Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961. "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on a prescription dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Following his death, The Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway"." (Wikipedia)
Dalida, O Sole Mio. I think I'm in love. "Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), birth name Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages including: French, Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish." [. . .]On Saturday, 2 May 1987, Dalida committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates.[7][8] She left behind a note which read, "La vie m'est insupportable… Pardonnez-moi." ("Life has become unbearable for me… Forgive me.")" (Wikipedia)
The Singing Nun, Dominique, 1963. "Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933 – 29 March 1985) was a Belgian singer-songwriter and initially a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium (as Sister Luc Gabrielle). She acquired world fame in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the her French-language song "Dominique". She is sometimes credited as "The Singing Nun". [. . .]
Citing their financial difficulties in a note, she and her companion of ten years[8][9][10], Annie Pécher, both committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985.[11][12] In their suicide note, Decker and Pécher stated they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together after a church funeral.[7] They were buried together in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Walloon Brabant, the town where they died.[13] The inscription on their tombstone reads "I saw her soul fly across the clouds", a line from Deckers' song "Sister Smile is dead". (Wikipedia)
Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends. There but for Fortune. "Philip David Ochs (/ˈoʊks/; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an Americanprotest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime." [. . .] "On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.[110]" (Wikipedia)
My favorite suicide song is Shiver Me Timbers by Tom Waits. James Taylor offers a beautiful interpretation. Is it really about suicide at sea? The reference to Martin Eden suggests to me that it is. But you might reasonably disagree.
Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit. You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your existence on its existence? You might want to think about this before making the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity.
It would be fairly easy to give strong arguments why TO BE is not the same as TO BE PHYSICAL. Think of so-called 'abstract objects.' It is much more difficult to argue persuasively that the identity fails in the case of persons. And yet persons are rather remarkable. The ones we are regularly acquainted with are also animals. Sunk in animality as we are, it is easy to think that we are are just highly evolved animals. It is easy to miss the wonder of personhood. But the abyss that separates man from the animal should give one pause.
Bishop James A. Pike's son Jim committed suicide. He supposedly communicated the following message to his father from the Other Side:
I thought there was a way out; I wanted out; I've found there is no way out. I wish I had stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings. (James A. Pike, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena, Doubleday, 1968, p. 118.)
If you were around in the '60s and hip to what was happening you will recall Bishop Pike. He was a theological liberal who made quite a splash the ripples of which have long since subsided. The book I have cited is worth reading but best consumed with a mind both open and critical.
I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year.
A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here. (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.)
The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.
Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse. Thanks for reminding me of the passage:
So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing. Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)
I am a native Californian who knows Jack's book and the coastal road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur. Gazing out at the Pacific nearly 50 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast.
Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity. Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.
The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:
. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.
Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides. You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser.
The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge. I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth. Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.
Addendum: At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.
I detect a cri du coeur in the following question to me from a reader:
Do you believe it is morally permissible for an unmarried person who is now middle-aged (late 40's) and who has no children to care for and who has battled clinical depression and anxiety for many years to commit suicide?
Since this is an 'existential' and not merely a theoretical question, and because I want to treat it with the proper respect, I should say that while I have read about clinical depression, I would not call any of my bouts with anxiety and depression 'clinical.' I have successfully dealt with all of them on my own through prayer, meditation, Stoic and other spiritual disciplines, journal writing, vigorous physical exercise (running), and just toughing it out. The classically American virtue of self-reliance, too little practiced these days, can sometimes see you through much better than drugs and hand-holding. But I have been spared the hell I have read about in William Styron's Darkness Visible, and more recently in the philosopher J. P. Moreland's Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Me Peace.
I recommend Moreland's book to the reader and this interview as an introduction thereto.
To come directly at the question: any philosopher who proffers a confident answer to the question is either a fool or a blowhard. Being neither, I will say that I don't know. I further believe that no one knows despite their asseverations to the contrary. I will say that I have never seen a rationally compelling argument against the moral permissibility of suicide when the going gets unbearably tough. That life is hell for some people is better known than any doctrine that forbids escape.
I now refer the reader to some entries of mine that I hope are of some use to him.
Addendum (1/28). It seems to me that each of us who has the time and soundness of mind to pursue the question should should decide now what he will do if calamity strikes.
At Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, Augustine speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me."
A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their pursuers destroying both their souls and their bodies.
At the apogee of this mad trajectory, the pleasure pursued issues in death as in the case of David Carradine's death by auto-erotic asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room. Is there any more extreme case of the insane abuse of the body as a pleasure factory?
As I noted earlier, the celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, hanged himself in his hotel room. I speculated that the man was spiritually adrift. "If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?"
