Abstract
Recently, the ‘right to die’ became a major social issue. Few agree suicide is a right tout court. Even those who believe suicide (‘regular’, passive, or physician-assisted) is sometimes morally permissible usually require that a suicide be ‘rational suicide’: instrumentally rational, autonomous, due to stable goals, not due to mental illness, etc. We argue that there are some perfectly ‘rational suicides’ that are, nevertheless, bad mistakes. The concentration on the rationality of the suicide instead of on whether it is a mistake may lead to permitting suicides that should be forbidden.
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Notes
This is not to say all utilitarians agree rational suicide is often (or ever) morally permissible, only that applying utilitarian principles makes it possible that some rational suicides are permissible.
Naturally, not all utilitarians (or libertarians) accept suicide as ethically permissible, while not all Kantians or religious thinkers reject all suicides as impermissible. But for our purposes it is enough to make a rough-and-ready distinction that Kantians and (Judeo-Christian) religious thinkers generally oppose suicide, while many utilitarians and libertarians accept suicide, or at least ‘rational suicide’, as sometimes permissible.
Nothing here requires the agent’s goals to be egoistic (let alone hedonistic) for the choice to be rational. Plato and numerous others argued that acting in a seemingly ‘irrational’ (e.g., self-denying, altruistic) manner is often the most rational choice for those who know what one’s real goals should be (a healthy soul, reaching heaven, etc.) For a modern defense of rational altruism, see Nagel (1970:3–8; in fact most of the book).
Right to die’ is a wider term, usually including the right to refuse life-saving or life-extending treatment (‘passive’ suicide), as well taking one’s own life (‘active’ suicide), and the more controversial right to be assisted in one’s suicide by a physician (‘physician-assisted suicide’). In this work, ‘suicide’ refers to “regular” (active, non-physician-assisted) suicide.
The idea that the possibility of later suicide might actually prevent current suicide is not new, as Nietzsche’s quip that suicidal thoughts save many sleepless nights shows (Nietzsche 2005:aphorism 157).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Prof. Giora Hon, Prof. Saul Smilansky (both from the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa) and two anonymous reviewers for advice and helpful criticism.
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Pilpel, A., Amsel, L. What is Wrong with Rational Suicide. Philosophia 39, 111–123 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9253-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9253-x