Suicide Chump?

For those of us who style ourselves as libertarians, at least when it comes to personal autonomy issues, suicide is always a tricky issue. From a legal standpoint, most of us would agree that laws against suicide unduly infringe upon personal liberty and, at any rate, are staggeringly ineffective (you can't prosecute a corpse). On the other hand, we have to realize that many in the psychological community view the act of suicide as per se evidence of mental illness. A mentally ill person, the theory goes, cannot rationally decide to end their own life.

That's the interesting debate playing out in the comments to this post over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

I sympathize with Sasha Volokh (the original poster) and his position that he would oppose interfering with another person's choice to end their life, but would quickly violate his own convictions in an attempt to save his teenage son from killing himself. I, too, would do everything in my power to prevent a friend or loved one from taking his or her own life. But on the other hand, I can't condemn the act itself.

A fundamental tenet of Mill-style libertarianism is that no person can really know another person's wants, needs, and desires. No matter how much I try to "walk a mile in your shoes," I simply can't really understand your life. I cannot grasp what gives you pleasure in the world , what causes you pain, and in what proportion those things exist. For anyone to say otherwise is the height of arrogance. When reviewing a situation where someone offs themselves (as with the novelist in the VC post), the best you can say is "I wouldn't do the same thing." But, by definition, you are not them, and therefore can't really grasp why they did it.

In that fashion, I very much enjoyed the way the assisted suicide issue was set up in The Sea Inside. The 2004 Spanish film tells the true story of a man who becomes a quadriplegic after a diving accident in his youth. He is confined for the next several decades to a bed in his brother's home in the Spanish countryside. He eventually decides that he wants to die but, due to his condition, needs the help of others to do so. His legal case set off a furor in largely Catholic Spain and was ultimately unsuccessful (he did indeed kill himself, using a conspiracy so elaborate that none of his conspirators could be prosecuted). What was interesting about the film was that it portrayed the man's life as pretty damn good, all things considered. Yes, he was paralyzed and confined to bed. But he had the care and support of his family, full control of his mental faculties, and an infectious personality. Personally, I think I could live on like that. But he couldn't, and that was the point - by eliminating the traditional movie-of-the-week agony of his condition, it faced the viewer to confront the issue fairly rationally.

While I can sympathize with the "pro-life" movement on this issue (i.e., suicide is by definition an irrational act of the mentally ill), they seem willing to compromise for certain exceptions. For the purely hypothetical, they seem to agree that killing oneself in a peaceful hours before being tortured to death would be a rational act. And, of course, folks want to leave open the possibility that the terminally ill should be able to die with dignity. But those examples cut against the "suicide=nuts" paradigm. In the end, it only shows that those situations are sufficiently clear to convince you that it's for someone to kill themselves. And that, in a free society that cherishes individual liberty (assume we are one, arguendo), isn't the point.