What is Wrong with “What is Wrong with RationalSuicide”

Michael Cholbi

Received: 16 August 2010 /Revised: 7 January 2011 /Accepted: 21 July 2011 /Published online: 4 August 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract In “What is Wrong with Rational Suicide,” Pilpel and Amsel develop acounterexample that allegedly confounds attempts to condition the moral permissi-bility of suicide on its rationality. In this counterexample, a healthy middle agedwoman with significant life accomplishments, but no dependents, disease, or mentaldisorder opts to end her life painlessly after reading philosophical texts that persuadeher that life is meaningless and bereft of intrinsic value. Many people would judgeher suicide “a bad mistake” despite its meeting “robust” conditions for rationality.Hence, Pilpel and Amsel conclude, even robust conditions for the rationality ofsuicide “fail to do their job: to exclude intuitively unacceptable suicides from beingpermissible.” I argue here that this counterexample fails to cast doubt onphilosophical attempts to account for the moral permissibility of suicide in termsof its rationality.

Keywords Suicide . Rationality . Right to die . Autonomy

In “What is Wrong with Rational Suicide,”1 Avital Pilpel and Lawrence Amseldevelop a counterexample that allegedly confounds attempts to condition the moralpermissibility of suicide on its rationality. In this counterexample, which Pilpel andAmsel dub “The Suicide,” a healthy middle aged woman with significant lifeaccomplishments, but no dependents, disease, or mental disorder, opts to end her lifepainlessly after reading philosophical texts that persuade her that life is meaninglessand bereft of intrinsic value. Many people would judge her suicide “a bad mistake”despite its meeting recognized conditions for rationality. (2) Hence, Pilpel and Amsel

Philosophia (2012) 40:285–293DOI 10.1007/s11406-011-9326-5

1Philosophia doi:10.1007/s11406-010-9253-x, online publication at http://www.springerlink.com/content/b623301168435414/, published 22 July 2010. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent parentheticalreferences are to this article.

M. Cholbi (*)Department of Philosophy, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, USAe-mail: mjcholbi@csupomona.edu

conclude, even apparently robust conditions for the rationality of suicide “failto do their job: to exclude intuitively unacceptable suicides from beingpermissible.” (2)

My aim here is to show that, on the most plausible understanding of therelationship between a suicide’s being rational and its being morally permissible,examples like “The Suicide” do not cast doubt on the thesis that suicide is morallypermissible if it is rational. I will first show that Pilpel and Amsel’s way ofcharacterizing their appraisal of this example is confused. For to claim that that “TheSuicide” is “a bad mistake” just is to claim that there is something irrational about it.Hence, making sense of Pilpel and Amsel’s appraisal of “The Suicide” requiresdistinguishing two sets of conditions for an act of suicide being rational: An act ofsuicide can be instrumentally rational, insofar as choosing to die serves the ends theagent seeks to achieve through death, or an act of suicide can be telically rational,insofar as choosing to die rests on a full and proper appreciation of the ends, bothcurrent and future, that suicide both serves and thwarts. Pilpel and Amsel’scounterexample is most plausibly seen as one in which the agent’s suicide isinstrumentally, but not telically, rational.

However, Pilpel and Amsel’s complaint assumes that philosophical proponents ofa ‘right to die’ should hinge the moral permissibility of suicide on its being bothinstrumentally and telically rational. While they are correct that some of theseproponents have made the moral permissibility of suicide depend upon its beingrational in both senses, this set of conditions (I argue) is too strong. The right to dieis clearly a liberty right to end one’s life, and in general, morally permissibleexercises of a liberty right may need to be instrumentally rational, but they do notneed to be telically rational. Hence, ‘the right to die’ can be permissibly exercisedeven by those who, as Pilpel and Amsel see it, are making a bad mistake in failing tobe telically rational. Pilpel and Amsel thus incorrectly saddle their opponents with anargumentative burden they can readily reject. For it need not be the “job” of thosewho condition the morally permissible exercise of the right to die on rationality to“exclude intuitively unacceptable suicides from being permissible.”

“The Suicide”

Let us begin with Pilpel and Amsel’s counterexample. The counterexample is veryrichly described, but let the following suffice for our purposes:

A healthy woman in her 50s concludes, after reading Epicurus, Schopenhauer,and the existentialist writers, that life is a “cosmic joke” with no intrinsic importanceand whose disappointments outweigh its satisfactions. She lacks dependents, isunmarried, and her parents are deceased, so she has no special obligations to others.She has a satisfying career, but she can no longer engage in her work or her hobbieswith the same intensity. In general, her desires for independence, physical health, andthe like are becoming harder to fulfill as she ages. Her suicide is painless.

