I support the right to die because I value bodily autonomy and the prevention of suffering. I support the right to die for those sick of their bodies, those sick of their brains and those sick of this ball of hell.
Though in this post I will talk in defense of suicide, it is only in protest to people claiming suicide is always irrational. I’m neither pro or anti suicide;
“I am as sick of death as I am of life.“
- Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair.
“Live as if you are already dead, not because you recoil at the thought, but because you left the corpse of your life and its values behind…Life is suffering, but life ain’t serious enough to kill yourself over.“
- Glenn M. Trujillo Jr, The Benefits of Being a Suicidal Curmudgeon.
If you, the person reading this, who ever you are, are struggling with suicidal ideation; I see you, I hear you, I love you. I don’t want this to come off as me telling you should die, though that is your prerogative. I hope you find happiness. You are a being of great worth and you have every right to be here, forever and always.
Ya got that? Ok now here is why suicide is based:
Death is weird. Life sucks but there is nothing else. What is there to gain from nothing? Is it not better to become happy than to become worm food? Or is it better to become worm food than to be hurt? I do not know. I just do not know if life is worth living, and before the folk in white coats capture the Meaning Of Life, distilled inside a vial for everyone to see, my opinion on its worth wages just about as much as anyone else’s.
I do not believe in life’s intrinsic value, but rather, life’s value depends on the interests, judgments, and choices of the person whose life it is. The jig is up. There is no God. Life only matters if you think it does.
There are times when we decide that it’s better not to be; when we put an old dog down. And if we accept this, the question is no longer “can death be good?”, but rather, “when is death good?”. At what point does life become too heavy to carry? Well, who could better answer that question than the person who has to carry it? No one else has claim to their body and spirit, no one else knows what it’s like to be them.
Though death is a harm, so is suffering, and which harm a person should be subjected to should be up to the person themselves. Suicide obviously demands a heavy price; the whole person, their whole future, and their only life on this planet, maybe the greatest cost there is. Still, it is a perfectly rational response to the inherent harm of life: It ends suffering. If someone wagers, that their own future will deliver them experiences they’d rather not see play out, why not allow them to cease consciousness? I can’t possibly tell someone that they should accept life’s bargain of hurt and happiness, if they themself deem it is not worth accepting.
"They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."
- Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies on Pessimism.
People killing themselves because they have been wronged by living is vile, but that’s because the suffering leading up to that point is, not because suicide itself is i.e. suicide is a symptom of a sick world, not the sickness. Preventing suicide doesn’t remove the root issue - people not wanting the lives they got. It only makes it so, that people are forced to remain in a circumstance they themselves consider worse than death. So weep at the root, not at the fruit.
“Our birth and death are just one thing. You can’t have one without the other. It’s a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It’s delusion. I think if you really want to cry, then it would be better to do so when someone is born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?“
- Ajahn Chah, No Ajahn Chah: Reflections.
Whether to live or die, it’s just a question of picking your poison.
“In 1983, twenty-five-year-old Nancy Cruzan lost control of her car in Carthage, Missouri, while driving home from her job at a nearby cheese factory. She was found facedown in a ditch, not breathing. Again, doctors declared the patient to be in a persistent vegetative state and put her on life support. Again, the woman’s parents insisted that their daughter would have preferred death to a vegetative life, and they asked for her feeding tube to be removed. Again, hospital administrators refused. And once again, the young woman lay in her hospital bed for days and months and then years: her hands and feet contorted inward at unholy angles and her body still, save for the occasional eye flutter or seizure or round of vomiting. This time, the patient’s fate was decided by the US Supreme Court, which in 1990 issued its first-ever ruling in a right-to-die case. In a 5–4 split, justices decided that any competent individual had the right to refuse any medical treatment, regardless of her prognosis or how effective a treatment might be. A patient could, for example, turn down medicine that would save her life. Also, family members and healthcare proxies could refuse treatment on behalf of an incompetent patient, as long as she had left clear evidence of her wishes. Some right-to-die advocates celebrated the decision, but for many Americans there was a creepy element to the court’s ruling; judges had established a right that many people assumed they already had and always had. When Nancy’s feeding tube was finally withdrawn, she took twelve days to die. It was reported that her lips blistered and cracked and began to protrude. Her tongue swelled and her eyelids dried shut. Americans following her story were left to wonder whether withdrawing a machine and letting a person die of dehydration was so different from letting a doctor give a lethal injection to quickly end a patient’s life, and which was better. "Even a dog in Missouri cannot be legally starved to death," said one reverend who traveled from Atlanta to stand outside the hospital as Nancy’s body gave way.“
“‘HOW CAN I explain this? I think it’s virtually impossible for any human being, no matter how old they are, to imagine their own death,’ Betty said. We were seated in her dining room, in straight-backed wooden chairs, eating fruit salad. She had just told me about the trip to Mexico and the drugs and the suicide pact. “The resurrection was the best idea to get people to sign up to Christianity that ever existed.” But Betty did not believe in resurrection. The best she could hope for, and the only thing she could plan for, was “a peaceful death,” which she hoped she could achieve by cutting short the very last stretch of her life. She would die before she became so ill or demented that she lost herself. The deep slumber of a barbiturate overdose seemed easy enough.
