Suicide – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Kant on Suicide

Is suicide ever morally permissible?

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.

What I have just sketched is a form of the ultimate paradox of divine creation.

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.

Benatar on Suicide: Is Suicide Murder?

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.

Merton the Conflicted

Thomas Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular — to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).

Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted, so much so that some view his death by electrocution in Bangkok in December 1968 as a case of suicide. There is some plausibility to that conjecture, but I don't share the view.

Is It Always Morally Wrong to Take One’s Own Life? Part I

A reader poses a question:

A 45 year old lady wants to kill herself. This is not a view that she has come to lightly. She has been thinking about suicide fairly systematically for the last five years – ever since she turned forty in fact. She can think of reasons to live – her sister, for example, will miss her if she’s gone – but she can think of many more reasons not to live.

She has thought hard about the morality of suicide. She knows that there are religious objections to the taking of one’s own life. She is aware, for instance, that the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church states that suicide is ‘seriously contrary to justice, hope, and charity’. But she isn’t religious, and doesn’t believe in the afterlife, so she isn’t much impressed by such pronouncements. She has taken into account that some people, such as her sister, will mourn her death. But she does not believe that their suffering will be very great, and certainly not great enough to outweigh what she sees as her right to do as she wishes with her own life – including ending it. She is also aware that she might feel differently about things at some point in the future. However, she thinks that this is unlikely, and, in any case, she is not convinced of the relevance of this point: certainly, she does not think that she has any responsibility towards a purely hypothetical future version of herself.

She has canvassed other people’s opinions about suicide, but so far she has heard nothing to persuade her that killing herself would be wrong. She is frequently told that she "shouldn’t give up", that "things will get better", and that she "should just hang on in there", but nobody has been entirely clear about why she should do these things. For her part, she can’t really see that she stands to lose much of anything by ending her life now. She does not value it, and in any case, if she’s dead, she’s hardly going to regret missing out on whatever it is that might have happened to her had she lived.

Question.

Would it be [morally] wrong for this woman to commit suicide? If so, why?

I will assume that the lady in question has no human dependents and that her sister has agreed to take care of her cats or other pets. My answer is that I see no compelling reason to think that it would be wrong for this woman, precisely as described, to commit suicide, assuming that she harms no one else in doing so. Of course, one can give reasons contra. But I see no rationally compelling reason contra. Let's run through some reasons that have merit. The 'argument' that suicide is always an act of cowardice has no merit.

Augustine's Main Argument

Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 20): “Hence it follows that the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’ refer to the killing of a man—not another man; therefore, not even thyself. For he who kills himself, kills nothing else than a man.”

To kill oneself is to kill a man; to kill a man is wrong; so, to kill oneself is wrong. Suicide is homicide; homicide is wrong; ergo, etc. Tightening up the argument:

1) Every intentional killing of a human being is morally wrong.
2) Every act of suicide is the intentional killing of a human being.
Therefore
3) Every act of suicide is morally wrong.

The syllogism is valid, but the major is not credible. Counterexamples in decreasing order of plausibility: just war, capital punishment, self-defense, abortion in some cases, and, of course, suicide!

Note that (1) cannot be supported from the "Thou shalt not kill" of the Decalogue. As Paul Ludwig Landsberg correctly comments, "The Christian tradition, apart from a few sects, has always allowed two important exceptions: [just] war and capital punishment." (The Experience of Death, p. 78) I would add that the allowance is eminently reasonable.

How could suicide count as a counterexample to (1)? Well, as Landsberg points out, killing oneself and killing another are very different. (79) As I would put it, in a case of rational suicide such as the case my reader proposes, one kills oneself out of loving concern for oneself whereas the killing of another is typically, though not always, a hostile and hateful act.

Although Augustine's argument cannot be dismissed out of hand it is not rationally compelling.

Next time: The arguments of the doctor angelicus.

I'll end with one of my famous aphorisms:

One Problem with Suicide

Suicide is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem.

So don't do anything rash, muchachos. Your girlfriend dumped you and you feel you can't go on? Give it a year and re-evaluate.

