For the sake of those reading along, I’d you to clarify the fact that you’re not talking about me here, as I’ve never claimed to be a prophet, and I haven’t attacked you.
I agree, and I don’t believe I attempted to make any such diagnosis here.
Someone who doesn’t meet your qualification standard may have attempted to stigmatize me with such a diagnosis, but all I did was to make a general statement about the inadvisabilty of trying to convince someone you deem suicidal that he’s making a category error if (even in his grief) he holds onto the belief that life is a gift, and that there are states of existence that are better than non-existence.
It’s totally counter-productive to try to convince him there’s no cruelty in allowing an animal to exist in needless pain, because the animal would be no better off if it didn’t exist, and that even at his happiest moments here on earth (and in some future bliss in heaven) he himself is really no better off than he’d be if he never existed.
If you deem someone to be suicidal, and you have reason to think he believes in God, it’s far better to try to convince him that God is good, and that in the end he and those he loves will be better off than they’d be if they were never created, and (even if he’s seen loved ones suffer, and he himself is suffering now) they will have every reason to be truly grateful to their Creator for bringing them into existence when they’re reunited in heaven.
That’s Pastoral counselling 101.
And even if you’re dealing with a client who doesn’t believe in God, it would still make more sense to try to convince him that whatever good times his loved one had, and whatever good times they shared together, and whatever good times he may still be able to look forward to as long as he continues to exist, somehow make existence worthwhile.
Depending on the individual circumstances, that may be a much weaker argument, but it still makes more since than semanticly arguing to him that there’d be no “him” to be better or worse if he didn’t exist.
It would be gross malpractice for any licensed therapist to subject a client to that kind of nihilistic (and in my opinion, poisenous) thinking.
In the former Soviet Union, Psychological diagnosis were used to margenalize, stigmatize, and institutionalize political dissidents.
And here in the U.S. homosexuality has been classified as a disorder, and is now declassified.
And I’m pretty sure that when I was using the DSM IV, there was something in there called “gender identity disorder.”
Does anybody know if that’s still in there?
Does Caitlyn Jenner have a Psychological disorder by today’s diagnostic standards?
I don’t know, but that’s really beside the point here.
The real question is whether anything has any real, objective value.
All I’m saying is that there are conceivible states of existence that are better than non-existence, and that there are things with intrinsic value (totally independent of whether we are consciously able to recognize their value, or of any personal judgment on our part.)
And in answer to that question, I submit these learned opinions.
The prevailing opinion that the Incoherence Argument is sound is an artefact of naivete about the extent to which semantics must mirror surface grammar."
Fleurbaey and Voorhoeve (as cited by Hilary Greaves): "The literature seems to have failed to see the difference between persons as concreteobjects and persons as they figure in ordinary discourse. A concrete object has properties only in the states in which it exists… But when we discuss possible people, the topic of our debate is not only concrete persons… it is persons as they are considered by evaluators of possible worlds"…
Roberts, Holtug: A is better than B for s if A’s well-being level is higher in A than it is in B. And if s does not exist in A, then s’s well-being level in A is zero.