Then I found the graphic below. Now I know the man was spiritually adrift. The view he gives vent to is utter nihilism. If the summum bonum lies in the gratification of the lusts of the flesh, why didn't Bourdain find his solace in further such indulgence?
Enjoy the ride and then commit suicide. And then there is Jeffrey Epstein whose ride to the bottom ended miserably.
My knowledge of my ignorance regarding the ultimate disposition of things keeps me from viewing suicide as a live option should the going get tough. I lack the complacent assurance of those atheists and mortalists who are quite sure that there is no afterlife. I also lack the complacent assurance of those theists and immortalists who feel sure that God will forgive them. And it seems to me that I have good grounds for both lacks of assurance.
"You may be fooling yourself. It may be that what keeps you from viewing suicide as a live option is your having been brought up to believe that it is a mortal sin. The priests and nuns got hold of your credulousness before you could erect your critical defenses."
To which my reply will be that others, brought up in the same way, went on to commit suicide and to commit without qualm other sins that they were taught were mortal. They were brought up the same way and taught the same things at a time when the Catholic Church was taken seriously as a source of theological and moral authority. Those others were not receptive to the religious teaching. They received it, but they were not receptive to it, and so they did not really receive it. A doctrine can be taught but not the receptivity thereto. Seeds can be sown, but if the soil is inhospitable, nothing will grow.
My innate receptivity to the message that something is ultimately at stake in life and that it matters absolutely how we live does not prove that the message is true. But the innateness of the receptivity to the message shows that it was not a matter of indoctrination but a matter of maieutic.
The recent suicide of Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and 'foodie,' offers food for thought. Why would so apparently successful and well-liked a man suddenly hang himself in his hotel room? One can only speculate on the basis of slender evidence, and it is perhaps morally dubious to do so.
On the other hand, not to wonder about a culture in which apparently sane and mature individuals throw away their lives on impulse is also dubious. But the problem lies deeper than culture. It lies in man's fallen nature.
It is clear to me that we are, all of us, morally sick and most of us spiritually adrift. If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?
Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.
This is what good eating is all about? Seriously?
Bourdain displays the requisite decadent New Yorker cleverness, but he also betrays a failure to grasp the moral side of eating and drinking. There is first of all his moral obliviousness to the questions that divide carnivores from vegetarians, an obliviousness in evidence farther down:
Even more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.
I am taking no position at the moment on the morality of meat-eating. I am merely pointing out that there is a moral question here that cannot be dismissed — especially not with the cavalier stupidity of the quotation's final sentence.
But much more important is the moral question of gluttony.
Gluttony is a vice, and therefore a habit. (Prandial overindulgence now and again does not a glutton make.) At a first approximation, gluttony is the habitual inordinate consumption of food or drink. To consume food is to process it through the gastrointestinal tract, extracting its nutrients, and reducing it to waste matter. Now suppose a man eats an excessive quantity of food and then vomits it up in order to eat some more. Has he consumed the first portion of food? Arguably not. But he is a glutton nonetheless. So I tentatively suggest the following (inclusively) disjunctive definition:
D1. Gluttony is either the habitual, quantitatively excessive consumption of food or drink, or the habitual pursuit for their own sakes of the pleasures of eating or drinking, or indeed any habitual over-concern with food, its preparation, its enjoyment, etc.
If (D1) is our definition of gluttony, the vice has not merely to do with the quantity of food eaten but with other factors as well. The following from Wikipedia:
Laute - eating food that is too luxurious, exotic, or costly
Nimis - eating food that is excessive in quantity
Studiose - eating food that is too daintily or elaborately prepared
Praepropere - eating too soon, or at an inappropriate time
Ardenter - eating too eagerly.
It is clear that one can be a glutton even if one never eats an excessive quantity of food. The 'foody' who fusses and frets over the freshness and variety of his vegetables, wasting a morning in quest thereof, who worries about the 'virginity' of the olive oil, the presentation of the delectables on the plate, the proper wine for which course, the appropriate pre- and post-prandial liqueurs, who dissertates on the advantages of cooking with gas over electric . . . is a glutton.
In short, gluttony is the inordinate consumption of, and concern for, food and drink, where 'inordinate' does not mean merely 'quantitatively excessive.' It is also worth pointing out that there is nothing gluttonous about enjoying food: there is nothing morally wrong with enjoying the pleasures attendant upon eating nutritious, well-prepared food in the proper quantities.
Someone with a proper sense of values needn't go to the ascetic Augustinian extreme of viewing food as medicine. (This is not to say that fasting and other forms of prandial self-denial are not valuable and perhaps necessary from time to time.) One ought to think of food as fuel, albeit fuel the consumption of which is a source of legitimate pleasure.
