“Self-death” (suicide) as a natural right

In the August/September 2018 issue of Free Inquiry (FI) magazine, and again in the June/July 2019 issue of FI, the Final Exit Network’s Client Services Director, Lowrey Brown, discusses rational suicide.  In the February/March 2020 issue of FI, retired clinical psychologist Mike Quattrocchi takes issue with the concept of rational suicide (“self-death” in his words) as a natural right:

Suicide is a human capability in nature; to be recognized as something more, it takes society. For centuries, society’s major institutions have judged suicide as inherently aberrant. Not everyone has agreed, and over recent years support for rational suicide has advanced, with some framing it as a human right. Arguments treating suicide as a human right are not persuasive, however, markedly failing to distinguish such a right from human capability. Support turns heavily on attributes shared with the capability rather than on an affirmative foundation. Further, these arguments insufficiently develop how a human suicide right would be integrated, exercised, and supported in society while coexisting with a human right to life.

History of suicide

While it is true that the Abrahamic religions that have predominated in western countries have in recent times generally condemned suicide, this has not been true everywhere else or at all times.  At various times in India, suicide has been accepted among Brahmans and also widows.  Criminals in ancient Greece were permitted to use suicide, Socrates being a well-known example; and the practice was prevalent among Jews seeking to escape their domination by Roman conquerers.  Two different methods of suicide, perhaps with mixed purposes, have sometimes been employed in Japan–hara-kiri and kamikaze bombers.  Concern about suicides among slaves, the property of the wealthier classes, caused state action against suicide in ancient Rome.

In the late 18th century, western criminal codes prohibiting suicide began to be abolished.  In the US, most such laws were abandoned nearly sixty years ago.

In ancient Greece and Rome, suicide was seen as acceptable, perhaps even heroic, depending on the circumstances. As Christianity took hold in the Roman empire, however, suicide began to be condemned as self-murder–an insult to God.  The Renaissance saw the reemergence of suicide as a philosophical issue in writings by Bacon, Donne, Montaigne, Sidney, and Shakespeare.  By 1700, the term “suicide” had replaced “self-murder,” and the subject began to interest the emerging scientific disciplines.

The certain inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are “life, liberty, and property.”  They are natural rights as seen in the philosophy and thought of John Locke and his contemporaries and predecessors for at least a hundred years.  We have duties to others not to kill or enslave them, or steal from them, just as they have duties to us in the same regard.  But the rights of life, liberty, and property may not appear related to something as personal as suicide.

The legal framework for suicide

The legal framework that bolsters the right to suicide has at least two dimensions.  One is the constitutional decisions of the courts that give people the right to decide on the medical care they will choose near the end of life.  Second is the broad philosophical basis for our system of government, namely, that all people have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.

Thirty years ago, the US Supreme Court held in the Cruzan case that end-of-life medical treatment for an individual should be decided on what that individual wants, if this could be shown by the “clear and convincing” evidence standard approved in Missouri.  (Other states presumably could choose other evidentiary standards.)  A person may refuse all treatment or accept some treatment and reject other forms of care.  This right to refuse all life-saving or life-prolonging treatment, as Justice Scalia noted, is no different from having a right to suicide.  However, the court has refused to hold that the Constitution supports a right to assistance in dying.

If individuals may end their own life by refusing medical treatment (or refusing to eat and drink, which is also permitted by our laws), then one way to look at the foundational principles of our rights suggests that suicide itself is a right.

If we have the right to both life and liberty, we should be able to use that liberty to decide to end our own lives.  Clearly, we don’t have the right to end the life of another, but we can, under the law, end our own life.  It is legal nonsense to suggest that if others disagree with our decision suicide cannot be a right.

Virtually every right in the Bill of Rights is subject to disagreement, controversy, and litigation.  The right to free speech is limited by time, manner, and place restrictions.  The right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure is limited by judicial interpretation of conditions like exigent circumstances or flight risk.  The right to “keep and bear arms” is subject to limitation by regulation.  The right of access to the courts is limited by the cost of litigation and court rules regarding standing.  Judicial decisions limit the right of equal treatment under the law and the right to due process of law.  The right to vote is not absolute as a result of felony conviction and judicially permitted voter suppression.

