I hope I'm not taking up too much of your time, but I do have one follow up question. You say "Purposefully ending one’s own life is morally impermissible" - and I assume the absence of that stance in my moral framework is why your thought process doesn't quite click for me, since forbidding people from ending their own life in any circumstance (be it by law or taboo) is itself reprehensible to me, as it limits one of the last personal freedom some people have, for a variety of reasons. Hence my question: where does that stance come from? Is it "just" religion, or are there other factors as well?
No worries! If I run out of time you’ll just stop hearing from me haha
original post for reference
It’s true that I’m religious and that that’s in the background of my beliefs about this, but the argument I gave is not strictly religious. The religious argument is “your life does not belong to you, it belongs to God and you are the steward of it”. (It’s not my favorite argument, in fact, because it treats life as a possession.) My argument is more like:
The worth of a human life is intrinsic [because it is given by God].
Suffering is an evil but it does not reduce the person to less than a person [and by the mercy of God can mysteriously be the means of grace].
Dependence is not an evil, [as all living creatures are by nature dependent on God].
With these three premises, taking one’s own life is morally impermissible simply because it is the taking of a life. Your life does not have less value if it’s yours, and the loss of your life would be no less tragic if you’re the one who ended it. Suicide is wrong for the same reason murder is. Even if you disagree with the religious background, to make assisted suicide permissible I think you would still have to disagree with the main body of at least one of those three bullet points. You would have to say “the worth of a human life is dependent on a person’s abilities and when those abilities are absent or reduced their life is worth less”, or “suffering does make a person to be less than a person, a person in great pain is reduced to the level of an animal”, or “dependence is undignified and evil and we are justified in taking extreme steps to avoid becoming dependent and avoid wasting resources on those who are”, or some other version of one of those.Â
You have to reject one of the three bullet points because what you mentioned about suicide being a “freedom” is not enough to make a judgment about whether it should be considered permissible or not. Thought experiment: a person is kidnapped by a Batman villain and injected with a paralytic and a slow-acting poison, so that they cannot escape and they know they are going to die. They’re in horrible pain and they’re afraid. And the villain comes up and puts a button in their hand and says “The last freedom you have is this choice: if you press the button you can poison Gotham’s water supply!” Poisoning the water supply doesn’t save them. It’s not a trolley problem, a choice between poisoning the water supply and killing Batman. It’s just press the button or do nothing. The button IS their last freedom. But that doesn’t mean the choice to poison the water supply would somehow be more legitimate, let alone laudatory, than if they made that choice in other circumstances. All choices are free. That’s what make them choices. It doesn’t mean they are by virtue of that good or moral choices. Sometimes it’s better to make no choice, rather than a bad choice.Â
So when you say “it’s their last freedom”, behind that is the assumption that it’s their last freedom to make a good choice, one that isn’t like poisoning Gotham. And so one of my premises would have to be false. And you are welcome to believe one of my premises is false! But I think when you wipe out those unconditional premises, limiting whose life has worth and what kind of life is worth living, you start down that treacherous slippery slope which is so deadly for vulnerable communities. I’m going to mention again the idea that certain options exert pressure as soon as they exist: society doesn’t have to work too hard to actually help people when it could funnel them towards suicide instead. And so once assisted suicide is thinkable, life for disabled, mentally ill, elderly, and poor people gets worse. (The United Nations agrees with me: article 10 paragraph 19b)
And if you make freedom itself the condition for life’s value, i.e. “a person’s life has value if they freely confer that value on it”, the danger doesn’t disappear. How do we know the difference between a person who has with full freedom decided to stop valuing their life and a person who is so mentally unwell that they should be considered unable to freely consent? If you’re going through a rough patch and you start to have trouble seeing the value in yourself, does your value immediately disappear? How quickly can a medical professional sign off on your death? That same day? The next? And are we saying, then, that people only have value when they’re able to exercise freedom? What about mentally disabled people who need a lot of support and whose autonomy is limited? There is an extremely thin line between the principle of a person going to the doctor and saying “I have freely decided my life has no value” and the doctor assessing them and agreeing that they have the mental fitness to make that free choice, and the principle of a doctor looking at a person (with advanced dementia, intellectual disability, etc) and assessing that they don’t have the mental fitness to choose to give their life value.
As modern people we are obsessed with autonomy, and terrified of not having control, but in reality, most people have quite limited control. Obviously it’s an admirable goal to restructure society so that the poor and marginalized are less trapped by their circumstances, but we should also be really, really careful about making being-in-control the ultimate value—because it confers more value upon the powerful and leeches it away from the poor and marginalized. Bad enough that they don’t have a ton of choices! Now their humanity is somehow less because of that? Their lack of autonomy shouldn’t make them disposable.
Even if you would want to say assisted suicide is morally permissible in very, very particular cases, I think there is an argument for keeping it wholly illegal because of the danger it poses to vulnerable communities. There is no assisted suicide without letting insurance and government have a say in whose life is worth living, because the whole point is that by legalizing it, it is able to be performed by doctors to be as painless as possible. That means the parameters would be written by politicians and enforced by doctors and insurance companies. We complain now (rightfully) about doctors who think the answer to everything is to lose weight and insurance companies which won’t pay for necessary interventions because something smaller should be sufficient. Imagine a world where your doctor hasn’t been able to diagnose you or fix your symptoms and they hit you with “Have you considered maybe your life isn’t worth living and your pain could be treated by killing yourself?” Or insurance plans which will only cover so many years of care for chronic illness before your time is up and they’ll only cover assisted suicide? Or government-sponsored free insurance for illegal immigrants which is touted as generosity but which predominately covers assisted suicide? And you can say that you’d have to consent, you could just say no, but that I think is an overly optimistic view of people’s strength. If you’re aging and your doctor and your insurance are pushing suicide, your government is praising the courage of people who end their own lives and their selflessness in not becoming a drain on society, your kids are hinting that they don’t want to go on paying for your nursing home, and you’ve seen several of your friends consent to assisted suicide, you’re under too much pressure to actually make a free choice. You mentioned the idea of a taboo. The purpose and force of cultural taboos is to help people make brave choices, when the alternative is an easy but bad choice or when forces are amassed against them. If, in the hopes of helping a few extremely sick people whose death was inevitable, we do away with the taboo and then we enshrine the goodness of suicide in law, we create an entire society which is hostile to life.
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