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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I find this conclusion to be very troubling from a moral perspective.

First jumping off a building or shooting yourself in the middle of a busy street are bad analogies - by their very nature those acts are disruptive to those nearby. But going out into an uninhabited place, having no desire to be rescued if things go awry, nor making any requests to get rescued - if we have any personal freedom at all, how can we not have the freedom over our own bodies if we are not disturbing others?

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When your dead body is eventually found by a passing hiker, it is going to involve the authorities whether you like it or not. Here in Japan, there is a large forest downhill[0] of Mount Fuji where lots of people choose to commit suicide in. They simply wander in and get lost. Years later, hikers stumble upon their bodies and then the authorities, whether you wanted them to or not, will have swamping the forest looking for clues as to your death, whether it was truly a suicide or if it was foul play.

We live in a society and there is no easy way to divorce ourselves from that reality.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aokigahara#Suicides

That uninhabited place is stewarded by someone else. It and the people that travel to it are the responsibility of that steward. This often happens to be park rangers or logging companies or whatever. Even if we have been granted the privilege to roam on these lands we do not have a right to go act as we see fit on them. There are always rules.

There is a lot of land that you can buy very dirt cheap and go live as you see fit on it without having to answer to anyone - minus some property taxes. There you can try to bushcraft to your hearts content.

"It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that "reasoning by analogy" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today."

I think the problem is that people like the parent comment don't believe there is any thing such as personal freedom, not true personal freedom. That is, freedoms that are not only the ones we are prescribed by society at large.

Source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...

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