Abstract
Suicidal ideation would often appear to relate to ideas about life’s meaninglessness. In this chapter, I consider the suicidal thoughts of an elderly person in light of the recent philosophical discussion on the meaning of life. I start by distinguishing between two importantly different questions about life’s meaning and explaining how they differ from certain other issues sometimes treated as questions about the meaning of life. Then I address the two questions about life’s meaning in turn, connecting them to the example case. After that, I briefly consider how the elderly person’s committing suicide would appear from the viewpoint of the philosophical debate on life’s meaning. I conclude by summing up how the philosophical discussion on the meaning of life I have referred to might help a person like the one in the example case.
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Notes
- 1.
Empirical studies on the grounds that severely ill or injured people have for seeking assistance in dying suggest that often the main reason for their desire to die is, not the physical pain caused by their illness or injury, but things like perceived threat of loss of autonomy and dignity, inability to engage in activities that are deemed to make life worth living, and hopelessness (see, e.g., [25]).
- 2.
The kinds of problems that bother Fred have also been called existential questions. Besides the problems Fred is now faced with, existential questions have also been seen to include questions such as whether there is a God, what is the true nature of a human being, and is there life after death. For reasons of space, I here put these further kinds of questions aside.
- 3.
An example of an important question that is partly philosophical is that of how depression affects decision-making ability and whether Fred is depressive enough to be unable to competently make important life choices. For discussion related to the conceptual side of this question, see, for example, Meynen [26], Rich [24], and Schuklenk and van de Vathorst [27]. The empirical side of the question is addressed in, for example, Hindmarch et al. [28] and Kolva et al. [29].
- 4.
The philosophical pursuit for plausible answers to concrete evaluative problems, such as those related to life’s meaning, is sometimes still seen as an endeavor primarily seeking to determine which of the traditional moral theories—utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, or Aristotelian virtue ethics—is the correct one. Yet, instead of relying on any traditional moral theory , most current philosophers working on practical moral problems rather aim to determine which answers to the problems cohere best with factual knowledge, principles of logic, and moral intuitions accepted by competent moral agents (cf., e.g., [30] and [31]). For instance, if a proposed solution to a moral problem logically implies that—to use an example presented by Ronald Dworkin [32]—torturing babies for fun is morally acceptable, that is a good reason to reject it. Some philosophers believe that plausible answers to concrete evaluative problems can be found, if at all, only after first finding out which philosophical theory about the nature of values and value judgments—which meta-ethical theory—is the correct one. Yet how the relationship between meta-ethical theories and practical evaluative problems should be conceived remains controversial. And if a meta-ethical theory logically entails, to continue with the same example, that torturing babies for fun is morally acceptable, that is a good reason to reject it. Hence, meta-ethical theories and their possible implications to concrete evaluative problems are also (to be) assessed in terms of the methodology commonly employed in addressing concrete evaluative questions in philosophy.
- 5.
Since the focus here is on the meaning a person’s life has from her own viewpoint, what I speak of as “meaning of life” has sometimes also been referred to as “meaning in life” and as “the meaning a person’s life has to her.”
- 6.
What I say below applies also if instead of happiness the focus is on well-being.
- 7.
Some advocates of the first kind of theory of happiness maintain that certain pleasures and pains are more significant from the viewpoint of happiness than others (see, e.g., [33], Chap. 2; cf., e.g., [34]). And proponents of the second kind of theory of happiness mentioned above may require that the wants that count in determining happiness are the ones a person would have after being what is deemed as adequately informed about their objects and/or consequences of their satisfaction (see, e.g., [35]).
- 8.
- 9.
To be precise, that I, for instance, lift my hand from the keyboard of my computer does make the history of the universe different from what it had been had I not lifted my hand. In that sense, everything people do, or omit to do, has cosmic significance. Yet, when the difference is not significantly bigger, it most plausibly would not satisfy proponents of the view that human lives could have meaning only if the lives made a difference in terms of the history of the universe.
- 10.
The above division between a happy life and a meaningful life notwithstanding, the absorption and enjoyment Blackburn refers to can be seen as an element of a meaningful life. I return to this point in the next section of this chapter.
- 11.
And even the (possible) meaningfulness of the lives of people with a similar lifespan as ours but totally different lifestyles would apparently be affected by the fact that they typically live for that period.
- 12.
Of course, these are not the only desires that have been explained in terms of evolutionary benefits. Yet, for the sake of simplicity, I here focus on these desires only.
- 13.
Not all philosophers writing about the meaning of life draw the distinction between subjective and objective accounts of life’s meaning in precisely the same way. Below I employ what would appear to be the most common and useful division between subjective and objective theories of life’s meaning.
- 14.
Sometimes, the first one of them is combined with the idea that the objective theories presuppose that there is one single meaningful way of life only. However, given that it is intuitively implausible that there could be only one meaningful type of existence—consider, for instance, the life of Mary as an artist and the life of Mother Theresa—objective theories about life’s meaning are better construed as pluralist than as monist theories, to employ the commonly used terms.
- 15.
- 16.
A person whose life is altogether meaningless can also want to continue it because she mistakenly believes that her life is worth living.
- 17.
Accordingly, a distressed person who is convinced about the wrongness of suicide might find meaning in continuing the struggle that she sees her life to be (cf. [41]).
- 18.
The contemporary debate on the moral and legal acceptability of physician-assisted dying has mainly focused on competent patients who suffer because they are severely physically ill or injured. For the main arguments presented in that debate, see, for example, [42], Chap. 1. For discussion on whether psychiatric conditions could sometimes provide moral grounds for physician-assisted suicide, see, for example, Appel [43], Cholbi [44], Parker [45], and Varelius [46]. Though Szasz famously argued against suicide-prevention (see, e.g., [47]), he did not accept physician-assisted suicide. In practice, The Royal Dutch Association of Medicine already allows that psychiatric reasons can warrant physician-assisted dying and in Belgium suffering unrelated to physical illness or injury is acknowledged in law as a valid basis for physician-assisted dying (see [48, 49]).
- 19.
In the most extreme scenarios, future technology—human enhancement technology, as it has been called—will enable us to live forever, as beings with physical, mental, and social abilities far beyond those we now have (see, e.g., [50]). If the kinds of radical scenarios would become reality, the questions about life’s meaning—though to an extent similar with those considered above—would apparently be assessed with rather different faculties than the ones we now have. Unless we will have such faculties and they help us to solve the problems with climate change, sufficiency of natural resources, etc., our conceptions of the meaning of life may also be affected by rather different kinds of developments than the ones depicted in the extreme scenarios of proponents of human enhancement technology.
- 20.
I thank Juha Räikkä for valuable comments and the Kone Foundation for generous financial support.
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Varelius, J. (2017). Life’s Meaning and Late Life Rational Suicide. In: McCue, R., Balasubramaniam, M. (eds) Rational Suicide in the Elderly. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32672-6_7
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