Time Was . . .

. . . when I had space for books, but no money. Now it's the other way around.

So I allowed myself only two purchases today at the antiquarian Mesa Bookshop in downtown Mesa, Arizona, Gary Wills' slim volume, Saint Augustine, Viking 1999, and Joseph Agassi's Faraday as Natural Philosopher, University of Chicago Press, 1971.

But I resisted the temptation to buy a big fat biography of Richard Brautigan, a poet/novelist of sorts I hadn't thought about in years and whom I last read in the 'sixties. The book of his I read is probably the same one you read if you are a veteran of those heady days and were en rapport with its Zeitgeist. I refer of course to Trout Fishing in America. Even if you never read it, you will recall the cover from the numerous copies scattered about the crash pads of the those far-off and fabulous times.

But I resisted the temptation to buy the fat, space-consuming biography for which there is no room on my Beat shelf. Instead, I sat down and read deep into the opening chapter which recounts in gory detail Brautigan's suicide at age 49 in 1984 achieved by a .44 magnum round to the head.

Brautigan, like Bukowski, had a hard life and writing was their therapy. The therapy proved more efficacious in the case of Bukowski, however.

I have been visiting the Mesa Bookshop for over a quarter of a century now. These days I pop in once a year, every year, on Thanksgiving Eve right after I pick up my T-shirt and race number for the annual Mesa Turkey Trot, Thanksgiving morning, which I run or 'run' every year. Time was when I ran the 10 K but tomorrow I'll essay the 5 K and see how the old knees hold up.

After the book shop and a snatch of conversation with Old Mike behind the counter I follow my tradition of having lunch nearby either at a good Mexican joint name of Mangoes or as today at a Thai place across the street, Nunthaporn Thai Cuisine. Recommended if you should ever find yourself in the heart of Mesa.

How I love this time of year! And what a pleasure listening to Dennis Prager on the drive over and Michael Medved on the drive back.

Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners

I have been reading Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009. I gather that Pavese was obsessed life-long with the thought of suicide. Entry of 8 January 1938:

There is nothing ridiculous or absurd about a man who is thinking of killing himself being afraid of falling under a car or catching a fatal disease. Quite apart from the degree of suffering involved, the fact remains that to want to kill oneself is to want one's death to be significant, a supreme choice, a deed that cannot be misunderstood. So it is natural that no would-be suicide can endure the thought of anything so meaningless as being run over or dying of pneumonia. So beware of draughts and street corners. (71)

From the entry of 16 January 1938:

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition. (73)

The last line of his journal, 18 August 1950:

Not words. An act. I won't write any more. (350)

Nine days later Pavese killed himself in a Turin hotel room with an overdose of sleeping pills. Apparently because of the ending of his relationship with the American actress, Constance Dowling.

Who among us has not been played for a fool by the illusions of romantic love?

Our restless hearts seek from the finite what the finite cannot provide.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Couple of Suicide Songs

Tastes in music are pretty much generationally-rooted. Just to yank (tug?) Dale Tuggy's chain a bit, I said to him while we were rooming together in Prague, that the heavy metal stuff he likes is "music to pound out fenders by," a phrase that Edward Abbey (1927-1989) applied to all rock music. I claimed heavy metal has little by way of melody. Tuggy, who is 20 years younger than me, demurred and pointed me to some songs one of which is Metallica's Fade to Black. The song was released in '84 when Tuggy was 14, so maybe it had the sort of impact on him that Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone (1965) had on me when I was 15.

"Fade to Black" features a very nice acoustic guitar intro and does have a melody, but can it hold a candle melody- or lyric-wise to Tom Wait's suicide song, Shiver Me Timbers? You decide.

The Morality of Suicide

There is a well-informed discussion of the topic at Auster's place. I have serious reservations about Lawrence Auster's brand of conservatism, reservations I may air later, but for now I want to say that I admire him for his courage in facing serious medical troubles and for soldiering on in the trenches of the blogosphere. He courageously tackles topics many of us shy away from. I hope he pulls through and carries on.

One Problem with Suicide

Suicide is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem.