Episode #062 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Did you guys know it’s illegal to commit suicide? It’s illegal to commit suicide. Well, it’s been taken off the books in some places because they must have realized just how hilariously pointless that law is. But nonetheless, all throughout history—it was a felony under English Common Law for the longest time—for most time periods and most cultures throughout history suicide has been illegal. That has been a law on the books. You are not allowed to commit suicide. Now, I might be spoiling the ending to the episode here a little bit, but suicide’s an interesting thing in morality. Is it okay to do? Is it not okay to do? It’s incredibly controversial. There’s certainly not a consensus on the matter. But given the time and place you were born into, you might think otherwise. You might think that there was a clearcut answer to the question. Is it wrong to commit suicide?

Like, what do we do when someone brings up suicide in just a normal, everyday conversation? Like, what do you do if somebody comes up to you at work and just in passing in a conversation tells you, “My uncle committed suicide yesterday.” Well, in modern American society we instantly feel terrible, right? “Oh, no. He committed suicide? That’s horrible.” Hear that? Quiet, reverential tone to your voice. Things get awkward real quick. I mean, it’s a completely different response than if somebody told you they—you know, “I took my uncle to the airport yesterday. He’s going on a long trip, and I’m not going to see him for a while.”

Well, pardon me for asking this. I don’t mean to offend anyone’s longstanding beliefs on the nature of suicide here. But after all, this is a philosophy podcast, in case you’re new around here. This is all about questioning our beliefs on stuff, questioning why we think and act the way we do. So, I apologize in advance if this is an easy question for you to answer, if I’m somehow wasting your time with this. But why is suicide so wrong? Why are we so quick to negatively judge suicide in particular? Why did suicide earn this reputation? Why can’t it be that we live in a world where somebody tells you at work their uncle committed suicide and your natural response is, “Hey, good for him. Good for you. Good for both of you guys, yeah!”

Look, maybe I should start here. Let me ask you a question. Can you at least imagine a world where there’s ever a situation where committing suicide is okay? Can you think of an example where committing suicide would be an okay thing to do? Now, most people in response to this question fall into one of two camps. I’m not saying you fall into either. In fact, if you listen to this show, you’re probably much more nuanced on the subject than this. But most people statistically speaking fall into one of two camps. Either one, “No! No, absolutely not. Are you kidding me? Why would you even ask that? What, are you stupid? It’s never okay to kill yourself, never! It’s never the right decision. There’s always an alternative.” The other camp is, “Who cares? I’m apathetic about everything. Not my problem. Hey, you want to kill yourself? Kill yourself. It’s your body. I can’t stop you. Do what you want with it.”

The point I want to make here today is not which one of these is more correct. The question I want us to ask ourselves today is something a little weird, I guess, but that makes it in keeping with this whole show. Where do these beliefs come from initially? Your beliefs that you hold right now about whether suicide is morally permissible or not, even if they’re more nuanced than these two examples I just gave, where did those beliefs come from in the first place? You weren’t born with them, were you? I mean, you weren’t a baby walking around on the playground with beliefs on suicide. You must have learned them somewhere. You must have reasoned to them somehow. Where did they come from?

Well, here’s an even better question for us to consider. Can you imagine a world—and this is completely hypothetical here. Okay? I realize how crazy this sounds—but can you imagine a world where committing suicide was actually a good thing, where people waited their entire lives for their ultimate moment to just commit suicide, where they trained every day in hopes of one day having the deterministic laws of the universe or the providential hand of God—whatever they believed in—give them the glorious opportunity to commit suicide? Can you imagine a world where you tell your friends at work your uncle committed suicide yesterday, and you’re not met with reverential tones and sympathy but with smiles and excitement? Because if you can, well, you can imagine the world you’re living in right now.

