Ionios IB

A very well known ethical problem that has puzzled people for a long time is whether it is ethical to commit suicide under specific circumstances. Let's examine the word “suicide” first.

Before I give my opinion on the matter I need to define the way I will be using the word “suicide”. Committing suicide means (from what I can perceive) attempting to remove your own life (preferably quickly and painlessly) while consciously knowing and understanding the effect that your actions might have. This concludes that some cases of what we call suicide should not actually be considered suicide. A person that hits their head on the wall because they are angry or slipped and ended up having internal hemorrhage and die did not commit suicide, of course. The reasons they died are mainly bad luck and/or stupidity. Their goal when hitting their head was not to end their own life even if that was the result, which makes such a case a weird type of accident. Also, if one is crazy or does something really risky very often like rock climbing without ropes, or taking selfies on top of skyscrapers they are not considered to attempting suicide daily even if their actions are more likely to kill them than trying to overdose on Vit-C tablets. The first cases' goal is living while the case of trying to overdose has a goal of ending one's life. Declining treatment from a preventable disease, though, could be considered suicide if the specific disease is deemed as terminal. Also, consciousness plays a huge role in such an act. A baby that accidentally kills itself after finding out where the gun was inside the house did not commit suicide since it did not know what it was doing. Accordingly, killing yourself under the influence of drug paraphernalia or because of mental issues like schizophrenia is also considered a misfortunate accident but still, not an act of suicide.

Now that we have defined the word suicide we need to touch upon another topic of ethics. That is, “What makes you…you and what is your connection with your past and future self?”. The specific topic, like most ethical issues, has never been completely answered but there were many attempts and there are some parts stated in almost every answer that I think we can all agree upon. As we grow we change. Over time our bodies change, our faces change and our character changes. What makes someone the person they are? This is shown clearer in a logical paradox called “The Ship of Theseus”. It is a thought experiment conducted by Plutarch in his “Life if Theseus” from the late first century. Suppose we had a ship, and after a while, we decide to change our ship's sails. Maybe because they are damaged, maybe because we want better or different sails. After some more time, we decide to change the wood that is used on the ship and then the hooks and we continue until every last bit of the ship is different. Is our ship a different ship or is it still the same? And to make things even more complicated we also take the spare parts we now have after the changes and build a new ship. Which ship is the original? The English philosopher and physician John Locke was particularly worried about this paradox when it came to people. What makes a person who they are? This time what makes things even worse and what John Locke never found out because it was discovered and proven only after his death is that peoples' cells change too over time. About every 7 years (a number that is slightly smaller when we are young and gradually gets bigger as we grow old) every single cell of our body is replaced. Thankfully, this time around the remaining cells are not existent and they are dispatched via mechanisms our body has (for example, dust is skin cells our body decides to replace) so we do not need to worry about someone collecting them and creating a younger self of ours, but the question still remains. Since you have nothing in common with your past body of at least 7 years, why are you still the same person? Locke defined the word “man” and “person” slightly differently than we do today. He considered that while you could be the same “man” as before, the “person” you are, changes. His definition of “man” was mainly connected to your body while his definition of “person” was mainly connected to your consciousness, awareness of self and memories. His example of “The Prince and the Cobbler” is a great example that can easily show the difference between those terms. If a prince's memories were transported to the cobbler's mind and the opposite, the person of the prince is now in the body of the cobbler, while the person of the cobbler is now in the body of the prince. They are still the same men, but each is a different person than before. When it came to who was responsible for a crime, the person that committed it mattered and not the man since they were the one that made the conscious decision to commit that crime.

Tying the answer to who you are in our memories seems like a very good way of answering our question but that itself also has its weaknesses. Thomas Reid, a Scottish philosopher created another thought experiment that revealed those weaknesses. What he stated, in simpler words, was that an old person that is let's say 80 years old, might share many memories with his self when he was in his mid-thirties, therefore making the old person the same person with his grown-up, but younger self. But the old person might have forgotten most of his childhood memories, memories that the middle-aged man might still remember. This concludes that the middle-aged man is the same person as the old man and the young boy, but the old man is not the same person as the young boy while remaining the same person as the middle-aged man, something that is illogical. What is the extent of the minimum needed memories to claim that a person is still the same after time passes? This is where a very good answer to a very important question of personal identity ends, but this weakness does not prove that John Locke was completely wrong, we can still keep some information from his attempt.

These are some statements that you might or might not agree with, some are personal, some are not, but they can guide us to the extent where we might be able to answer our suicidal question:

1. the person you are changes.
2. your character, your actions and your thoughts also change.
3. this change happens all the time, sometimes more drastically, like in an event of a shock or a really important triumph but it does.
4. you never change fully. Never 100%. From the moment you start having memories (about 4 years old) until the moment you die some small parts and characteristics are still the same.
5. such characteristics are both mental and physical, being stubborn or forgetful are examples of mental ones while having a birthmark is an example of a physical one. The difference is mental ones only transform while physical ones can be changed (for example tattoos change physical appearance) and birthmarks can be removed.

