Rational Suicide and Knowledge of Death

An interesting claim against suicide points to a difficulty regarding the possibility of rational suicide. In any situation which requires a rational decision, there are several options. In order to make a decision these options have to be evaluated and compared. However, in the case of suicide, one cannot really evaluate the option of suicide, since nobody can "know" what death is like. So the option of suicide cannot be evaluated, which in turn makes a comparison to any other option impossible.

This position is given by Philip Devine [1]: "... if, as seems, plausible, a precondition of rational choice is that one know what one is choosing, either by experience or by the testimony of others who have experienced it or something very like it, then it is not possible to choose death rationally."

Actually, Devine's article contains the beginning of the reply which we will expand upon: "But the decision to kill oneself - it might be argued - need not reflect a preference of death over life, but rather of one (shorter) life over another...". However, Devine continues this line of thought by limiting his concern to cases where self-killing is performed under some coercion (see [2]) and then distinguishing these cases as separate from suicide. Devine calls such self-killings "self-executions". In this way, he disposes of the need to explain why suicide cannot be evaluated in terms of life rather than death.

What is misleading about Devine's argument is that indeed in many cases, options should be evaluated according to how things are expected to be in some state in the future. However, for suicide, Devine insists on using this method of evaluation which is not compatible to the goals of one committing suicide.

For example, consider a vineyard owner from a communist country who has to make decisions regarding, the type of grapes to plant, and the amount of water and fertilizer to provide for them. Suppose that the goverment enforces upon the vineyard owner a measure of success relating to the amount of grapes produced. The owner would be forced to make decisions in order to produce as many grapes as possible. However, suppose that the real intention of the vineyard owner is not to sell the grapes on the market, but to make wine from them. It may be that the grapes he produced result in wine of very poor quality.

The point is that the person's goals and the methods of evaluating options go together. The method of evaluation has to match the person's goals and not vice versa. Devine starts out with a method of evaluation which does not fit the goals of one committing suicide.

Although the intention of suiciders is to reach a state of death, they are not interested in being able to evaluate what the experience of death is like (for the sake of this discussion, let us exclude the case of people who believe in some form of afterlife). The whole point of death is not being able to experience. An evaluation method requiring knowledge of what death is like, would be a poor choice.

Instead, we propose a different method of evaluating options, which is expounded in [3]. The idea is to evaluate each option by considering the overall value of life from the present till the time of death. This is done by "summing" up the value of all the individual occurring experiences along one life option. Using this method of evaluation, a "knowledge" of what death is like is not required.

REFERENCES

[1] Philip E. Devine, "On Choosing Death", in The Ethics of Homicide, 1978, pp 138-143. Also in "Suicide: Right or Wrong", John Donnelly (ed), 1998.

[2] "Suicide Defined: Motivation", sui_def_motivation.html

[3] "To be or not to be" pg_2bornot.html