I can understand why we must try to prevent teens from committing suicide due to things like bullying, parental abuse, etc. And also people who have depression caused by chemical imbalances. Because these can be (not in all cases) overcome with long term treatment.
But is there really a good reason to prevent people of age who are of sane mind and do not want to live due to misanthropy (hating humans), or nihilism (finding no point in existence) from ending their life?
I have heard a few arguments against suicide and I will list them and my response:
Suicide is selfish - Maybe if you have financial dependents. But I would say that could be easily resolved if society made it acceptable and allowed people to make arrangements that would not inconvenience their family. Another way people say its selfish is that it bring distress to family members and friends. I personally do not think an independent adult is obligated to anyone emotionally. If society accepted suicide was a right provided the decision was not irrational and encouraged suicide discussions with family members then there would be less distress.
2)Suicide is cowardly - I don’t even understand why this has any relevance. So what if suicide is the “cowards way out”? What would bravery be? Forcing an individual to live in a world they consider unjust which they could not change? As far as I know, cowardice does not stop the world going round; the universe does not care if you are a coward or not. Unless you believe in religion.
3)Suicide goes against human instinct- Some things we do today go against animal instinct. For example abortion doesn’t really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint as animals are constantly seeking to reproduce and populate but we as humans can make decisions unlike other animals and choose whats best for us. If people want suicide then that does not mean they are irrational and their brains are sick. It just means they want a different life
This is somewhat like saying it’s OK to punch someone else in the face hard enough to break their nose because you’re not obligated to keep other people safe.
Suicide is, typically, horrifically painful to the friends and relatives left behind, particularly parents and children of the suicide. It’s NOT “distress”, that’s extremely dismissive of the amount of PAIN experienced by those left behind. Do you dismiss the distress of the friend or relative of someone who was murdered? Do you dismiss the pain of a parent that loses a child to death?
Yes, an “independent adult” living in society IS obligated to not infringe upon the rights of others or cause harm to them. Suicide most definitely does cause emotional harm to those who cared about the person and trying to make excuses for the selfish prick who does it is like trying to excuse someone for physically assaulting their spouse and children.
Sure, the mentally ill may not be responsible for their actions. People who do awful things because they’re sick are one thing, “rational adults” who do awful things are selfish asshats.
So assume they discuss it with their friends and relative and their friends and relatives understand and respect the decision? Suicide is painful because it is usually messy and must be done in secret and using whatever method the person can put together. You cannot have a rational discussion with people and say “well I’ve thought this through carefully and this is my reasoning”, you will be institutionalised against your will.
None of this is getting into people that are terminally ill which is entirely a different matter. I watched my mother die slowly and horribly from intestinal cancer, begging the whole time for it to end. She was rational and wanted to choose the time of her own passing, but was forced to endure weeks of pointless pain because of “ethics”.
Speaking as someone who lost an immediate family member to suicide, that’s nonsense. Suicide is painful for the survivors because they’re sorry that their loved one is gone and that their loved one was so unhappy.
You can never make suicide into something that’s okay or socially acceptable, barring circumstances like terminal illness and terrible pain etc., because what leads people to choose suicide is being miserable. And what compassionate caring people want is for a miserable person to be able to become not miserable. Not just to shut the whole thing down by offing themselves.
I have sympathy for people who are so miserable they choose suicide, and I wouldn’t be angry at them and all that, but you just cannot expect non-suicidal people in general to agree that they should accept suicide as an okay decision on somebody else’s part.
It’s like watching somebody with a blindfold on walking towards the edge of a cliff. They may feel very strongly that they know what they’re doing and are going in the right direction, but from my point of view they just look catastrophically mistaken. You can’t expect me not to run after them shouting “no no, wait, stop, you mustn’t go that way”.
What, is it OK if two people talk it over and they agree it’s OK for one to harm the other? That’s not considered generally acceptable, either. How extraordinary! Would you be OK if two people discussed the matter and agree it was OK for one party to murder the other?
No, suicide is painful because someone you care about DIES and is never coming back.
Right. Because -outside of some extraordinary exceptions - such a discussion is inherently irrational. Rational adults don’t normally want to kill themselves. Hence, the assumption that if a “rational” adult wants to kill him or herself something is VERY wrong and needs to be corrected.