We don't live to eat, we eat to live. And we don't live by bread (food) alone. Why not? Because we are not merely animals but spiritual animals whose life is not a merely animalic life but an embodied spiritual life.
There is something wrong with someone who becomes 'rapturous' (see initial quotation above) over Wellfleet oysters. It is spiritually obtuse so to secularize religious language. And it smacks — forgive the pun– of idolatry. Why not just enjoy your oysters without attribting to them transcendent meaning? Spiritual hunger cannot be sated in so gross a way.
Curiously, the attempt to do so is a sort of 'proof' that man is not a mere animal.
And please don't say that some piece of crud is to 'die for.'
Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy:
God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)
It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.
But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property? Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it? Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?
Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?
We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:
1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value. My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation. I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.
2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned. For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person.
Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing. This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us. The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.
But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?
Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.
The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.
Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise
Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows. Thus he maintains that
. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death.
Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.
What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.
Landsberg again:
All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”
Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.
This is the eleventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). I have decided to skip ahead to Chapter 7, "Suicide," and leave Chapter 6, "Immortality," for later. This episode discusses pp. 163-172.
We have seen that for Benatar death, being a part of the human predicament, contra Epicurus, is no solution to it. Suicide is no escape. Mortality is a "brute and ugly feature of the human predicament" (161), but death "does not solve the problem of one's mortality." (163) Nor does death, which includes death by one's own hand, solve the problem of meaninglessness. At most it eliminates the felt meaninglessness of a particular person's life. The only way to avoid the human predicament is by not being born.
Nevertheless, suicide is a reasonable response to one's condition if it has become bad enough. This raises the question whether suicide is ever morally acceptable. Benatar argues that there are cases in which suicide is both reasonable and morally acceptable.
He makes an important linguistic point. To say that one 'commits' suicide "presupposes the wrongfulness of suicide." (168). So he prefers the verb 'carry out' instead.
Is Suicide Murder?
One who understands the concept of murder understands that while killing a human being may or may not be wrong, murdering a human being is always and indeed necessarily wrong inasmuch as murder, by definition, is wrongful killing. But what makes murder wrong? One answer is that it is wrong because it violates the victim's right to life. So one might argue as follows (my formulation, not Benatar's):
If a person has a right to life, then it is morally wrong for anyone to violate it. The suicide, by killing himself, violates his own right to life. Ergo The suicide does something morally wrong.
The argument is not compelling inasmuch as the correlativity of rights and duties can be upheld while denying that one has duties toward oneself:
On this view my having a negative right to life implies that others have correlative duties not to kill me. It does not imply that I have a duty not to kill myself. Thus, when a person rationally kills himself, he has not violated his own rights. (170)
Waiving the Right to Life
But suppose I do bear duties to myself, duties entailed by the rights I possess. Benatar maintains that, even so, "a competent right-bearer has the moral power either to assert or waive a right' (170) For example, I waive my right to bodily integrity when I grant a surgeon permission to operate on me. Why then can't I waive my right to life? If do, then, by the same stroke, I nullify my duty not to kill myself.
Reflexive duties are different from non-reflexive ones. As a rights-bearer with the power to waive my rights, I may release myself from my reflexive duties.
One naturally wonders, however, how a right so fundamental as the right to life itself could be waived. If any right is inalienable, it is the right to life, I should think.
Is the Right to Life Inalienable?
Some will indeed maintain that a basic negative right such as the right to life is inalienable. If my right to life is inalienable, then I cannot waive it. Nevertheless, Benatar maintains that one can hold both that suicide is sometimes morally permissible and that rights are inalienable. How? By distinguishing between "the inalienability of a right and its waivability." (171) Waivability, unlike alienability, is typically limited. If I waive my right to bodily integrity and give a surgeon permission to cut into me, the waiver is for a limited period of time, for a specific purpose, and is granted to a specific person and no one else. So far, so good.
But how does this show that the inalienable right to life can be waived for a time by the person whose life it is is so as to permit the person to kill himself during that time? If my right to life is inalienable, then no one may kill me at any time. From this it follows that I may not kill myself at any time. Either I do not understand what Benatar is saying on p. 172, or he has fallen into confusion.
Contra Benatar
Benatar maintains that suicide is sometimes morally permissible. The follow argument, however, sees to show that it is never morally permissible:
1) The right to life is inalienable. 2) An inalienable right is one that it is morally impermissible for anyone at any time to violate. Therefore 3) It is morally impermissible for any one at any time to violate his own right to life. Therefore 4) Suicide is always morally impermissible.
We shall have to return to the aporetics of the situation. For the argument just given either proves too much in that it could be modified to show that killing in just war, self-defense, and in capital punishment are morally impermissible, or else shows in effect that there are no inalienable rights.
