Things happen to most other animals. They don't opine that it could have been something else. They don't have the ability to see the picture of the category of Suffering in general.

So here we are, animals that can see the big picture of Suffering. That can know that things could be different, but are currently not the ideal.

These comparisons with animals seem to be very important to you. It's not yet clear, why, though. Some form of envy or nostalgia?
Do you think animals are better off than humans?

Yet, there’s a paradox here: the very recognition of our cognitive limitations seems to point to a desire to grasp something beyond them. Does this suggest an innate tension in human thought, or is it simply a reflection of the inherent constraints of our perspectival existence? — Tom Storm

Like they say, follow the money.

If you look at why in particular someone wants to "grasp something beyond" themselves, the motivations are mundane. People are looking for money, power, health, and when they can't get them, they feel "at the end of their wits". This is a recognition of one's cognitive limitations. But it's all for mundane purposes, not because of some profound yearning for "something more" or "beyond".