As Pilpel and Amsel see it, a common (though not universal) reaction to this caseis that the woman is making a bad mistake—that she is “throwing her life away,” (5)and for this reason, many of us would feel compelled to stop her. “The Suicide”supposedly demonstrates that an individual can fulfill the “technical conditions” for

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a suicide to be rational and yet be acting wrongly in “some more substantiveway.” (11) According to Pilpel and Amsel, the 50-year old woman discards herlife “for no good reason, because of what seems like a fundamentally mistakenworldview.” (11) Their conclusion: The typical conditions for rational suicideput forth by advocates of a right to die “are simply too weak to exclude this(and many other) potential suicides from getting the stamp of approval.” (11)Attempts to capture the moral justification of suicide in terms of rationality arethus conceptually lacking.

Two Standards of Rationality

There is a great deal in Pilpel and Amsel’s discussion that I readily concede. Forinstance, Pilpel and Amsel admit that the judgment that “The Suicide” is wrong, amistake, or even regrettable, is not universally shared. (3) But I will concede thatjudgment for the sake of argument. However, I do not believe that her suicide’s beinga mistake casts doubt on the thesis that the moral permissibility of suicide hinges onits rationality.

First, a careful consideration of the nature of rationality will illustrate howher suicide is a bad mistake precisely because it is irrational. I concur with Pilpeland Amsel that the woman’s suicide exhibits many of the features typicallyassociated with a suicide’s being rational. Her choice to end her life is suitablywell-informed. Her suicide is sufficient to satisfy her desire to avoid futurefrustrations, she does not suffer from systematically distorted beliefs, and herchoice is autonomous insofar as it is neither coerced nor undertaken impulsively.Nor does she exhibit any symptoms of mental disorder. What unites these variousfeatures, I suggest, is that their absence would indicate that the woman in questionended her life irrationally in that a suicide undertaken with insufficientinformation, etc., is one that is not likely to serve the end she seeks to achievethrough death, irrespective of what that end happened to be. From the standpoint ofmeans-ends rationality, “The Suicide” is clearheaded and rational. Let us say, then,that an act of suicide is instrumentally rational when the choice to die serves theends the individual seeks to achieve through death, the individual chooses to dierecognizing that death would serve those ends, and the individual chooses to diebecause death serves those ends.

So far then, “The Suicide” exhibits instrumental rationality. (Pilpel and Amselacknowledge as much. (6)) Tellingly, Pilpel and Amsel note that philosophersusually understand rationality as being more than purely instrumental though—that‘rational’ has a “more robust” or “’substantivist’ sense” in which the “agent’s goalsand desires are themselves evaluated as more or less ‘rational’.” (6) The difficultyhere is how to reconcile Pilpel and Amsel’s acknowledgement of this more“substantivist” sense of rationality with their claim that “The Suicide” made a badmistake despite being fully rational. Pilpel and Amsel maintain that the woman in“The Suicide” has made a bad mistake in some “substantive” way. She is throwingher life away, they conclude, wrongly deciding that “oblivion is better thancontinued life.” (7) Clearly, their worry is not that suicide does not serve thewoman’s ends. It is rather that her or her choice of desires, goals, or ends—avoiding

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future frustration, among them—, is not fully rational in that it is not properlybalanced or juxtaposed against other ends or values that speak against her ending herlife. Presumably, the charge that the woman in “The Suicide” throws her life away isthe charge her life is worth even when weighed against the woman’s existential angstand her sense that her quality of life is in decline. Suicide is rational given herworldview, but according to Pilpel and Amsel, that worldview is “fundamentallymistaken,” and as a result, her suicide is undertaken for no “good reason” or end.

It is clear, then, where we should locate the woman’s irrationality. She isinstrumentally irrational, but her decision is not telically rational. For while her deathserves her ends, she chooses to die lacking a full and proper appreciation of the ends,both current and future, that her death would serve or thwart. As Pilpel and Amselnote, practical rationality can go astray if an agent’s beliefs about the world are notcorrect. (6) In this case, the woman’s decision to end her life serves her ends, but theends so served are part of a worldview that at least many would find mistaken. Hererror is one of evaluative or ethical fact, the error of concluding that, in thesecircumstances at least, “oblivion is better than continued life.”

