 |
Answering Pro-Suicide Arguments
This article tries to answer claims that suicide is always good.
Life is meaningless, so why not commit suicide?
At the end we are all going to die. Death makes life meaningless. Tolstoy, in his autobiography, "Confession", provides the following analogy:
"There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveler overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it. His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon's jaws. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. and this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all."
Tolstoy continues his analysis, and concludes their are four possible reactions in the face of the inevitability of death:
- Ignore the problem.
- Admit the problem, but still go through life as if things do matter.
- Devote oneself to the pleasures of life, to make life as good as possible while we are still around.
- Commit suicide.
The first option is not fit for intelligent beings. The second and third options ignore the problem. The conclusion is that suicide is best.
However, this entire argument is based on the claim that death makes life meaningless. This implies that life in itself would be good if there was no death. But death is inevitable, and if life has any inherit good (when there is no death), the badness of death somehow cancels the goodness of life, making life meaningless.
However, death is just the termination of life. But in that case, if death is bad, then life must be good. Death is not a reality in itself. It is just the absence of something else. Therefore, the badness of death can only be derived from the properties of what is being terminated. So if death is bad, life must be good.
Only a "positive" bad could taint something else which is good. For example, a flood could destroy a house. The flood, being a bad occurrence (a negative presence), destroys something good: the house. However, a negative absence, such as death, cannot taint something else which is good.
Actually, the same argument is a basic justification for pro-choice advocates. Tolstoy, as most people, thinks that life is essentially good, as indicated by the traveler licking the drops of honey. But what about people who feel that their lives are bad? It appears that for these people death must be good.
REFERENCES
[1] Joseph Ellin, "Morality and the meaning of life",.1995, page 309.