In this view, if there is no prohibition against suicide, there is, therefore, a right to take one’s own life.

Natural rights–privacy and autonomy

Natural rights can flow from our basic enumerated rights–they are extensions of these rights. For example, some Supreme court Justices have believed, though it isn’t written in the Constitution, that we have a right to privacy.  That right is derived from our right to personal autonomy–the right to choose whether or not to participate in certain acts and experiences.  This right to privacy/autonomy has been found at one time or another to be an extension of the enumerated rights in the US Constitution:

•  The First Amendment protects the privacy/autonomy of beliefs

•  The Third Amendment protects the privacy/autonomy of the home against the use of it for housing soldiers

•  The Fourth Amendment protects privacy/autonomy against unreasonable searches

•  The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, which in turn protects the privacy of personal information

•  The Ninth Amendment says that the “enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.” Thus, the Bill of Rights should protect privacy/autonomy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.

But the right to privacy/autonomy is most often cited as found in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, which provides:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

So the Supreme Court has recognized the right to marital privacy with respect to decisions about contraception, the right to view pornography in the privacy of one’s own home, the right to decide to terminate a pregnancy (within certain parameters involving when a compelling state interest is manifested), and the right to engage in consensual sodomy.

The latter case was found to involve the right to liberty under the Due Process Clause.  But other rights to privacy have been based on laws enacted by the Congress:  the Privacy Act of 1974, which prevents unauthorized disclosure of personal information held by the federal government;  the Financial Monetization Act of 1999, which requires financial institutions to provide customers with a privacy policy that explains what kind of information is being collected and how it is being used;  the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which protects personal financial information collected by credit reporting agencies.

When states passed laws removing suicide from criminal misconduct, they affirmatively created a right to take one’s own life.  In 2018, Gallup reported that 72% of adults polled answered “yes” to the question, “When a person has a disease that cannot be cured, do you think doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it? 

While euthanasia is not the same as suicide, it appears that a substantial majority of the public understand the desire of people not to suffer in the face of intractable disease.  There is no meaningful or ethical difference between voluntarily ending one’s own life and having a doctor do so at a person’s request to avoid unwanted suffering.  It is fair to conclude that our society has adopted a norm in favor of voluntary death to avoid suffering, which makes suicide not “inherently aberrant” as Quattrocchi claims.

What is a right?

Merriam-Webster defines a right as (1) “something to which one has a just claim;” (2) “the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled,” such as “a right to decide;” (3) “something that one may properly claim as due.”

By all of these definitions, we do have a right to take our own lives.  If we are free to end our own lives to avoid suffering, we have a privilege to which we have a just claim–hence, a right.  To deny such a right in the face of unwanted suffering would be a clear injustice.

Writing in the journal Current Oncology, David Benator, a philosopher, academic, and author, offers a clear enunciation of a right to die: 

The right to die is the right to decide whether one will die (when one could continue living). If the right to life were only a right to decide to continue living and did not also include a right to decide not to continue living, then it would be a duty to live rather than a right to life. . . . It is extremely implausible, however, to think that continued life is always in a person’s interest. Quality of life can fall to abysmal levels. While there can be reasonable disagreement about how poor the quality must be before life is not worth continuing, it is an indecent imposition on people—an unconscionable violation of their liberty—to force them to endure a life that they have reasonably judged to be unacceptable. 

It would be an abrogation of the very essence of liberty for a liberty-respecting state to deny the right of a person to end their own life when their life has become a burden to themselves in their reasonable estimation.

Forcing or compelling a person to live when all they want to do is avoid suffering which is occurring to them or reasonably anticipated to occur to them in the future is the worst sort of torture I can imagine.  It is the primary reason I support the Final Exit Network’s mission.  

Whether it is a right or a mere capability, in the end, I will take whatever action I deem appropriate to avoid suffering.  I know that the law, basic human compassion, and societal approval allow me to do so.  But it would be so much better for my choices if I could legally have someone’s assistance in doing so, should I need or want such assistance.