The Roman Catholic Church has long argued that one’s life is the property of God and thus that to commit suicide is to deride God’s prerogatives. The counterargument, by philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) is that, if such is the case, then to save someone’s life is also to deride God’s prerogatives.
Most religions share the Church’s belief in the sanctity of life, although a few have come to regard at least some suicides as honourable. For example, a number of Tibetan monks have killed themselves in protest against the Chinese occupation of Tibet—although this is perhaps more a case of self-sacrifice than suicide proper.
Legal systems have historically been informed by religion, such that in many jurisdictions suicide and attempted suicide are still illegal. The very expression ‘commit suicide’ implies or at least suggests a crime or sin. In late 2014, the Indian government moved to decriminalize ‘attempt to suicide’ by deleting Section 209 of the Penal Code from the statute book. Under the said section, a suicide bid could be punished with a prison term of up to one year.
In the UK, the Suicide Act of 1961 decriminalized attempted suicide and suicide, but voluntary euthanasia remains a crime. This may change as the voice of pro-choicers becomes louder than that of pro-lifers.
Broadly speaking, pro-choicers argue that a person’s life belongs to no one but himself, and that his decision to commit suicide, especially if justified as a rational solution to real problems such as chronic and disabling pain, should be respected and assisted. In contrast, pro-lifers believe that a person’s life is not his to take, regardless of circumstances.
Some of the stronger arguments in favor of voluntary euthanasia are that it preserves dignity, prevents suffering, and frees up valuable healthcare resources. On the other side of the argument, a person with a physical or mental disorder may lack the mental capacity to make a rational decision about such an important issue, or may feel pressured into making a decision, and, of course, cannot change his mind once he is dead. Moreover, voluntary euthanasia is difficult to regulate, and could be open to abuse by doctors and relatives keen to unburden themselves and free up or inherit resources.
Unlike most people, some philosophers do not think about suicide in terms of ethics. Existentialist philosophers in particular turn the tables round by arguing that life has no meaning and therefore that there is no reason not to commit suicide. Rather, a person must justify not committing suicide by giving his life a meaning and fulfilling his unique potential through this meaning.
As philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) mused:
Nihilistic (from the Latin nihil , ‘nothing’) philosophers differ from existentialist philosophers in that they believe that a person cannot justify his life even by giving it an individual meaning. For nihilistic philosophers, nothing can have a meaning, not even suicide itself.
Interesting as this may all be, suicide is seldom the product of rational deliberation, the so-called ‘rational suicide’, but mostly an act of uncontrollable anguish and despair.
Around 1755, David Hume, who suffered from melancholy, published On Suicide and On the Immortality of the Soul in a book of essays entitled Five Dissertations. Unfortunately, pre-release copies of Five Dissertations stirred up such controversy that both essays had to be removed.
In On Suicide , Hume argues that, though only ‘one step’ could put an end to his misery, man dares not commit suicide because of ‘a vain fear lest he offend his Maker’. This, combined with his natural fear of death, makes it ‘all the more difficult for him to be free’. Hume proposes to ‘restore men to their native liberty’ by examining all the common arguments against suicide and demonstrating that suicide is ‘free from every imputation of guilt or blame’.
According to Hume, God established the laws of nature and enabled all animals, including man, to make use of them by entrusting them with certain bodily and mental powers. Owing to this interaction between the laws of nature and the powers of animals, God has no need to be involved in the world: ‘...the providence of the Deity appears not immediately in any operation, but governs everything by those general and immutable laws, which have been established from the beginning of time.’
Given this state of affairs, man employs the powers with which he has been invested to provide as best as possible for his ‘ease,
happiness, or preservation’. If this should bring him to commit suicide, then so be it: the interaction between the laws of nature and the powers of man clearly permit it, so why should it pose an exception? Thus, suicide is permissible even if one adopts a religious stance.
For Hume:
Natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (23-79) goes one step further than Hume in his Natural History by regarding the ability to commit suicide as the one advantage that man possesses over God:
A common argument against suicide is that it is selfish and harms the individuals and society that are left behind. For Hume, a person does no harm in committing suicide, but merely ceases to do good. Assuming that he is under some obligation to do good, this obligation comes to an end with death; and even if it does not, and he is under a perpetual obligation to do good, this should not come at the expense of greater harm to himself, that is, at the expense of prolonging a miserable existence for some ‘frivolous advantage that the public may perhaps receive’. In some cases, a person may have become a burden to society, and so may actually do most good by committing suicide. In such cases, says Hume, suicide is better than morally neutral. It is morally good.
Regardless of the morality or permissibility of committing suicide, suicide entails death, and so the question naturally arises as to whether death should or should not be feared. In his influential paper of 1970, tersely entitled Death , philosopher Thomas Nagel (born 1937) addresses precisely this question: if death is the permanent end of our existence, is it an evil?
Either death is an evil because it deprives us of life, or it is a mere blank because there is no one left to experience this deprivation. Thus, if death is an evil, this is not in virtue of any positive attribute that it has, but in virtue of what it deprives us from, namely, life. For Nagel, the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements.
The longer we are alive, the more we ‘accumulate’ life. In contrast, death cannot be accumulated—it is not ‘an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust’. Most people would not consider the temporary suspension of life as an evil, nor would they regard the long period before they were born as an evil. Therefore, if death is an evil this is not because it involves a period of non-existence, but because it deprives us of life.
Nagel draws three objections to this view, but only so as to later counter them. First, it is doubtful whether anything can be an evil unless it actually causes displeasure. Second, in the case of death there is no subject left on whom to impute an evil. As long as we exist, we have not yet died; and once we have died, we no longer exist. So there seems to be no time at which the evil of death might occur. Third, if most people would not regard the long period before they were born as an evil, then why should they regard the period after they are dead any differently?
Nagel counters these three objections by arguing that the good or evil that befalls us depends on our history and possibilities rather than on our momentary state, such that an evil can befall us even if we are not here to experience it. For instance, if an intelligent person receives a head injury that reduces his mental condition to that of a contented infant, this should be considered a serious evil even if the person himself (in his current state) is oblivious to his fate.
Thus, if the three objections are invalid, it is essentially because they ignore the direction of time.
Even though we cannot survive our death, we can still suffer evil; and even though we do not exist during the time before our birth and the time after our death, the time after our death is time of which we have been deprived, time in which we could have carried on enjoying the good of living.
The question remains as to whether the non-realization of further life is an absolute evil, or whether this depends on what can naturally be hoped for: the death of Keats at 24 is commonly regarded as tragic, but that of Tolstoy at 82 (even though he died of pneumonia in a hitherto obscure train station) is not.
‘The trouble,’ says Nagel, ‘is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us... Death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive goods.’

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