Now, that’s a pretty good place to start. For example, the Spartans. Spartan warriors lived every day of their lives training, praying for this sort of opportunity, praying to be met with a glorious situation of certain death on the battlefield where they may sacrifice themselves in the name of their countrymen. But even outside of combat, even in many cultures today it’s seen as an honorable thing to do to take your own life in certain contexts. It’s an honorable thing to do to take your own life if you’re nothing but a financial or an emotional burden on your family and fellow members of society. See, what I’m arguing is not that suicide is some great thing that we should all strive to do, but that maybe the world is not as black and white as “Suicide is bad in every situation,” or “Suicide is perfectly okay in every situation.” I mean, even just in the vacuum of modern America—a single culture, a single time period—even then, we keep two sets of books when it comes to suicide, don’t we?

Hitler—notoriously seen as a suicide. The guy had it coming, right? The enemies were converging in from either side on Berlin. The guy killed himself; it was a suicide. But what about the suicide of Jesus Christ our Lord? Why did Jesus commit suicide? Now, right now you’re probably saying, “Stephen West, you are horrendously misinformed. Jesus didn’t commit suicide. He was crucified. He was put to death by the Romans. He was murdered.” Well, I got news for you, person I’m talking to through this microphone, Jesus was God manifest on planet earth. This guy could do everything. This guy could walk on water. This guy could heal the blind. This guy could have summoned an army of freaking flaming unicorns to come down and smite the Romans and prevent them from every crucifying him. He chose not to. He facilitated his own death. He committed suicide in the name of your sins.

See, it’s very tempting to try to redefine this word “suicide” to only account for the negative. Very tempting to redefine suicide to only account for the self-facilitated deaths that I disagree with. Let’s try not to do that. Now, for you more secular-minded folks, the Jesus example probably didn’t resonate with you very well, so let me do another one. What about Socrates? Socrates committed suicide in the name of philosophy, didn’t he? Now, again, many of you might be saying right now, “Stephen West, you are horrendously misinformed. Socrates didn’t commit suicide. He drank hemlock. It was a death sentence. The Athenians sentenced him to death.” But Socrates could have easily argued his way out of those charges. He could have been exiled. He didn’t need to be put to death. The whole point was that he was not going to be reduced to sophistry. He spent his entire life as the opposition to the sophists around him. He facilitated his own death in the name of a noble cause. That is suicide.

Again, it’s very tempting to try to redefine this word “suicide” to only account for the self-facilitated deaths that I disagree with. When someone tells us at work that their uncle committed suicide over the weekend, we instantly make a host of assumptions, don’t we? We instantly assume that something must have been wrong with this person when they made that decision. And there may have been, mentally, but that doesn’t change the assumptions that we make in our head: assumptions like “Suicide is wrong. Why would anyone commit suicide? I certainly wouldn’t commit suicide. Death’s something I’m trying to avoid at all costs.” But therein lies the problem. You’re conflating your own intentions behind why you make the choices you do with theirs. And it’s all from the comfort of that beautiful, little armchair you have up in your head, right?

Here’s what I’m going to ask you to consider today: that maybe your thoughts on suicide are equally as conditioned into your head as the ones were conditioned into the heads of the Spartans during antiquity. Maybe your beliefs on suicide are more pliant or at least less black and white than they might initially seem on the surface. And we’re going to look at suicide from a lot of different angles today—ultimately to Kant’s views on suicide, which I think are an incredibly interesting take on why suicide is never okay. But let this episode serve as an extension of last episode. Let this episode be an example of just how easy it is for us to outsource our beliefs to the people around us. I mean, suicide in itself doesn’t seem very dynamic, does it? It seems like something that’s pretty cut and dry. If conclusions about what is morally permissible or not can be made at all, suicide seems like one of these behaviors where we’re going to be able to make some conclusions about stuff, right? Suicide seems like a pretty good place to start.

