The Ethics of Suicide

Victor Cosculluela

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000044331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1995, this volume addresses a topical subject: assisted suicide. The book discusses the issues surrounding the morality of suicide and in so doing clarifies the literature in applied ethics. It critiques the complex moral and religious arguments on the topic offered by philosophers and theologians. It establishes a middle position between those who hold that suicide is never morally permissible and those who claim it always is and it determines when second parties ought to aid and when they ought to prevent suicides.

CHAPTER 1

POPULAR AND RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS AGAINST SUICIDE

In this chapter we will consider various popular and religious arguments for the claim that suicide is morally wrong. By a “popular argument,” I mean an argument that would very likely be employed by the average person without philosophical training. By a “religious argument,” I mean an argument that is expressed in the context of religious beliefs, such as the belief that God exists. As we shall see, however, some religious arguments against suicide can be reinterpreted in a non-religious way. Religious arguments are treated together with popular arguments since there is obviously a great deal of overlap between the two categories thanks to the widespread acceptance of religious claims.

Some of the arguments we will discuss would not merit consideration were it not for the fact that they have been served up again and again in the history of the debate on the ethics of suicide. Further, they continue to influence the thinking of contemporary authors. One sometimes finds these arguments offered as conclusive reasons for condemning suicide. For these and other reasons, it would be inappropriate to ignore them entirely.

Is Suicide Unnatural?

Suicide is often condemned on the ground that it is “unnatural” in some sense. The suicide does not follow “nature’s way.”¹ Since different arguments can be expressed by the claim that suicide is unnatural, we must consider various possible formulations.

Suicide and the will to live: On one interpretation, both St. Thomas Aquinas and Josephus argued that suicide is unnatural in the sense that it is a violation of the alleged ever-present drive which all living organisms have to preserve their Hves. According to Aquinas, since “everything naturally keeps itself in being, and resists corruption as far as it can,” it follows that “suicide is contrary to the inclination of nature.” From this he inferred that “suicide is always a mortal sin.”² Likewise, Josephus claimed that suicide is “repugnant to that nature which all creatures share” since among the animals “there is not one that deliberately seeks death or kills itself; so firmly rooted is all nature’s law—the will to live.”³

Before we consider this argument, it is important to note that despite the phrase “suicide is always a mortal sin” in the quotation from Aquinas, he does not condemn suicide in all possible circumstances. For Aquinas, every case of suicide is morally wrong except for the extremely rare cases in which God Himself directly commands the act.⁴ In what follows I will generally ignore this qualification since I will not be concerned with suicides which are directly commanded by God Himself.

On one interpretation of Aquinas⁵ and Josephus, their argument is that suicide is morally wrong because it involves a failure to follow the alleged innate and ever-present drive which every living organism has to preserve its life. Let us call this drive the “life drive.” Their argument, on this interpretation, may be formulated as follows:

(1) Every living organism has a life drive.

(2) If every living organism has a life drive, then every case of suicide involves a violation of the suicide’s life drive.

(3) If every case of suicide involves a violation of the suicide’s life drive, then suicide is never morally permissible.

(4) Therefore, suicide is never morally permissible.

I am willing to grant premise (2) for the sake of argument.⁶ So my evaluation will focus on (1) and (3). Of these two premises, (3) is the more dubious.

According to (1), every living organism has an innate and ever-present drive to preserve its life. This claim raises several problems. First, as several authors have noted, there is evidence that self-destructive behavior is not unknown even among non-human animals. Some evidence suggests that self-destructive behavior is genetically selected for when the death of an individual organism creates for related members of the same species advantages which outweigh the genetic value of its own survival.⁷ Self-destruction has been observed in dogs, who may kill themselves by drowning themselves or by refusing food, for various reasons.⁸ Second, the mere fact that human beings commit suicide may weaken the claim that every organism has an ever-present drive to preserve its life. It is arguable that many human beings have no desire whatsoever to preserve their lives.

However, the proponent of (1) is in a position to admit that non-human animals perform acts of self-destruction, and that human beings commit suicide—of course they do—while claiming that these facts are compatible with (1), since it is possible that when these events occur, the life drive is not absent but overpowered by some other drive, say, a drive to escape pain. The idea here is that from the mere fact that an organism performs a certain act (e.g., suicide), it does not follow that it had no desire at all to refrain from performing that act. It has been suggested that suicidal persons would prefer to go on living but are willing to do so only if their prospects were less bleak.⁹ Perhaps, then, when non-human animals perform self-destructive acts and when human beings commit suicide, what happens is that their life drive is not their strongest source of motivation. This objection does show that the evidence concerning self-destructive behavior in non-human animals and suicide in human beings is not conclusive against (1). However, what this evidence does show is that (1) is not in any way obvious or self-evident. While it may be obvious that animals usually strive to preserve their lives, it is not at all obvious that they have an ever-present drive to do so. Thus, (1) is not obviously true, and its truth is not established by pointing out the evolutionary value of a general tendency in animals to preserve their lives; as pointed out above, evolutionary theory itself may conflict with (1).

