Comment by sillysaurusx
1 day ago
Feeling suicidal isn’t a debilitating condition. People around you have suicidal ideation every day, and they manage their jobs well.
I’ll counter your argument with this: a bus driver is allowed to feel suicidal ideation, yet they safeguard the lives of everyone on board. Maiming everyone would be as easy as accelerating on the highway and swerving off the road. Yet we don’t worry about this, because it’s rare enough not to matter.
Meanwhile if you say "a suicidal bus driver has no business behind the steering wheel", congratulations, you’ve just forced all the suicidal bus drivers to hide their condition.
You’re not going to be able to detect this illness the way you can detect the ones you name. Your policy is going to force people to hide it. It’s a dumb policy. That’s not an appeal to emotion.
tl;dr We're talking about a $200 million piece of equipment. This isn't your typical job. Merely "getting by" is nowhere near sufficient.
That line of reasoning isn't an appeal to emotion but your earlier focus on dehumanization and discrimination most certainly was.
I think it's a reasonable point that such a policy exhibits a severe perverse incentive. So the question becomes, how many lives are lost due to the perverse incentive versus if the policy didn't exist? Someone with the right knowledge and resources can at least make an objective attempt at estimating that.
Regarding bus drivers I'll observe there is a stark difference in both scale and certainty of death. The degree to which safety risks are tolerated almost invariably scales with such metrics. Pilots operate in a domain where an unmitigated failure not resulting in the deaths of everyone on board is far closer to the exception than the norm.
There are also public perception and financial angles to consider. People are rather paranoid about hurtling through the air in metal tubes. The equipment is also rather capital intensive, with a 787 and a hyperscale data center falling vaguely in the same order of magnitude. As such many of the practices surrounding that activity go a bit overboard from an actuarial perspective at least in comparison to other common daily pastimes (but not in comparison to aforementioned data centers).
Which circles back around nicely to your leading statement. It is the act itself, the attempt to commit suicide, that I think is reasonable to view as a sudden and debilitating condition. Those with suicidal ideations are statistically more likely to suffer from that. I think it's extremely similar to the heart attack example, and policy certainly requires commercial pilots to have regular physicals. The primary difference (and potential point of contention) is that there's no straightforward way to hide a physical condition whereas you probably can hide a mental one and (unlike a physical one) doing so is likely to exacerbate it.