It was strange, Betty thought, how humans were left to suffer in the end, while dogs got to be put out of their misery with a quick shot of medicine. Strange, too, how the putting down of dogs was seen as an act of mercy. Strange to be envious of dogs! There was a slogan that Betty liked that was shared by right-to-die enthusiasts online: “I would rather die like a dog.”
I heard this line over and over in my reporting. I heard it all the time. Many people told me about sick pets who were euthanized by kindly veterinarians. Why, they asked, couldn’t they have the same opportunity? Here we were, in the country that spends more per capita on healthcare than any other in the world, and people were begging for a veterinary solution.“
- Katie Engelhart, The Inevitable.
As mentioned above, even if recovery was possibly foreseeable, people have all the right in the world to refuse treatment. It’s not justified to force a person to go through a medical intervention they do not want. Exactly what amount of pain is worth exactly what amount of happiness is a borderline impossible calculation to make on someone’s behalf. If someone is informed of the different treatment options and is cognitively capable of ruminating on their own future, and making decisions based on it, and they decide that life is not worth the cost, what right does anyone have to decide they should suffer instead?
“Nobody else will have to endure this individual’s suffering; therefore nobody else is qualified to be an arbiter of what constitutes an acceptable ‘exchange rate’ between the amount of suffering to be paid, and the amount of life’s goods to be reaped in return…A free individual can choose to shuffle off their mortal coil whenever they perceive the putative ‘benefits’ of life as no longer commensurate to the price that they need to pay in order to receive them.”
- Schopenhauer on Mars, a blog supporting the right to die, antinatalism and efilism.
“Those who are comfortable with paternalism often argue that suicide must be prevented—indeed, that it displays a lack of compassion to allow it—because of the harm to the suicide himself. a. Loss of future experiences Frequently the victim under consideration for the harm/ care foundation is the suicidal person—who is to be protected from himself. How can one harm oneself? The harm inflicted by the suicide upon himself must be the deprivation of possible future experiences (keep in mind that sacred harms, such as religious harm, belong under different moral foundations). However, by committing suicide, a person affirms that, in his evaluation, the expected future gains from living are not worth the expected costs. Many people intuitively support this line of thinking when it comes to people dying of a terminal illness. But why would people dying of a terminal illness be the only people miserable enough to rationally want to die? Hope is not necessarily rational. Prohibiting suicide amounts to substituting one’s own (poorly informed) judgment for the suicide’s own (immeasurably better informed) judgment of the degree to which his life is worth living.“
- Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave.
I understand being cautious in these life-or-death decisions. Death cannot be reversed and there is no restitution for the dead. (Though a promortalist may argue, the dead are not in need of restitution). If a doctor assisted a person in his care in suicide, and then came to a conclusion, that it was the wrong decision, there is no longer anything he can do to make things right for her. However, harm of living cannot be reversed either. If a doctor denies assisted suicide for the patient, and the patient goes on to live a life of misery, until they die anyhow, be it a freak accident or unassisted suicide, again, there is no longer anything he can do to make things right for her. He could have prevented all that unnecessary suffering, and now there is nothing left to be done.
