Related reading: The Sacrifices We Choose to Make by Michael Nielsen, which discusses self-immolation (suicide) for political signaling. That also drove home to me that, while self-sacrifice is sometimes the right step to take, it often is not. See this example (emphasis is mine).
I’ve discussed Thich Quang Duc’s sacrifice in tacitly positive terms. But I don’t want to uncritically venerate this kind of sacrifice. As with Kravinsky’s kidney donation, while it had admirable qualities, it also had many downsides, and the value may be contested. Among the 500 self-immolations identified by Biggs, many seem pointless, even evil. For example: more than 200 people in India self-immolated in protest over government plans to reserve university places for lower castes.This doesn’t seem like self-sacrifice in service of a greater good. Rather, it seems likely many of these people lacked meaning in their own lives, and confused the grand gesture of the sacrifice for true meaning. Moral invention is often difficult to judge, in part because it hinges on redefining our relationship to the rest of the universe.
Related reading: The Sacrifices We Choose to Make by Michael Nielsen, which discusses self-immolation (suicide) for political signaling. That also drove home to me that, while self-sacrifice is sometimes the right step to take, it often is not. See this example (emphasis is mine).