Germanwings Flight 9525

He had delusional depression, and was guiltily covering up his delusion that he was going blind, which may have emerged from fear that he would lose his job. Of course if you deliberately crash your aircraft into a mountain you also lose your job, but logic was left behind a long time before.

Murder involves culpability, that is, intent, and to what degree he is culpable depends on the state of his mental faculties. I don't know the details of his case, but if he was flying a plane, then he seems to have been sane enough to have at least a general contact with reality, which means, yes, it was very much an act of mass murder, and act of horrific hatred toward self and others, and being itself.

> They don’t have to feel the value of others, just observe that the others seem to value theirs. This is bulshit reasoning.

It's not a question of what others value, but what is valuable. Subjective dispositions and attitudes are a weak ground for moral reasoning. I could always counter "But why should we care that others value their own lives?" A subjectivist view has no answer that has intersubjective significance.

Now, I agree that a person who experiences some lingering feelings of self-hatred can still generally recognize that murder is wrong, and on that basis alone, refrain from such actions. But when we say "love your neighbor as yourself", or "do unto others as you would have them done unto you", you can argue that, in life, we first love for our own sake first (think of infants), that our understanding of love of others develops from a recognition of and reflection on the fact of such love, and that failing to will the objective good of others is to fail to will one's own objective good. ("Love" here means willing and acting for the objective good, not some kind of conceit or indulgence, of self or other.) If someone hates himself, it tells me there is a lack of love of neighbor (or, according to traditional parlance, a lack of charity). If he sees life as categorically meaningless, then what value could the lives of others have? Or is the problem a pathological and disordered love of self, a sense of entitlement, and is this kind of suicide then an act of envious ressentiment, an instance of "if I can't have something, neither can you"?

So the cause of suicidal tendencies matters. Is it a mental illness that cripples the faculties of reason? Or is it a wicked vice that corrupts the intellect and the will? A mix of both?

I couldn't tell, so I asked.