Yes there are people, who in their younger years would have carried out suicide if they had been given such a chance, and are now living happy lives. But isn't it equally true, that there are people now living painful lives, because they weren't given the chance. Do the happy lives justify the perpetuation of painful lives?
Besides, even if our interests now may contradict with our interest in the future, it is nonetheless a basic principle of bodily autonomy that we should be allowed to make decisions regarding the trajectory of our lives. To claim otherwise is plain paternalism.
“Responses to the pro-choice position that strive to maintain the liberty frame tend to balance future liberty interests of the person with present liberty interests, breaking a person into multiple selves over time and presenting the different selves’ interests as in conflict. The position that prioritizes future interests over present interests is in accordance with the suicide prohibition; paternalism often refuses to admit that it is paternalism, instead insisting that it is merely representing the true, genuine “freedoms” of a future person. In other contexts, restricting the actions of a future self is seen as an important freedom. All contracts, for instance, have this feature, as did the institution of marriage before modern no-fault interventions. In the suicide context, however, the decision of the present self to commit suicide is often stigmatized as disordered, insane, or impulsive; that it may be a rational and integrated decision makes the case for restricting it based on future interests more difficult.”
- Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave.
Now, some may argue that suicide is rational only in cases of painful illness, and the others who want to die are just mentally ill. And why would that be? Why should physical pain be considered obviously unbearable, while mental anguish something that people should just get over? Honestly, feels like the age-old ”it’s all in your head“ quip, used to dismiss depression as something people are not in dying need of alleviation from. Suffering should not be belittled, just because it can’t be seen the same way cancer can be seen.
In fact, people with painful conditions eligible for medical aid in dying often cite psychological reasons, rather than physical pain itself, as their primary reasons for departure.
“We do know something about what motivates patients to choose early death, in the states where aid in dying is legal. What surprised me most, looking through Oregon Health Authority data, was that most people who ask to die are reportedly not in terrible pain, or even afraid of future pain. The vast majority cite “losing autonomy” as their primary end-of-life concern. Others worry about “loss of dignity,” loss of the ability to engage in enjoyable activities, and “losing control of bodily functions.” Where pain enters the equation, it is a fear of future pain, or a wish to fend off forthcoming pain—or sometimes the here-and-now psychic pain of not knowing how much more pain will come. Will it be a good death or a bad death? The uncertainty is what lends the question its urgency. Patients in Oregon must have a terminal illness to qualify for assisted dying, but in the end they choose to die for more existential reasons: in response to suffering that falls outside the established borders of modern medicine.“
- Katie Engelhart, The Inevitable.
And who’s to say that people who don’t love living are “crazy”?
“Much of this has to do with the fact that many self-identified atheists are still committing the naturalistic fallacy. Although they would explicitly deny that life was created by an intelligent designer; their attitudes towards life and death issues often tend to reflect an assumption that the natural forces which placed us in this position ‘know what’s best for us’. Such an atheist would readily accept that, if you placed a monkey at a typewriter, you would not expect it to produce the finest works of Shakespeare. But yet, they seem to have faith that the blind, unintelligent, unthinking forces of evolution have only ever been able to produce objectively good results; and can never produce results that a thinking and rational entity could ever reject.
The fact that a suicidal person must defy their survival instinct in order to end their life is taken as prima facie evidence that they are “not thinking straight”. But this argument assumes that our survival instinct was given to us by a designer who knew that our lives were always worth preserving, and therefore designed us with this safety mechanism which would make it psychologically difficult for us to end our lives. It makes no sense to assume that an instinct which was created by purely unintelligent forces, with no end goal in mind, would just so happen to always be perfectly aligned with our rational self interests.“
- Schopenhauer on Mars, a blog supporting the right to die, antinatalism and efilism.
Sanity is a social construct and up to debate. The is nothing that fundamentally separates the sane from the insane. The division between the two is based on our ability to function in a society, which of course presupposes, that society as it is, is something we should function in. It is insidious to categorize people into “mentally ill” and justify violating their autonomy by claiming that their wants and needs are just “symptoms of the illness”. “You are insane and we, the sane people, get to decide what to do with your body and where it belongs, and if you have objections, well, that’s just the illness talking.”