Now, look, I’m not naïve. I know what you’re saying right now. I glossed over this point before purposefully. I know what you’re saying. “Well, look, when somebody tells me at work that their uncle committed suicide, yes, I instantly assume some stuff. I instantly assume that something’s wrong with him because, typically, there was something wrong with them. I have that reverential tone in my voice because mental illness is a tragedy.” Well, I wholeheartedly agree. Mentally ill and depressed people do kill themselves. These people needed help, help that they didn’t get. In fact, if you want my opinion, I think a hundred years from now people will look back on the way we underserve these people; they’ll see us as barbarians. People also typically make an exception for the terminally ill, people in a lot of pain. If someone’s in a lot of pain, it’s okay for them to commit suicide because at least they’re going out on their own terms. They’re bringing an end to all this suffering they’re going through. Again, not disagreeing.

But that said, I would ask you to return to the original question. Barring the exceptions of mentally or terminally ill people taking their own life, is suicide a morally permissible act to you? How much control do people have over their own bodies? Does an otherwise mentally sound, perfectly normal person have the right to take their own life if they want to? Would you say they were morally wrong for doing it? These are questions worth asking. And by the way, the mental illness exception to the rule is one that Plato recognized all the way back in the third century BC.

Let’s talk about Plato. Plato writes in this work Phaedo through the quintessentially wise character of Socrates, of course. In one of his more Pythagorean moments, he talks about a concept that the Pythagoreans actually were the first to lay out—the idea that suicide is definitely wrong. It’s wrong because it would be releasing ourselves from our duty that the gods put us here to do. He compares us like a guard at a guard post. It would be completely inappropriate if you were a guard manning a guard post to relieve yourself of your duty. No, it’s not your choice. It’s not your choice when you leave your guard post. No, you wait for your orders from up above, right? Plato talks about how we’ve been placed here as sort of a punishment by the gods. We’re kind of like prisoners serving out a sentence. Although, there’s a pretty negative connotation associated with being a prisoner. That’s probably not the best example. But committing suicide is wrong because it’s like we’re a prisoner committing some sort of celestial jailbreak, to Plato. It’s not our job to decide when our sentence is over on this planet.

Now, Plato does give exceptions to this rule: people who are struggling with mental illness, people whose—well, he says, in terms of people whose character is so far gone that it’s a lost cause to even try. These people get a free pass. But for everyone else, very cut and dry. There is no excuse for committing suicide. It is morally wrong. It would be laziness or cowardice to ever relieve yourself of your duty. You probably recognize those words: laziness or cowardice. But Plato just—Plato starts to sound downright emasculating at times. I felt—I, for one, felt personally attacked this week reading Plato. He starts to say things like, what, you can’t handle the pressures of life? Man up! Man up! Don’t commit suicide.

But I want to talk about this theory, this idea that it would be morally wrong for us to relieve ourselves of our duty as guards placed at a guard post by the gods for a purpose. Alright, let’s talk about that theory. It’s so easy to look back at that and cloud it with medieval superstition. So easy to say, “Plato, look at you, 300 BC with your gods and your hocus pocus, your witches and goblins.” But keep in mind, Plato lived hundreds of years before Jesus ever made it popular to be a monotheist. Plato’s not talking about a singular God here, he’s not talking about a single God that has a personal relationship with you who has decreed a moral code for you to follow. And I think it opens up a lot of interesting conversations to be charitable to Plato here. You can apply any number of different worldviews across Plato’s example, and you might be able to appreciate his argument a lot more.

Let’s do a modern example. That’s what this show is, right? Let’s do—let’s apply some Saganism to Plato, if that’s even an ism, Saganism. Based on one—Carl Sagan’s famous quote, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” We’ve all heard that before, right? The original Cosmos, nineteen-seventy-something. Carl Sagan said it. We are sentient life. We sense and perceive the world around us. Our purpose is to sense and perceive the world around us. So, if you apply this idea across Plato’s example metaphorically speaking, the gods, well, the gods could just be the ordering principles of the universe: you know, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the progressive adaptation of life to its environment, evolution, whatever you want to call it—the things that make it possible for sentient life to exist at all. And our guard post that we’re manning as guards is just to perceive the world, the world around us. The universe has bestowed upon you sentient life, this incredible ability to be one tiny aspect of that totality and to be a way for the cosmos to know itself. It has bestowed upon you a guard post, and you committing suicide would be to cut that perceiving short—that duty that you have to help the cosmos know itself.

