The Ethics of Death: Religious and Philosophical Perspectives in Dialogue

5. Suicide

5 Suicide Introduction Anyone thinking about the issue of suicide generally begins with negative attitudes and conclusions on the subject, although there is a clear distinction between suicides done for purely bad reasons and those done as sacrifices for others.1 Suicide is just an evil thing and wrong to do, as the vast majority of folks will tell us. That is why we have major programs in place to prevent people from taking their lives, one of which is the It Gets Better Project founded by Dan Savage.2 The goal is to help lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teenagers deal with suicidal thoughts that too often cause them to take their own lives. Our society also allows for individuals to lose their rights of selfgovernance if they are suicidal. In fact, if a person exhibits such signs they can be committed against their will by the state to mental institutions. But we should always be wary of placing too much credence in what society does or how society feels about an issue, and we should also be careful about how our individual biases create unwarranted intuitions. Although these facts can be relevant moral factors, we have to remember that they are often not the sole or primary evidence justifying a conclusion. In too many situations, individual intuitions and social conventions are merely reflections of bias or tradition that have not been examined for their evidentiary weight. We have learned that such conventions are wrong, such as in the case of allowing slavery or keeping women subservient to men. So, we cannot assume that suicide is always morally wrong or that it is forbidden merely because it is something that we individually or as a majority of the population would not do and think is morally wrong or bad when others 1. Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 93–94. 2. It Gets Better Project, http://www.itgetsbetter.org/. 185 do it. To see if our and society’s views capture the moral view, we should first consider the most powerful arguments for and against suicide. Cooley As always, I will begin with the standard philosophical arguments for and against the death-and-dying issue under consideration, in this case suicide, and then develop what I believe to be the most relevant issues in my own arguments. ARGUMENTS AGAINST SUICIDE Some important arguments for the standard moral view of suicide have been around for a number of years. Perhaps the most powerful philosophical argument is that of Immanuel Kant, who believed people are intrinsically valuable because they possess a good will. Most people interpret Kant as a philosopher who prohibited all forms of suicide because a person’s taking his own life entailed that the person did not treat himself as an end in himself. That is, rather than respecting his value as a person with the good will that makes him a person, the suicidal individual degrades himself by acting in a way that his intrinsic value was used as a mere means to the end of taking his own life. In fact, Kant explicitly takes up several of the most common reasons people commit suicide—for example, avoidance of a life that is more painful than pleasurable—and then argues that those who want to commit suicide on these grounds cannot rationally act to kill themselves. A human being cannot renounce his personality as long as he is a subject of duty, hence as long as he lives; and it is a contradiction that he should be authorized to withdraw from this obligation, that is, freely act as if no authorization were needed for this action. To annihilate the subject of morality in one’s person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person.3 3. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 177. 186 | The Ethics of Death A suicidal person cannot rationally reject the very thing that made him a moral agent capable of choosing and acting as a moral agent in the first place. Basically, there is a contradiction in a suicidal person’s thinking that must...