24. Suicide, Part I: The rationality of suicide

Summary

Professor Shelly Kagan introduces suicide as the final topic of the course, framing it as a question raised by the fact that people can sometimes control when their lives end. He argues that the subject should be examined carefully rather than dismissed through assumptions that anyone who considers suicide must be irrational or immoral.

Rationality and morality are separate questions

Kagan distinguishes two issues:

• Rationality: Could ending one’s life ever be the decision that best serves one’s interests?
• Morality: Could suicide ever be morally permissible or acceptable?

These standards can come apart: an action may be rational but immoral, or morally permissible but irrational. The lecture focuses on rationality, leaving morality for later.

Two questions about rational suicide

Before deciding whether suicide could be rational, Kagan separates two questions:

1. Could someone be better off dead? In other words, could their future life be worse for them than having no further life?
2. Could they rationally judge that this describes their situation? Even if such cases are possible, a separate question is whether someone can reliably recognize that they are in one.

The lecture primarily considers the first question and sets aside, for the time being, whether a person in such circumstances can assess their situation clearly.

Why Kagan rejects the “two-state requirement”

One objection holds that saying someone would be “better off dead” makes no sense: comparisons of well-being supposedly require two states the person could occupy, but a dead person does not exist in a state.

Kagan rejects this requirement. He argues that it would also make it difficult to say that saving someone’s life benefits them. We can say that a person’s life is worth continuing because of the good life they would otherwise have, without treating nonexistence as a state they occupy. By the same reasoning, if someone’s remaining life would be sufficiently bad, it can make sense to say they would be better off dead—meaning that avoiding that bad life would be better for them.

What makes a life worth living?

Whether a life could be worse than no further life depends on one’s theory of well-being:

• Hedonism: A life’s value depends on its balance of pleasure and pain. If suffering outweighs pleasure, continued life could have negative value.
• Broader accounts of well-being: Other goods—such as relationships, achievement, knowledge, and meaningful activity—may also matter, along with harms beyond pain.
• Neutral-container theories: Being alive adds no value by itself; the value of a life depends on what it contains.
• Modest valuable-container theories: Being alive adds some intrinsic value, but sufficiently bad experiences could outweigh it.
• Fantastic valuable-container theories: Life itself is so valuable that no negative contents could outweigh it. On this view, no one could be better off dead.
• Pessimistic theories: Some views hold that life is, overall, worse than nothing for everyone.

Kagan’s own position is between the extremes: he thinks the value of life varies, and that some people’s future circumstances could be bad enough to outweigh whatever intrinsic value life may have.

Applying the idea to possible life trajectories

Kagan uses a graph of a life’s overall value over time. The horizontal axis marks time; the vertical axis marks how good or bad life is. The zero line represents the point at which life is neither better nor worse than nonexistence.

• A declining life that remains above zero: A downturn alone does not make suicide rational. If life becomes less good but remains worth living, ending it would discard a life that still has positive value.
• A life that eventually falls below zero: If future life becomes sufficiently bad, the question of whether ending life could be rational becomes intelligible.
• Timing matters: If a person could choose the exact moment, Kagan suggests that the relevant point would be when life’s overall value turns negative—not merely when it begins to decline.
• Limited future control: If illness or incapacity will eventually prevent a person from acting, the decision may involve comparing the remaining good and bad periods that would otherwise follow. Whether ending life earlier would make sense depends on that overall balance.
• A temporary downturn followed by recovery: A bad period does not by itself justify concluding that life is not worth continuing if improvement is expected and the life remains positive overall.

A caution about judging one’s own life during a downturn

Kagan warns against confusing “my life is worse than it used to be” with “my life is not worth living.” During a painful setback, a person may lose sight of future possibilities. He uses examples such as a relationship ending or failure to reach an educational goal to illustrate how a temporary disappointment can be mistaken for evidence that the entire future is hopeless.

He says that, in his judgment, suicide would very likely not be a rational decision for anyone in the class at that time. The lecture’s cases are philosophical thought experiments, not practical instructions or a personal assessment of someone’s circumstances.

Speakers and sources featured

• Professor Shelly Kagan — lecturer and primary speaker.
• An unnamed student — asks a question about what makes life intrinsically valuable on the “fantastic container” view.