Now, again, this works with any number of examples. The constant in the argument is this: we have an obligation to some exterior thing, whatever it is, some purpose assigned to us by a third party that would make us killing ourselves immoral because it’s us not meeting up to our end of some bargain that’s been set up. People don’t just do this with gods or the universe. People even do this with government and society. They say from the very moment you’re born, society and government are giving you certain benefits: the benefit of security, the benefit of resources, even down to the roads that you drive around on. These things are serving you. And some people say that it’s morally wrong to commit suicide because you owe it back to this society—your production. You owe it to this society to produce as long as you possibly can. Again, this argument is not just gods; it’s not just the universe or virtue or society. The constant in all of these arguments is that it’s wrong for you to kill yourself because you have an obligation to meet your end of some bargain that’s been set up. Oftentimes this bargain’s been set up without your explicit consent, which starts to be the really funny and twisted part of all of this.

But anyway, after Plato, you got the stoics; you got Seneca—famous counsel to the emperor Nero as we talked about on this show. One of the most famous suicides ever. Seneca famously—it’s the quality of life that matters, not the quantity of life. But nothing was more influential, nothing, on how the average American views suicide than Christianity. Now, it should be said, to be fair to Christianity, in recent years the Catholic church has been coming around. They see the writing on the wall. If they want to survive as being a moral authority in this world, they’re going to have to grow, morally speaking, as the society grows morally around them. They’ve introduced new clauses into their verbiage that allow for mentally ill or terminally ill people to commit suicide, and they are pretty sure that Jesus is going to be understanding. They’re pretty sure Jesus is going to take that terrible disease he allowed them to get into consideration before damning them to eternal hellfire.

But before about 15 years ago, the stance of Christianity on suicide was very simple. It was based on a conglomeration of the philosophy of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Suicide was wrong, absolutely wrong, no exceptions. Turns out, God takes the ten commandments pretty seriously. Who would have thought? And what Augustine notices about suicide—he writes in his famous work The City of God—is that God makes his stance on suicide perfectly clear. There’s no ambiguity here. He says right there in the ten commandments. He chisels it into stone. He says, “Thou shalt not kill.” Now, he also says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

So, what Augustine says is, God very deliberately frames it this way. He could have easily chiseled into some stone tablets “Thou shalt not kill they neighbor.” But no, no, he says, “Thou shalt not kill.” That means everything, everything, yourself included, future reader of this stone tablet. Makes it kind of interesting and confusing though. How about all the life that’s coursing through these animals that we supposedly have dominion over? And the fact, of course, that Christianity is founded on the ultimate voluntary human sacrifice. But either way, God’s will was clear. Suicide was wrong, no matter what color you were: black, white, or yellow with jaundice.

Now, Thomas Aquinas completely agreed with Augustine. He defends the idea further all throughout his philosophy. And ultimately the end game of their philosophical suicide tag team that they play is the idea that we, as mere humans, we don’t completely own our bodies. We were limited to what they called the concept of usus, sort of like a rent-to-own program. We’re merely in possession of these bodies. God owns them. We’re renting them from him as we’re navigating this planet. But the deed’s in his name. They’re his bodies.

Now, of course, the natural conclusion here is that if you commit suicide during the middle ages, your body is then desecrated, torn apart, mutilated. All of your possessions and your family’s possessions were seized. Wait, was that the natural conclusion? Well, either way, it’s how it went down. Point is, they didn’t take suicide lightly in the middle ages. You know what? They just loved you way too much to ever watch you hurt yourself like that.