I contend, therefore, that Pilpel and Amsel have mischaracterized their owncounterexample as a rational ‘bad mistake’. Neither they nor I have given a defenseof the notion that full practical rationality requires that our choices be bothinstrumentally and telically rational. But insofar as our ends are embedded withinlarger worldviews, an instrumentally rational individual can be telically irrational ifthat worldview contains fundamental errors. To borrow an example from WarrenQuinn, a person for whom a central end of his life is to act on his urge to turn onevery radio he sees can pursue this aim with sterling levels of instrumentalrationality. (Quinn 1993: 236–241) But the normative opacity of this desire leads usto conclude that this urge stems from a deep misunderstanding about the nature ofvalue or happiness, and so even if this end is pursued with instrumental efficiency,the pursuit itself is nonetheless irrational in light of the end pursued. Quinn’s radioexample is of course a more extreme example of the irrationality that should beascribed to the suicidal woman. As argued above, the suicidal woman does not haveirrational ends, i.e., the avoidance of suffering or frustration are not irrational wants.Her error is more global than local, a matter of her misprioritizing ends instead ofvaluing that which is valueless. Moreover, neither in her example, nor in Quinn’sradio example, need the agent be suffering from systematically distorted beliefs as awhole. A single evaluative error can render choices irrational.

Again, in the case of “The Suicide,” that her worldview contains errors ofevaluative fact is disputable, as Pilpel and Amsel admit. But supposing that to be thecase, then “The Suicide” is a mistake precisely because it is telically irrational.Contrary to Pilpel and Amsel then, we can fault the woman’s rationality, and onterms that Pilpel and Amsel themselves implicitly acknowledge.

Rationality and the Right to Die

Understanding Pilpel and Amsel’s example in this way suggests that what theirexample demonstrates is not that a rational suicide simpliciter can be mistaken.Rather, it shows that a suicide can be instrumentally rational rather than telically

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rational. (The converse is of course possible too.) Seen in this light, their complaintabout conditioning the ‘right to die’ on its being rationally exercised must beunderstood as the claim that proponents of the right to die endorse as rational (andhence morally permissible) some suicides that could be well be mistaken becausethey are telically irrational. But this, I will now argue, is precisely what philosophicaladvocates of a right to die ought to say about the relationship between a suicide’sbeing rational and its being morally permissible: At most, a morally permissiblesuicide must be instrumentally rational, but it need not be telically rational. Toimpose the latter condition on morally permissible suicides is to impose an undulyhigh standard for the exercise of what is clearly a liberty right.

To be fair, some advocates of ‘rational suicide’ have seemed to conclude that arational suicide is one that is both instrumentally and telically rational. MargaretBattin, for instance, stipulates that a suicide is rational if a range of cognitive andinterest-based conditions are met. Among the latter are that a suicide enables one toavoid identifiable future harms and that dying accords with one’s most fundamentalinterests and commitments. (Battin 1995: 116) Doubtless, “The Suicide” avoidsidentifiable future harms, but it is more controversial that her death would accordwith her fundamental interests and commitments. After all, the 50-year old womanhas only recently concluded that life is an existential vacuum, and so doubt may beraised about just how ‘fundamental’ her interest in dying really is. But we need notconcern ourselves with precisely what makes an interest fundamental to notice thatBattin appears to condition the rationality of suicide on its being instrumentally andtelically rational. For on her view, a suicide is rational not only if it serves certainends a person has, but also if these ends are among her most fundamental, i.e., ifthose ends have been assigned the appropriate significance vis-à-vis the individual’schoice to die.

In a different vein, Richard Brandt, in a seminal paper, argues that in evaluating“future world-courses,” a person’s suicide is rational if ending his life is what he

would choose under conditions of optimal use of information, when all of hisdesires are taken into account. It is not just a question of what we prefer now,with some clarification of all the possibilities being considered. Ourpreferences change, and the preferences of tomorrow are just as legitimatelytaken into account in deciding what to do now as the preferences of today.(Brandt 1992: 323)

According to Brandt then, a suicidal person must both project and vividly engagewith the future preferences (or ends) whose satisfaction his premature death wouldnecessarily preclude. In the case of “The Suicide,” it is far from obvious that thewoman has done this, for she takes little stock of how her future desires mightchange, and more acutely, how they might change in such a manner as to render herending her life at present a choice that is irrational from the perspective of her life asa whole. So like Battin, Brandt thinks of rational suicide not simply instrumentally interms of how well suicide serves a person’s actual or present ends, but in terms ofhow suicide might serve or thwart ends a person may come to have in the future. Arational suicide, on this view, requires the appropriate assessment of both the endssuicide would serve and those it would thwart.