[del]Oh, you’re talking about the terminally ill? Why did you leave that out of the OP? It’s an important fact, don’t you think? Because otherwise we think you’re talking about someone otherwise adult and healthy since only a very small minority of the population is terminally ill at any one time. In fact, you didn’t mention terminal illness at all, you mentioned “misanthropy” and “nihilism”. Are you done with the bait-and-switch on a volatile subject or do we get to expect more of that out of you?[/del]
My apologies, coremelt, I mistook you initially for the OP. The OP is talking about healthy and allegedly rational adults deciding to kill themselves. I agree, the terminally ill are a different category.
Several points:
Terminal illness is not always painful. My mother died without pain or need for painkillers.
Even when a terminal illness involves pain that pain can, with proper medical care, usually be controlled. My father-in-law died of bone cancer. I won’t say he was entirely without pain, but he wasn’t in agony, either. The last week or so the level of painkiller required did result in a medication induced coma, a level of medication that almost certainly hastened his death, but did not directly cause it. That is considered acceptable for the terminally ill. So I have to wonder if your mother actually had proper palliative care and if she didn’t I am truly sorry. If she did have proper care and was still in agony I am even more sorry and move on to point 3.
For the RARE situation where death is certain and pain can not be controlled I can see a justification for suicide… which might be why there are jurisdictions (which are slowly increasing in number) where this is allowed. But that’s a very, very different situation than a physically healthy adult. Even then, death is still painful for those left behind even if they simultaneously feel a sense of relief when it’s over. Or are you going to tell me you didn’t mourn or feel any grief at all at your mother’s death? But that’s a situation where you’re going to feel the pain of death either way, so minimizing the suffering of the dying is not going to harm anyone else any more than circumstances will anyway.
Define “allowed”, too. In the UK we no longer, thank goodness, impose legal punishments for failed attempts at suicide, but any other sense of “allow” means expecting other people to suppress their natural instinct to preserve life if at all possible - i.e., it’s not so much “allowing” the suicide’s freedom as imposing on the bystanders.
I’ll guess I’ll be the first to go along with the OP. Anybody should have the right to knowingly end their own life at any time (I put “knowingly” to exclude children, people on drugs etc: so people fully understanding the scope of what they’re doing).
Feelings are strong on this topic, but the actual arguments given rarely stand up.
Examples:
“You would cause extreme distress to others”.
Normally we don’t impinge on rights for that reason. My parents might be extremely distressed to discover I’m a gay porn star, but that would be their problem, not mine, and few people would consider me immoral for saying that.
Now I’m sure some people will say how can you compare that level of distress to bereavement? Well, I don’t need to. The fact is, in principle, we don’t care about distress and just changing the scale of it, and saying what about mega distress doesn’t change that.
“It’s irrational”.
That has to be shown.
Most people nowadays feel that terminating your life when you’re suffering from a terminal and painful illness can be rational. So there is at least some cases where most people would concede this point.
And the line between “rational” and “irrational” suicide is not so clear cut I think. After all, we all have a terminal illness, it’s just a question of, again, scale.
And why this dividing line between physical and mental pain? Maybe in some cases the prognosis for a particular kind of mental suffering is worse than a physical pain. It can’t even be alleviated temporarily with pills.
“We have a natural instinct to preserve life if at all possible”.
No, we don’t. And the steak in my stomach agrees with me.
Sorry on reading this back I realize how callous this sounds, but I was just making a point there, and I do care about the feelings of others.
If my parents were upset at my career or life choices then I would try to talk it through with them and help them to understand. I don’t want anybody to be upset, least of all my parents. But their feeling in itself should not take away my rights.
But there are (or were recently, anyway) cultures where suicide is expected in cases of extreme dishonor. In those places, it was socially acceptable, though still at a high cost to the survivors.
I’m just saying that “you can never…” is contradicted by anthropological evidence. I’m not making an argument about what our society should or shouldn’t do.
I’m not convinced that “It is hurtful to friends and family!” is a good argument. Many of the decisions an individual makes for themselves can be very hurtful to friends and family. Like the refusal of medical treatment. If a person with dependent children decides to forego chemotherapy, are we collectively supposed to condemn that person? Or should we just accept that it ain’t none of our business, even though the decision may burden society in some way (e.g., foster care for the children)?