However, it will be safer for us to assume that (1) is true. The present argument against suicide would still fail if (3) were shown to be false. (3) claims that if every case of suicide involves a failure to follow the suicide’s life drive, then suicide is never morally permissible. This claim seems implausible. Why should the fact—assuming it is a fact—that suicide conflicts with a certain drive have any bearing on the moral status of the act? Aquinas and Josephus may be assuming the principle that if an act conflicts with a “natural” (i.e., innate) drive, that act is morally wrong.¹⁰ Given this principle, (3) can be defended. But this principle is itself totally implausible. As John Donne suggested in Biathanatos, the first work published in English (1647) to challenge the traditional Christian condemnation of suicide, if the fact that an act conflicts with a natural drive is sufficient to make it morally wrong, then celibacy would be morally wrong since it violates the natural desire for sexual gratification.¹¹ Likewise, donating to charities, monogamy, honesty, and other practices which we praise are frequently contrary to our natural inclinations, but surely this fact alone does not establish that those practices are wrong. So the principle that any act which is contrary to a natural drive is thereby morally wrong is implausible. Consequently, (3) cannot be rescued by this principle. Further, in the absence of this principle, (3) seems implausible. From the mere fact that a case of suicide violates the suicide’s life drive it cannot be inferred that it is morally wrong. Likewise, even if a case of martyrdom conflicted with the martyr’s life drive, that in itself would not render the act wrong.

Suicide and prescriptive natural law: Some philosophers have claimed that while the above interpretation may apply to Josephus, it does not apply to Aquinas. Consequently, they claim that the objection just rehearsed (i.e., that some acts which are contrary to our inclinations are morally right) is irrelevant to Aquinas’s argument. Tom Beauchamp clearly expressed this position:

This interpretation overlooks the fact that Thomistic philosophers draw an important distinction between laws of nature and natural laws. Presumably, the former are descriptive statements … while the latter are prescriptive statements derived from philosophical knowledge of the essential properties of human nature…. In this theory, natural laws do not empirically describe behavior… ; rather, they delimit the behavior that is morally appropriate for a human being; they tell us how we ought to behave because of our very nature as humans.¹²

On this view, there is a “natural law” that applies to human beings. This natural law is, as Margaret Battin notes, a prescriptive principle which requires human beings to “live and to engage in specifically human activities” that “promote the fulfillment of man’s highest potential. Suicide is wrong because it precludes these activities.”¹³ So when Aquinas classes suicide as an act which is contrary to “natural law,” what he means is that the act is contrary to a prescriptive principle which applies to human beings because of their potentialities as human beings. As Frederick Copleston, a contemporary Thomist, puts it, the natural law is “the totality of the universal precepts or dictates” regarding “the good which is to be pursued and the evil which is to be shunned”; “man has a natural tendency to preserve his being, and reason reflecting on this tendency as present in man promulgates the precept that life is to be preserved.”¹⁴ Aquinas’s own words put this interpretation beyond dispute:

… this is the first precept of [the natural] law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this… ,¹⁵

With respect to the present issue he says that whatever is a means of preserving life “belongs to the natural law.”¹⁶

With this in mind, we can consider Beauchamp’s formulation of the Thomistic argument:

(i) It is a natural law that everything loves and seeks to perpetuate itself.

(ii) Suicide is an act contrary to self-love and self-perpetuation.

(iii) (Therefore) suicide is contrary to natural law.

(iv) Anything contrary to natural law is morally wrong.

(v) (Therefore) suicide is morally wrong.¹⁷

Although Beauchamp himself criticizes this argument on the ground that the Thomistic distinction between laws of nature and natural laws is “far too obscure to be convincing,”¹⁸I will not pursue this kind of criticism. Instead, I will consider first premise (ii) and then premise (i).

Premise (ii) asserts that suicide is contrary to self-love and self-perpetuation. Clearly, suicide is contrary to self-perpetuation since we are concerned here with bodily self-perpetuation (i.e., perpetuation as a living embodied being). However, it is unclear that suicide is contrary to self-love. One can, it seems, commit suicide without abandoning self-love; for instance, one can commit suicide in order to spare oneself a great deal of suffering. Out of self-love, one can put an end to one’s life in order to free oneself from pain.

However, it is open to the Thomist to simply rewrite (ii) as follows:

(ii’) Suicide is an act contrary to self-perpetuation.

Having rewritten (ii) as (ii’), the reference to self-love in premise (i) is no longer an essential part of the argument; it does no logical work since self-love is not referred to in premise (ii’). So (i) can be rewritten as follows:

(i’) It is a natural law that everything seeks to perpetuate itself.

Given the prescriptive meaning of “natural law,” (i’) is not a purely descriptive statement. Since to say that there is a “natural law” requiring the performance of an act is to say that the act is obligatory, (i’) must be saying that it is obligatory for every living thing to seek to perpetuate itself. It should now be clear that, without further argument, our revised Thomistic argument simply assumes that suicide is wrong; that is, premise (i’) begs the question. Once we interpret “natural law” in a prescriptive s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Popular and Religious Arguments Against Suicide
• Chapter 2 Philosophical Arguments Against Suicide
• Chapter 3 From Permissible to Obligatory Suicide
• Chapter 4 The Role of Others in Suicide
• Chapter 5 Schopenhauer and Camus: Suicide and the Hero
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Defining Suicide
• Bibliography
• Index