Re: Suicide

I do and don't agree. Whether life is worth living is a totally first person question: only you yourself can decide whether you value life enough to want to live it. All sorts of things might impact your evaluation of life ( e.g. cultural norms unique to this epoch as you suggest), but it is still just your attitude towards life that matters. No one else can do any work at all to suggest that what you think is incorrect. I follow Blackburn to the letter on these kind of issues: once a person's attitude is discovered that is all we need to know about whether their life is worth living, there are no further facts to consider (especially no facts external to those about peoples' attitudes). There is no point a group of us (or even all of us) getting together to discuss what we think of life since our answer will only be an amalgam of our own personal evaluations of life (or maybe just our own lives): my evaluation of John's life as worth living isn't really going to make John see his life in any better way. So I don't think that the question of whether life is worth living is the most important question in philosophy; I don't even think it's a philosophical question. It's on a par with "do you like marmite?" (It shares the same form ultimately: "do you like your life?") It's a question about tastes.

Whether we should (as a society) try to prevent suicide is another matter. You could suggest that since everyone has their own view on their own lives we should let them get on with that. Firstly, there is the psychological fact that lots of people trying to kill themselves either aren't being "rational" (by which I mean thinking calmly to some degree) to be sure that what they really want is to end their life or are making a cry for help ( i.e. they want to get help rather than die, but don't know how else to communicate what they are going through). That's the practical answer about why we should try to prevent suicide. Now the philosophical answer (which isn't very well thought through). The important thing about this Blackburn-relativism is that although a person's moral views are completely idiocentric that does not stand in the way of judging each other. Suppose Mary has an abortion, suppose John disapproves of abortion but also realises that his moral standards are his own and are not objective; I can't see why he doesn't still condemn Mary for having an abortion: she's still done what he thinks is wrong. Similarly some people might consider suicide immoral (although in the preceeding paragraph I've given my reasons why I think they shouldn't), and so they might then actively try to prevent suicide. (OK, so this second "philosophical" answer says why people might stop suicides, not why they should, mea culpa).

On 13/09/06, David Mitchell <david110salo@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

I was reading a story in the paper about someone who'd committed suicide, and who had, prior to her death, visted 'suicide websites' , sites that allegedly 'encourage' or 'advise' people to kill themselves.

What was interesting about the attitudes of the parents and the media, towards these sites, was the way in which they seemed to reveal an underlying and unchallenged assumption in our society, namely that life is inherently worth living. Surely though it is at least an open question as to whether life [either in general, or in this particular historical epoch] is indeed worth living [and therefore whether the promotion of suicide is a correct action]? This is especially the case if you do not believe in god, since then there would be no ultimate 'reason' why life had to be more of a gift than a burden.

Further this is a question that is so rarely asked either by philosophers, or most people living their lives, yet one that Camus considered 'the most important question in philosophy' [Myth of Sisyphus]

Any thoughts?

David

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