Justifying a duty to suicide

Summary Asserting that there are mandatory suicides is a controversial claim to make, to say the least. The idea that some people have an obligation to end their own lives creates a visceral reaction in its apparent attack on the central moral tenets of respecting life and people for the intrinsically valuable entities they are. Moreover, there is a well-justified fear that some despicable groups might take advantage of such a position in their attempts to eliminate what they consider to be undesirable populations in their community. Given the conventional view that these populations are generally the most vulnerable, believing that there is a mandatory duty for vulnerable, persecuted populations to suicide would plausibly make the person holding such a position a moral monster to be roundly condemned. The issue of obligatory death, however, deserves far more serious consideration than generally given because it is not a simple view with obvious conclusions. The very arguments used against duties to die or suicide can be shown to support such obligations in certain increasingly common situations. In this article, I will develop the philosophical justifications for mandatory suicide based on Gillian Bennett's suicide letter. The letter shows the practical reasoning that many reasonable people facing end of life decisions use to justify, and more importantly, explain to others why they are going to take their own lives on their own terms. Bennett's message serves not only as a foundation to developing critical arguments but as a grounding of the emotional, reasonable humanity involved in these tragic situations. In what follows, seven arguments for suicide duties will be considered. Some, such as the Rights’ Argument, will be found deficient based on the existential implausibility of the rights existing, as Jeremy Bentham pointed out approximately 200 years ago. Others, such as the Consequentialist Argument, are far more plausible in that they appeal to our intellectual desire to use the most objective, rational approach to solving ethical quandaries that literally involved life and death decisions. The problem, however, is that consequentialism denies the very foundation of morality in that it treats intrinsically valuable entities, i.e., persons, as mere objects. What might be surprising to many is that the most convincing arguments suicide duty are built upon moral foundation that most people think are the most hostile to any such obligation. However, care ethics, narrative ethics, and even Kantianism can justify a duty to die if certain conditions obtain. In fact, these theories show far more humanity to those who are facing the existential decision to remain alive or to end their lives. The Kantian Argument, for instance, can justify a suicide only in those instances in which the person faces the moral dilemma of sacrificing her physical life as the only way to preserve her human dignity, or continuing to physically live even though her dignity has been destroyed by an unethical choice she made or implemented. Of course, the latter is an irrational action to take. The Care Ethics and Narrative Arguments are based far more on subjective grounds, including personal relationships that create attendant obligations or existential choices the person makes to be a particular type of person with a particular history. Finally, it should not be thought that any one of the suicide duty arguments cover every situation or must be used on their own. In the final section, a compromise argument is developed that uses elements of all the plausible justifications for an obligation to die. The power of this argument makes it far more difficult for anyone to claim that there are not real instances in which a person has a duty to take his own life.