We got the optimists over here basically saying “wanting to die is mentally ill because only the mentally ill would want to die”. Oy vey what a circle. You just can’t win with these people.
Speaking for myself, if you don’t mind, it pisses me off when people treat me as if I’ve been possessed by some wicked spirit. Nah, I’m right here. Am I ill? Maybe. I’m trying to survive in this Gehenna in a way I deem is best for me. But the line between my illness and me is impossible to understand, and there is no way you can sever and exorcise the illness out of me and leave me intact.
Of course there are mental illnesses, that disconnect people from reality. I wouldn’t want an ill person to end their own life, because they were under a misbelief that something is out to get them, that a higher being demands their death, that the world will end tomorrow, and so on. This applies for the “sane”, too, like I wouldn’t want a a religious woman killing herself because she thought she will get to afterlife, or reunite with dead loved ones. However, whether life is worth living is a value judgement, not an objective truth about the world. There is no way you can prove to a depressed person, that they are wrong about their assessment of the quality of their own life. (If you think you can, I’d love to hear it.)
“Besides, who sold it as valid and how do we get to the conclusion that, for example, frolicking around aimlessly day and night; watching a bunch of people run with a ball in hand or after it (as it happens in most sports); seeing some mindless explosive action or run-of-the-mill dramatic stories on a big or small screen (as the entertainment industry often delivers); performing repetitive tasks for hours as an almost obligatory activity—among many other common things diurnally offered by reality—are by default good, purposeful and positive? While, not liking any of these things as much, finding them as cool or interesting, a warning that something's wrong? The cheerful robot that loves what is programmed to do and the confined sandbox-like space given to roam around, which somehow manages to function and be a productive member, is great, no questions asked; but, the one noticing that things aren't that enjoyable, worthy of one's time or as fulfilling as they should be, is the strange and defective one? Hmm, interesting...
Pretty unconvincing stuff, if you ask me, to so convincingly say that the one clearly under the fantasy of happy-go-lucky, optimistic biases is the correct role model that everyone must follow and imitate-just because it matches with the prevalent anthropocentric set goal or agenda of "progress for the sake of progress, we are here, what else can we do?". While the one with the evidently more realistic and accurate outlook (which inevitably makes it 'wake up from the dream' so to call it), is the one that needs fixing, and immediate check-up or intervention because of its 'no-nonsense allowed' attitude.
It all seems too biased, arbitrary, and way too one-sided to be taken serious. And, it becomes a problem because this isn't just the opinion of normal, everyday people found in society or walking down the streets, no. But, more like the one people qualified as professionals also use—and it's with this same method of judgment they 'properly' diagnose and 'effectively' medicate.
Which isn't even the main problem here either, as this is the best help that can be offered as of now—to at least cope with the situation of finding oneself in that horrendous position of viewing it all so ascetically and clinically unadorned. The real problem, is that we take it all out on the individual's cognitive health almost instinctively. Instead of maybe straightforwardly admitting that life, existence and reality perhaps-just perhaps--aren't as fabulous, wonderful and amazing as we so very-hard try to think or convince ourselves that they are.
No, Heaven forbid the openly admittance of life, existence and reality being fruitless, tedious, dull, hollow, wearisome, lackluster, vain business, and so on with many other contrary adjectives. Can't afford to do that, too much encephalic cost. So, we send the mean cognitive police with vicious dogs, to hunt after them...
Who's saying all that negative, yet very sensible stuff? Who's talking crap about this precious sentient experience, even if done in a constructive manner? Can't have maniacs like those freely running around, we are trying to keep a self-deceptive pipe-dream alive here, for Christ's sake! We have to send a message, so capture them all, and send them to the gallows, right now!“
- Matthias Jablonka, Of Futility & Decay.
None of us chose to be here. We were all terminally wounded from the severance of the umbilical cord. Soon we will be nothing once more. When is the time to become nothing? Let the choice be ours.
