Old Stuff on Philosophy of Suicide

Old Stuff on Suicide: Old Realisation (I think it’s hard to dispute) about the (Im)morality of Suicide plus an Old Debate about the Rationality of the Act

Suicide is almost always a profoundly immoral act. There are very few people who, if they were to die, do not (tense is unavoidably awkward here) have at least one person in their life who would feel grief, distress or some other kind of intense pain upon this occurrence. Demented old people in nursing homes and schizophrenic homeless people probably don’t have any such ‘loved-ones’, but almost all people do (such demographic groups are minor). Unless you are totally dependent or parasitic upon one of the few (/the only) ‘loved-one’ in your life, and this ‘loved-one’ isn’t actually that much of a loved-one in the sense that she wouldn’t be struck down with long-term grief and depression if you died (and might have other opportunities to do better things with her life, without the burden of looking after you 24/7), then killing yourself is going to be an immoral thing, according to any moral theory which pays some attention to consequences (plus Kant, of course, following the Bible, said suicide was deeply immoral; I can’t figure out if neo-Kantians, like Christine Korsgaard, typically agree that suicide is immoral, though they may well).

Performative forms of suicide are, for obvious reasons, even more immoral, all else equal. Those people who commit suicide (or attempt to) by jumping in front of trains, for example, cause trauma to all the other people on the platform, the people on the train who hear the terrifying thud (when I was 16, I experienced this firsthand while inside the train at Lindfield Station, and found myself really upset – though it turned out the guy (who I didn’t see) had barely injured himself), and especially the people who have to scrape up the mangled body. It is a deeply selfish act.

As for whether suicide is typically irrational in terms of self-interested rationality, I had a long-running dispute with my friend HR over this. His position was the following: suicide is almost always (if not always) irrational, because:

a)      Given basic facts about human mood and psychology, we can infer with an overwhelming degree of confidence that anyone who commits suicide has fallen for a kind of paradigmatically irrational myopia: she has failed to recognise that her terrible mood will get better (regression to the mean!) and that her ‘life’ will get better – that happiness or pleasure is always possible around the corner, barring the most extreme of cases (and probably no case of severe depression and anhedonia is so extreme that no pleasure of any kind is possible in future (with medication at least)).

b)      The act of suicide is, by definition, the obviation of the suicider’s potential for sentient experience (obliviation). Since experience is the source of all value – since there is no value in oblivion because there is no anything – this makes suicide always a fundamentally stupid and futile act.

Another way he put this argument was the following: it makes no sense to talk about oblivion being “better” (or “worse”) than experience, but it does make sense to talk about the act of obliviation as being a wrong move, because you are moving from a realm where good and bad are possible to nothingness, where there is no good or bad, because there is no experience, and that is just dumb, because experience is everything.

I always had a problem with this compound argument, and still do, because it seems to me that, while a) is true, that is not a decisive argument in itself – it relies on b) to back it up – and yet there’s something fundamentally dodgy about argument b). It’s really hard to say anything sensible in response to b), however, and that’s why our dispute lasted so long. Ultimately, my reply became this:

‘I just don’t think one can have a determinate verdict on whether obliviation is bad. It seems especially unclear if the obliviator is one whose life, on the whole, involves more suffering, stress and striving than joy, fulfilment and love. In such a case, it seems especially unreasonable to be confident that the suicider is acting irrationally (which is not to say that I can confidently say that he is acting rationally). It seems to me that we kind of reach a fundamental impasse in trying to reason about this, and that our concepts no longer make sense. I don’t think we can really justifiably say either that killing yourself is typically or always rational or irrational.’

In other words, this question appeared to me, and appears to me, a good example of a question about self-interested rationality that can’t be solved. That makes it very interesting philosophically. We typically think that whether a given action is rational or irrational in terms of self-interest is always determinate (that questions about rationality of action only become more complicated when we try to explore the Parfitian question of whether there are objective reasons for action (whether certain actions can be rational or irrational objectively)). That is to say, we typically think that either x is in our interest or it is not: either going to the shop is going to give us an ultimate benefit, or it is not going to. It may actually be far too complicated to work this answer out in most cases, because of the complexity of the world, but it seems to us silly to think that there is no determinate ultimate answer. And yet it seems to me that there is no determinate answer on suicide.

To sum up, committing suicide is almost always deeply immoral, though it is not clear to me that we can say either that it is typically rational or irrational in terms of self-interested rationality.