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Hence, on these accounts of the conditions for rational suicide, “The Suicide” wasnot rational. Again, such accounts are well-positioned to explain why many wouldjudge her to have made a bad mistake.

Yet it is not obvious either that (a) those who offer such accounts of rationalsuicide believe that a suicide is morally permissible only if it meets these twostandards of rationality, or (b) that an act of suicide is a permissible exercise of one’sright to die only if it meets both of these standards of rationality.

First, we must keep in mind Pilpel and Amsel’s target: the claim that the right todie rests on its being exercised rationally. Some philosophers, such as Brandt (whoseapproach to the ethics of suicide is rule-utilitarian), do not offer conditions forrational suicide for the purpose of outlining the conditions on the right to die. And ingeneral, it is an exaggeration to claim that contemporary advocates of a right to die“usually demand” that a suicide is permissible only if it is both instrumentally andtelically rational. (2) Battin, one author Pilpel and Amsel repeatedly cite in defenseof this claim, does not unequivocally endorse that position. Indeed, her attempts tolay out the conditions for a suicide’s being rational are aimed at explaining whensuicide is something we ought to do, not when suicide is something we have a rightto do. (See Battin 1995: 183–87)

Suicide as a Liberty Right

These scholarly matters aside though, those who support a right to die should bewary of making the permissible exercises of this right contingent on individuals’decisions to die being both instrumentally and telically rational. As Battin (1995:189) notes, most contemporary writers defending a right to die are defending neithera claim right, imposing a duty on others to assist in one’s suicide, nor even a right ofnon-interference, imposing a duty on others not to interfere with one’s suicide. Theyare instead defending a liberty right to die, according to which, under somecircumstances, a suicidal person has no obligation to refrain from ending her life.Indeed, as both supporters and opponents of the right to die see it, whether there is aliberty right to die is the chief issue dividing them, and that in fact, these other rightsmust ultimately hinge on the liberty right to die. (Kamm 1997, Kass 1993, Lebacqz& Engelhardt 1980, Nozick et al. 1997, Sunstein 1997, Velleman 1992)

But what are the appropriate rationality conditions for the exercise of a libertyright? In general, the rationality conditions for the permissible exercise of a libertyright are extremely weak. Typically, a person may permissibly exercise her libertyrights even when such exercises neither serve her actual ends nor serve those endswhich she ought to rationally endorse or accept as part of a rationally defensibleworldview. A liberty right is permissibly exercised even when it is neitherinstrumentally nor telically rational. To have a liberty right to one’s own wealthdoes not require that one put that wealth to the most rational use (by investing withthe utmost prudence, say) or that one assigns wealth its appropriate status within aweb of ends one might pursue. Having a liberty right to vote does not require thatone vote only for the candidate that best reflects one’s interests or is likely to governmost effectively, nor does it require an especially reflective or rich understanding ofthe ends that are served by supporting different candidates for office. Having a

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liberty right to marry does not require that one’s spouse be certified to be someonewho will serves the ends one seeks through marriage, nor does it require that thoseends be rationally endorsed or held. And so too for any liberty right, including theright to die: The conditions for their permissible exercise are extremely weak. Apermissible exercise of a liberty right does not require that the right be exercisedonly in the service of ends chosen on the basis of a complete and accurate appraisalof them and of their relation to other possible ends.

If, as Pilpel and Amsel seem to suppose, a suicide is morally permissible if andonly if it is both instrumentally and telically rational, then this would put advocatesof a liberty right to die in the odd position of treating this liberty right as havingextraordinary rational conditions for its permissible exercise. It is for these reasonsthat philosophical advocates a right to die, especially those for whom individualautonomy is a central value, should be uneasy about making the conditions forrational suicide so substantive or robust. If the conditions for a suicide being rationalare strengthened enough, then at some point, a rational suicide simply becomes asuicide supported by the best reasons, period. Arguably, we reach that point whensuicide’s permissibility is conditioned on its being both instrumentally and telicallyrational. In other words, if a rational suicide turns out to be any suicide supported bythe best reasons, then rational autonomy—i.e., an agent’s own rational determinationof what she has reason to do or what ends she ought to adopt—has no role in theexplanation of why a suicide is permissible. In fact, a suicide could be deemedirrational on such a view even if the individual herself finds it rational in light of herends (or vice versa). To respect autonomy is to respect a person’s end-setting andend-appraising capacity, even when the exercise of this capacity generates errors ofnormative appraisal. Making the permissibility of suicide hinge on such a strongrationality condition thus fails to give autonomy its moral due.