Now, this moral-absolutist stance on suicide was the main way of thinking all the way up until the Enlightenment. It was unshakeable. It was powerful, really was. Consider this: even someone like a John Locke—even someone whose entire political philosophy, world-changing political philosophy is predicated on the idea that we talked about on here—we as humans have the right to life, liberty, and property. Two big pieces of that are liberty over our body and what it produces—even John Locke, polymath genius, says that one of the exceptions to that rule of liberty over our body is that, well, we can’t kill ourselves. Why would he make that distinction though? Why don’t we have total sovereignty over our body? Why don’t we have sovereignty over our body to the point that we can destroy it if we want to?

Raises a lot of interesting questions about what suicide is at all. That couldn’t you make the case that people that smoke or people that eat really bad or people that drink all the time—they’re willingly destroying their body. But you wouldn’t call that suicide. You wouldn’t call it suicide if somebody thought they were drinking Kool-Aid, but instead they were drinking bleach. So, suicide can’t be just any death that is self-caused, right? And what philosophers usually say from here is that suicide is only when you intentionally are bringing about death on yourself—intentionally. It’s somewhere in the intentions behind why you’re doing something that suicide lies, not in what actually happens. Conversely, on that same note, it’s still called suicidal behavior if you think you’re taking an entire bottle of prescription meds when in reality they were Flintstones Vitamins. You just ate 400 Barney Rubbles.

But questions about what suicide is itself aside, philosophy’s opinion on it took a giant shift in the Enlightenment thinkers—the guys we’ve been talking about the last 12 or so episodes. Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, they all opposed the—well, as they saw it—radical idea that suicide is morally impermissible. Hume may be the most interesting of all these positions, though, mostly just because what he does is so David Hume. Like, it’s exactly what you’d expect from David Hume. He takes the argument that the church has been making for centuries, centuries, about why suicide is wrong, and he points out all the assumptions and contradictions in it, and ultimately shows that it may be way more complicated than what they’re leading on about.

So, the church’s argument is that we don’t own our bodies, and ultimately, they’re God’s property. And that makes it God’s decision when and how we die, and that by killing ourselves we are going against the “divine order” that God has set up for the universe. Again, we are beholden to some “divine order” that God has established. To take your own life is to violate that order. So, Hume just starts right there. What is this divine order that we’re appealing to there? Really, let’s get to the bottom of what this divine order is that we’re beholden to. By divine order, do you just mean the causal laws created by God? What he’s saying is, are we never allowed to take any sort of action for the sake of our own happiness for fear of going against this divine order? How do we know when we’re going against it and when we’re not?

Well, obviously, that’s ridiculous, Hume argues. God wouldn’t get mad at you for taking medication when you’re sick or trying to get yourself better if you were dying. That can’t be the divine order that we’re talking about here. Is the divine order just a set of behaviors that’s intended to make us happy? Then, Hume says, what if someone decides they’d be happier if they killed themselves? It certainly wouldn’t contradict the divine order if that’s what it is. Is the divine order just whatever God consents to? Because in that case, God seems to be consenting to everything we’re doing. I mean, after all, Hume says, an omnipotent God could always choose to intervene and change the course of history. He apparently does it all the time. So, at least we know we’re not going against the divine order if that’s the metric you’re using. God is consenting to this behavior.

Now, at this point we could say, “Come on, Hume. Stop picking on God. Maybe it’s not God, okay? Maybe we don’t have an obligation to God. But what about society, Hume? Don’t we have a moral obligation to stick around for society? Don’t we owe it to our fellow countrymen to give and produce as much as we can for as long as we can, given that we so willingly accepted the benefits of society for so long before?” Hume says, well, that’s all well and good, yes. But it reaches a limit, right? Eventually you get to be 60 years old, sometimes much younger, tragically. And it becomes extremely painful for us to work. Should that person just continue working in abject suffering, working themselves into the ground just for the sake of this obligation that they have to society? Would you call them an immoral person if they didn’t?

