Causing Death and Saving Lives by Jonathan Glover

Author:Jonathan Glover
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141949734
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

2 Questions for the Person Thinking of Suicide

Where someone contemplating suicide is sufficiently in control of himself to deliberate about his course of action, two factors are relevant to the decision. What would his own future life be like, and would it be worth living? What effect would his decision (either way) have on other people?

The difficulties in answering the question about one’s own future life are obvious. If life is at present sufficiently bad to make a person think suicide may be in his own interest, he will need to have some idea of how likely or unlikely is any improvement in his state. This is often hard to predict (except in cases where the blight on his life is an absolutely incurable illness). Most of us are bad at giving enough weight to the chances of our lives changing for better or worse. And people sometimes contemplate suicide without exploring the possibility of less radical steps to deal with their problems. Someone who would normally not even consider such upheavals as leaving his family, changing his job, emigrating, or seeking psychiatric help, should not absolutely rule out any of them once he enters the region where killing himself is not ruled out either. And, since many of us are bad at predicting our own futures, it is worth talking to other people who may see the thing differently, whether friends or the Samaritans.

The other difficulty is deciding what sort of life is worth living. One test has to do with the amount of life for which you would rather be unconscious. Most of us prefer to be anaesthetized for a painful operation. If most of my life were to be on that level, I might opt for permanent anaesthesia, or death. But complications arise. It may be that we prefer to be anaesthetized for an operation only because we have plenty of other times to experience life without pain. It may be worth putting up with a greater degree of pain where the alternative is no life at all. And, even if we can decide about when we would rather be unconscious, the question whether a life is worth living cannot be decided simply by totting up periods of time to see if more than half our waking life is below zero in this way. Some brief periods of happiness may be of such intensity as to justify much longer periods of misery. (Equally, some brief periods of agony or despair may outweigh longer periods of mild cheerfulness.)

Our estimates of the quality of our lives are especially vulnerable to temporary changes of mood, so that the only reasonable way to reach a serious evaluation is to consider the question over a fairly long stretch of time. Even this has limitations, because of the difficulty of giving the right weight to estimates made at different times and in different moods, but anything less is hopelessly inadequate.

The other question to be answered is about the effects on other people of a decision for or against the suicide.

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