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Daily Linz 6 - A Duty to Live? “The United States of America has become a country just like the country from which it gained its independence back in the late 1700s. It is now managed by government, and nearly everything people want to do that doesn’t please some other people must secure public permission. Thus we have the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments about whether Oregon’s law permitting doctors to dispense drugs that can be used to commit suicide is constitutional. Of course it is. …” Elsewhere, in an op-ed for the Ayn Rand Institute, Thomas A. Bowden wrote: “Since 1994 Oregon physicians have been permitted by statute to help their patients commit suicide. The federal government's challenge to that law will be argued on Wednesday before the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the court is likely to base its eventual decision on legal technicalities rather than on the real issue: an individual's unconditional right to commit suicide.” The key word here is unconditional. Enlightened and all as the Oregon law is, it should not be hedged about with mandatory written requests, counselling, waiting periods and the like. Any kind of pact between an individual and another party that does not involve force or fraud is no one else’s business. But the reaffirmation of the Oregon law is infinitely to be preferred over the recriminalisation of assisted suicide. (In New Zealand, in spite of the efforts of two politicians to introduce laws similar to Oregon’s, assisted suicide remains illegal. See the reprised articles below, my “Live, Damn You!” and Cameron Pritchard’s “Lesley Martin, Moral Hero.”) Bowden again: “Who is missing from this debate? The individual patient whose life is at stake. … “What the courts must grasp, if they are to justly resolve the battle over assisted suicide, is that there is no rational secular basis upon which the government can properly prevent any individual from choosing to end his own life. When religious conservatives use secular laws to enforce their idea of God's will, they threaten the central principle on which America was founded. “The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, for the first time in the history of nations, that each person exists as an end in himself. This basic truth--which finds political _expression in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--means, in practical terms, that you need no one's permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct your efforts to achieve your own personal happiness. But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself--is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.” This is standard Objectivist fare, eloquently and elegantly expressed, and I can’t imagine any SOLOist disagreeing with it. Here, however, I want to take the argument a step further. Bowden asks, “What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering?” I want to ask, “What if one doesn’t?” I want to argue that the right to commit suicide is indeed unconditional—it pertains to the healthy as well as the terminally ill. I don’t mean just that one should have the legal right; I mean one has the moral right. (I should stress at this point that I’m speaking entirely personally, not for SOLO. And I certainly am not claiming to speak for Objectivism.) I want to dissent from the Objectivist party line that if a well person chooses suicide he places himself on “the lowest rung of hell.” Objectivism holds that the choice to live, while it is the basis of morality, is itself pre-moral. If one chooses to live, then morality becomes necessary; if one doesn’t, then, surely, morality has nothing to say about that? How can it have anything to say when it has not yet entered the picture? Here’s Peikoff on the matter, in OPAR: “A primary choice [to live] does not mean an ‘arbitrary,’ ‘whimsical’ or ‘groundless’ choice. There are grounds for a (certain) primary choice, and those grounds are reality—all of it. The choice to live, as we have seen, is the choice to accept the realm of reality. This choice is not only not arbitrary. It is the precondition of criticising the arbitrary; it is the base of reason. A man who would throw away his life without cause, who would reject the universe on principle and embrace a zero for its own sake—such a man, according to Objectivism, would belong on the lowest rung of hell. His action would indicate so profound a hatred—of himself, of values, of reality—that he would have to be condemned by any human being as a monster.” If that’s not arguing that one has a duty to live, then I don’t know what is. To be sure, I myself regularly rail against certain epistemologies, politics and esthetics as anti-life. That’s because their advocates and practitioners have chosen to live and then promoted things contrary to that choice (both their own and others’—their statism and their death-music are inimical to my choice to live, so I despise them). They have acted immorally, no question. But were they, or any decent person for that matter, suddenly, without explanation or fanfare, to top themselves, I would have nothing to say about the morality of that action, since, by it, they would have removed themselves from morality’s purview. Their life, their death, their prerogative. Peikoff goes on to say of the suicide-committer: “The moment he would announce his decision seriously he would be disqualified as an object of intellectual debate.” Exactly! That’s my whole point! If he’s beyond debate, how can it be argued that he’s a monster on the lowest rung of hell? The most one can say is that he’s reverted to the pre-moral state and opted not to live. Peikoff’s answer to the question, “Why choose life?” reads to me like, “Because it’s there, so you must.” Mine would be, “There’s no intrinsic ‘why,’ short of a powerful biological urge which I’m free to accept or reject; there’s no a priori categorical imperative saying you must choose life—so find your own ‘why’ and speak for yourself. Why do I choose life? Why the hell not? It’s rapturously beautiful, irresistible, fascinating and challenging; it beats the hell out of being dead; and opting out would be damned messy. But I’m under no obligation to stick around, and not to do so wouldn’t make me a monster. If I choose life, then I must acquire a code of morality, one consistent with that choice, which means a morality consistent with the reality I have chosen to live within (i.e. an objective morality, not an arbitrary, whimsical or groundless one).” Now I don’t doubt that Peikoff accurately represents Rand’s view and that she’s thundering from Valhalla to New Zealand right now to flay me alive. If I have opened the floodgates to subjectivism, intrinsicism, altruism, collectivism, hedonism, whim-worship, rationalism and empiricism, not to mention Saddamy, pomo-wankerism, vegetarianism and Luke Setzer’s flow-charts, then I’m more than willing to stand corrected. But I thought a duty ethic was what we Objectivists were not about.
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