Admittedly, there are good reasons for making the rationality conditions ofmorally permissible suicide stronger than the usual conditions for the permissibleexercise of a liberty right. Death is, after all, irreversible and momentous. That thereare more ‘checks’ on the instrumental rationality of those who seek to exercise theright to die than there are on those who exercise their rights to invest their money,vote, or marry is a reasonable constraint. The more someone has to lose byexercising their liberty rights, the more stringent the standard of instrumentalrationality their behavior must meet in order to be morally permissible. But eventhese more stringent standards allow for exercises of liberty that are bad for us.Steven Luper makes the same point in the context of “competent consent”:

The notion of competent consent is meant to be flexible enough to allow forthe possibility of competently consenting to certain things that we know areagainst our interests. For example, typically, it is assumed that people cancompetently choose to smoke cigarettes, and pugilists can competently chooseto box, if they know the risks. (Luper 2009:159)

Hence, applying elevated standards of instrumental rationality to the right to diemakes sense, even if the standards applied to other liberty rights are weaker. Inparticular, it is reasonable to require that a suicide must be instrumentally rational inorder to be permissible.

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But the error of Amsel and Pilpel, and of those who would condition the moralpermissibility of suicide on its being telically rational, is to apply an unjustified andunduly strenuous standard of rationality to the right to die. As we have seen, even astandard of instrumental rationality for a right to suicide exceeds the standards ofrationality typically applied to exercises of liberty rights. Note that meeting thisstandard still allows for morally permissible suicides to be telically irrational. Such isthe case with “The Suicide”: She meets the various instrumental conditions forrationality (generally true beliefs, autonomy, absence of mental disorder, etc.), andsince her suicide is not irrational in this respect, her suicide is thus morallypermissible. However, the sense that she is nevertheless making a bad mistake canbe explained by the possibility that her suicide is telically irrational—that, say, aperson with a deeper appreciation for life and its wonders would likely not killherself in this situation. As Pilpel and Amsel acknowledge, the 50-year old womanin this case does not “wish to kill herself for a trivial reason” (6), and in this sense,she is acting on recognizable reasons. But this is wholly compatible with her suicidebeing a bad mistake in the sense of being telically irrational.

Thus, advocates of a right to die do not have to concede that there is“nothing wrong” with the woman in “The Suicide.” (11) They may insteadaccommodate the intuitions that drive Pilpel and Amsel’s critique whilemaintaining that her suicide is nevertheless morally permissible. Advocates ofa rational right to die can admit that she makes a “bad mistake.” Furthermore,they can allow that perhaps her telic irrationality gives others grounds forintervening with her suicidal intentions even if she would violate no obligationsin ending her life. Her having a liberty right does not automatically imply aright to non-interference. Thus, our desire to stop an instrumentally rationalsuicide need not be evidence of its being morally wrong. (3)

Conclusion

Thus, on the most plausible interpretation of what renders an act of suicide rationaland morally permissible, “The Suicide” is not a troubling counterexample.

Of course, some may blanch at a view that deems “The Suicide” morallypermissible despite its being in some way irrational. But again, any liberalconception of rights must allow individuals to exercise those rights in less thanfully rational ways. The class of morally permissible suicides, on such views,coincides with the class of instrumentally rational suicides. I have said little in directdefense of this view of the right to die, and it is obviously possible to defend astronger condition of telic rationality on morally permissible suicides. But defendersof such a view would be wrong to depict their view as grounding the right to die inautonomy. A fortiori, such a view does not defend a right to die in any recognizablesense.

We may very much regret when individuals are not perfectly or strongly rationalin exercising their rights, especially when the right in question is the right to die.Doubtless it is hard to view “The Suicide” as anything but tragic. (Hill 1991) Butsuch is the cost of living in a society wherein, to use Mill’s famous words, “overhimself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” (Mill 1869)

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