Furthermore, there are plenty of people who don’t have friends and family. Or maybe they have family, but their family is incapable or unwilling to help them. Should a person be obligated to stay on this earth just because it would break the heart of their Aunt Betty, who they haven’t seen in ages, if they were to commit suicide? More importantly, why should society care more about Aunt Betty’s feelings? What if Aunt Betty is the primary cause of the person’s desire to commit suicide?
I can think of some good reasons why society would permit an industry geared towards safe, effective suicide:
Half-ass suicidal attempts can be devastating. Not just for the individual, but for the family who feels obligated to care for that person. You would have fewer half-assed attempts with professionals.
An industry can be mandated to have certain safeguards. For instance, perhaps we can make it so that everyone who uses a suicide service has to wait at least 30 days and speak with a counselor regularly throughout that duration. Individuals with dependents would be required to leave behind a will and a note.
Some families never accept that their family member committed suicide because the circumstances of death are so ambiguous. A formal process would alleviate any doubt.
Perhaps agreeing to donate one’s organs could offset the costs of the procedure.
To be fair, I can think of downsides of a suicide industry. There would still be many people who’d fling themselves off of train platforms and highway overpasses. While I think it should be an individual’s rights to commit suicide, people have an obligation to pay their financial debts and care for their dependents–and I don’t society should facilitate ditching these responsibilities. I think I’d feel a lot better about government-sanctioned suicide if government provided free healthcare (including mental health services). I think society has a responsibility to its members to provide a good quality of life. A society that provides only a good quality of death isn’t one I’d want to live in.
Agreed. I also find disturbing the OPs use of “with the help of society?” in his OP title.
We live in a world where there are just too many people who’d want to be some version of the dinner table of murderers in "The Last Supper "(1995).
Someone who might show the slightest weakness might be seen as a tempting target for the homicidal tendencies of some group of genetically-damaged-by-inbreeding Psychos.
(ie Should that person ‘commit suicide’? Lets all get the ‘gang’ together and ‘help’.)
Most Americans are Christian – they believe that suicide is a road to eternal suffering. Most Jewish Rabbis believe that few of us will suffer more then a few millennia.
What if a person has spent decades in therapy–talk and pharmacological–and have had little success? These people do exist.
Or what if there lives are unquestionably miserable. Like being an unemployable, friendless paraplegic stuck in a urine-reeking nursing home? Why should I–a person who isn’t in this circumstance–be able to tell someone who is that they are being irrational for wanting to bail out?
People should have the right to kill themselves. It is the most basic of rights, the individual choice to be or not to be. Without overwhelming evidence that a person would not kill themselves if not for a curable mental disorder then no one should be prevented from exercising that right.
Whether or not society needs to help someone end their life is another matter. When we are talking about physical suffering that cannot be ended otherwise I believe society should help, at least in providing the means to terminate one’s life in a manner that does not lead to more suffering. The really tricky part is knowing that someone wants to die but that person cannot physically commit the act of suicide. I’m not so sure whether any member of society should have to, or be able to actively aid that process. Given that a person makes their wishes known at a time where their state of mind can be established I guess the means to follow through should be available, although the proper level of safeguards to prevent abuse from impatient heirs and the like will make that a difficult process.
A friend of mine who is to use his words is a cripple with more physical defects than you can shake a stick at he says NO because tomorrow they may be able to rebuild him.
During his life he has achieved a hell of lot, held down a job, represented his country in the Paralympics, I do not know how he has he has done it but he is now a fully qualified fitness coach. He has done this by pure guts and determination and with some help from others. Rather than allow people to shuffle off this mortal coil we should be looking at the problem and helping them to overcome problems and achieve goals. It is very easy to look at my mate and see a cripple its obvious and he may need you to ASK if he needs a hand. With some people it is not obvious because they are emotional cripples, you cannot see their pain and their despair, instead of allowing them to leave us before their time it may be an idea to try and recognise they need help even just trying to be a friend
If one helps another to kill themselves … the first commits the crime of murder … I don’t think that should change. “Of course he wanted to commit suicide, he just didn’t know it yet”.
Just seems allowing suicide is a solution looking for a problem to solve … or do we have too many suicidal people running about? I think most everybody “gets over it” and goes on to have productive lives.
I have always felt that someone suffering from an incurable illness should have the right to opt out with medically assisted suicide, instead of suffering needlessly and running up monster medical bills.