What will matter to us the most in order to answer our question is the first statement: “The person we are changes, maybe not fully, but it changes”. This is a really vague statement, though, it cannot be proven nor can it be falsified I personally think it is something we can all agree on, one way or another. Now, why are we talking about personal identity when our own question involves ending it? Simple, what we just said relates fully to our question. A very simple thing people seem to believe (fortunately) is the fact that we should never kill anyone. Of course, that statement itself has weaknesses. As many would say, what if the death of one person had the outcome of many others surviving? I am sure that if I transported you back in time with a gun, you would probably kill Hitler in a heartbeat and you would consider that action to be ethical, even though you would have killed him before he even committed his crimes, you would probably sleep more soundly at night. We can battle that weakness with an easy answer. Since there is no way to know whether someone, including ourselves, will cause the death, misfortune or unhappiness of others in the future, we have to assume what is more likely, which is that we won't. Then, if we believe that we should not kill people, except if they are about to launch a nuclear missile attack, that itself is enough to make it unethical to kill ones' own self, but there are even more reasons. People believe that even though they do not have the right to end other peoples' lives, they have every possible right when it comes to their own, including ending it. That seems correct but it is actually really ambiguous. Before, we said that the person we are changes over time, this concludes that we are not only responsible for our own lives but also for every single momentarily existence of ourselves in the future. Responsible for every person or at least every slightly different person we will ever be. These future selves even if they have many things in common, they have many things that are different, including thoughts, opinions and after some time every single cell in their body. If one ends their life, their future selves were never able to choose whether they wanted to exist or not. If even for a second a future self of ours believes that life is worth living, the action of committing suicide and never reaching that self becomes unethical and although it might not be actual murder, some could consider it close to, or at least something we should not have the right to choose. Furthermore, even if for every moment of their life that person and their future selves chose to not exist (highly unlikely) our actions are still unethical since by committing suicide we are not allowing them to choose, and when it comes to such an important matter, everybody should have a choice.

This brings us in a very difficult position. We just “proved” (it always depends on your personal point of view of course) that committing suicide under any circumstances is unethical, but truth is, that there is a very specific set of factors that could possibly make suicide if not ethical, at least acceptable. These factors can be from various different examples but they boil down to this. If a person is in pain and they decide that the pain is too much to keep on living, and they know for a fact that their pain is only going to increase until they die, then it is almost sure that every future self would choose to not exist. Those future selves would also probably choose to not have to make that choice and feel the pain even for a short amount of time. Again, there are weaknesses. An example of what I just said would be a terminally ill patient, a person that is suffering from cancer or another equally tremendous disease and has reached a point where the drugs they are given do not work and it is certain that the person is going to die. Some countries would allow this person to choose whether they want to keep on living or end their lives painlessly. It might seem really humanitarian when we first think about it but we can not forget that research is happening constantly and there are constantly new treatments under development. If, and let's hope for, a treatment that is perfect is created in the future it is safe to assume that many people that were considered to be terminally ill will be saved. This means that without knowing so, those people had future selves that would choose to live. The chance might be really small and those people might be really few, but they are still existent and they deserve a chance to live the rest of their lives as much as anybody. Also, there have been a number cases where patients have recovered from a number of different terminal illnesses almost like a miracle. They are very few but not non-existent.

To completely answer every part of our question, it is not only unethical to commit suicide, but it is not even righteous to allow people to. It is also not ethical for people to decline treatment from a preventable disease and, additionally, if one truly believes the above then they could make an argument that it is also not ethical for one to harm themselves consciously and have a negative impact on the length of their lifetime, with actions like smoking.

A common question to think about after listening to this answer is: “Then according to this logic, should people even have rights to their own selves?”. Technically, no. Practically, yes, and there's a good reason for that. Apart from the fact that people would riot, and they would be right to, if smoking, alcohol, every possible drug, extreme sports, needles, knives, and many more things were banned there is another, better and more important reason why everyone should have every single possible right when it comes to their bodies and minds. The actual act has some self-enforcing consequences that are enough of a penalty by themselves. Suicide is unethical for the reasons we explained, but it also has a penalty that is pretty straight-forward. The parts that are yours also cease to exist. One cannot cease to exist by not shortening their own existence and only killing their future selves. As we said, the person you are changes, but also keeps some characteristics identical from beginning to end. By committing suicide or consciously shortening your lifetime, you are depriving the world of your existence, and every future possible existence of yourself. We shouldn't start treating people that committed suicide like their last act while they were living was murder. That doesn't mean that we should also give them the choice to kill themselves by providing a painless poison. If one is certain that they want to end their life, they will find a way to no matter what. In fact, whether you agree or not with this answer, does not matter since this way of looking at the act of suicide and of self-harm does not involve changing anything in our system. It is just food for thought.

written by Nikos Mertzanis