People rarely live in a vacuum, they engage with society, and those interactions have tangible results. I feel this is obvious, but it seems lost on people. When a person is systematically bullied, that negative interaction with society will inevitably have an impact, and if severe enough, suicide is a potential result. Aaron had the weight of a state on his shoulders, and while I'm glad to say I've never experienced that the prospects of it terrify me. As someone with a history of depression, I can quite confidently state, I'm unsure I'd survive through the experience, and can foresee it simply becoming too much.
To state that no one has responsibility for his death is to excuse the gross abuses of those who's interactions with Aaron led to it. You are giving a pass to disgraceful prosecution tactics including intimidation and overreach. You are giving a pass to institutions that abandoned morality by siding with an abusive prosecution instead of standing up for a member of their community. Most egregiously, you are encouraging a broad view that only the victim is at fault for their choice. There's so much wrong with this view it's hard to know where to start, but for one, it suggests they're in the position to even logically and rationally evaluate the choice. If you're depressed to the point of suicide, it's fairly safe to assume, you aren't thinking logically or rationally. How can you then be held at fault for the resultant choice?
Suicide is horrible, and I've known some who've taken that path. But blaming those who commit such an act is the easy way out. To reduce the instances of people taking their own lives, you need to understand why. This means fully comprehending the circumstances that led to their choice, and this means holding those to account that contributed to it.
You have to admit that people that commit suicide are primarily responsible for their own deaths. That's like saying, people who drink alcohol are primarily responsible for getting drunk - it's just true prima face.
He killed himself, therefore he was responsible for his own death.
Perhaps in the same way that we might say someone who dies of cancer is responsible for their own deaths. That is: if we were in the habit of assigning blame to the suffering, for the medical problems they suffer.
Or if we are to outright deny what science has to say about it and instead further the US habit of denying mental health conditions as actual, legitimate medical issues.
Would you say the same thing about a war veteran who has PTSD and commits suicide? Or a rape victim who commits suicide? Or a middle school kid who commits suicide after months of cyberbullying?
I doubt it.
Aaron did the deed, but the circumstances in which he found himself were extremely dire. Government and MIT have a lot of stake in that death, even they aren't the one who pulled the trigger.
Imagine if you would have the prospect of spending your best years in a prison, and the terrible prospect of joblessness once you left prison. Worse yet, his torment wouldn't end with prison, and adapting to life outside bars, I'm sure government would make him suffer for all the things he supposedly did. He would be under constant supervision, he wouldn't be able to stay true to himself. Even slightest doubt of activism would probably return him to a jail cell. He only could look forward to more fear and terror.
"their choice" is the key bit here.
We can (and should!) look at circumstances as you've described, but it does a disservice to everyone to accept a suicide as the result of anything other than the individual's choice--this cheapens the act.
It seems hard for people to grasp that the actions of Aaron's antagonists need to be judged independently of his decision to end his own life. We really don't want to start assigning responsibility for other peoples' suicides.
People can be provoked into suicide by a number of things. If a woman divorces her husband and he commits suicide, the woman may be blamed for the manner of the divorce, whatever that may be, but it was not her choice for the man to die. Conversely, if Aaron didn't commit suicide, the prosecutors would be no less responsible for their cruelty and injustice towards him.
Your moral responsibility for what you do to me has nothing to do with how I choose to react to it. I am not exonerating Aaron's prosecutors, though the logical conclusion of your argument is that you would exonerate them, had Aaron reacted differently.
People have a responsibility to diligently consider the consequences of their actions, and to act based on their expectations of those consequences. "Consequence" isn't hard to define here; it's "what things are likely to happen after X, versus what things are likely to happen after ~X". There's no "will it be my fault?" There is only "will it be more or less likely depending on what I do?"
After the fact, the matter of responsibility is a function of whether the person took reasonable measures to obtain information, and whether the person acted in a way that would maximize the utility of the expected outcome based on that information.
Note that responsibility need not be a conserved quantity. Had the prosecutor not been informed that Swartz was a suicide risk, he would bear exactly the same amount of responsibility for his own death. The prosecutor would have just born less.
Thanks for this, you should post more, a community is only as good as its active members.
Arguably life in our modern prison system is one of the most horrific experiences you can have, some of the most miserable living conditions on the planet. The effect on your psyche of having a group of highly empowered, well funded government agents seeking zealously to place you in that cage over what is really a silly reason cannot be overestimated.
Yes it's tragic that Aaron committed suicide. But the real tragedy is that we as a people let our government cage non-violent offenders in a veritable hell all the time for stupid stupid reasons. It's an atrocity that it happens, and for MIT to take a position of neutrality on whether or not a human should be caged up for downloading documents is at the very least condoning that atrocity.
Would you say the same about any person facing a six-month plea deal?
that's a black and white view of the world. One that I also don't think would hold up to the slightest logical scrutiny.
Can we delve into your comment a bit. Is your claim that when someone commits suicide that no else ever bears any responsibility for their death?