Now, at this point, “Come on, Hume. Okay, I see what you’re doing, Hume. Devil’s advocate, right? I see what you’re saying. Suicide’s okay. We can’t actually live this way, right? I mean, if we don’t tell the whole world that suicide is unthinkable, that it’s absolutely wrong, what’s to stop the whole world from killing themselves? What’s to stop tomorrow from everyone just waking up and putting a gun in their mouth?” That’s the slippery slope argument. I guess if I was Bill O’Reilly, I’d feel like I really hammered home a good point right now. The more solid argument that somebody could make to Hume here, the more interesting conversation might be, people that are young and stupid make rash, immoral decisions. We know this. They make them all the time. How many of us out there—how many teenagers have stolen a candy bar from 7-Eleven at some point despite knowing that stealing is wrong? If we allow suicide to be on the table, this time, what if a teenager makes a similar rash, immoral decision, but this time it’s not a Snickers bar at stake; it’s their own life at stake?

To that Hume would probably say, you know, what are we worried about with suicide? What’s so wrong with suicide? What are we worried is going to eventually come about if we dare to say that suicide is a morally permissible thing? Look, it’s not like the world’s ever going to be one where we go around attracted to the idea of suicide. No, we have a natural aversion to death as humans. And what he says is, if a right-thinking person ever got to a place where they just truly didn’t want to live anymore, if they got to that place and arrived at that conclusion in the face of that fear of death, in spite of that fear of death, they probably thought long and hard about that decision to even be able to transcend that natural wiring. Hume would say, as much as I want to compare the two, it’s just not comparable to stealing a candy bar at 7-Eleven. Suicide takes courage, to Hume. Suicide takes a clarity of mind for someone to do, for Hume, obviously with the exceptions that we’ve already talked about.

Voltaire, though, another Enlightenment thinker—he also talks about this inherent fear of death as being a safeguard against people just randomly—oops! Killed myself one night. He actually has a very beautiful quote. He says, “I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?” He’s saying, how crazy is it that even in cases where people hate their life—and I mean truly hate it, detest their very existence—they still have a desire to live. They still have that instinct to just persist at all costs. It’s downright illogical, Voltaire’s saying. It’s like caressing the serpent that’s eating us. Why would we go on like that? And to take it one step further, Voltaire would say, why would we say that someone’s immoral for wanting to end that? Why don’t they have full control over what they do with their body?

On that same note, let me ask you this question. Let’s say you knew someone. Let’s say you knew someone, and they said that they truly hated their life and what they wanted more than anything else in this entire world, what would make them happier than anything else, is to just end it all. Let’s say that you knew they were planning to do it on a specific night in a specific place. Would you want some sort of police force, some sort of governing body, to step in and stop them from doing it, to restrain them, to lock them up and force them to live? So, in other words, do you believe that people not only have the right to take their own life if they so choose to, but they also have the right to not have people intervene and stop them from doing it if they want to? There are a lot of people that feel this way. If what you want more than anything else in this world is to kill yourself, these people say, “I just don’t think it’s right for someone to be able to tie you up and force you to live.”

But the flipside is true as well, right? Like, if you don’t think somebody should be able to step in and stop you from committing suicide, then you also need to be consistent on the other side and say that you don’t believe in doctors stepping in, intervening in assisting people with the act of committing suicide—complicated national debate that we’ve been having in this country for quite a while now. And I think it’s this question on whether we should allow people to intervene on one side or the other of this decision—I think this is one of the big things that stops progress in this area. But it’s a tough question to answer. Not going to do it on this show.

But the point that I think these Enlightenment thinkers would want us to realize is that look, it’s so easy for us to relegate this activity of suicide down into terms of “I think death is bad, therefore suicide must also be bad.” But here’s the thing, many cultures don’t see it this way at all. Sometimes the most dignified and best way that you can die is on your own terms, not on the terms of something else. Maybe what these Enlightenment thinkers would want you to ask is, maybe what you have a problem with is not the act of suicide itself as somebody voluntarily facilitating their own death, but something else that lies at the root of the intentions behind suicide. Maybe it’s something else, because not everyone commits suicide for the same reasons. There’s a lot of range. Yes, some people do do it out of depression. Some people do it out of anger. They say, “I’m going to show you! I’m going to commit suicide!” like they’re punishing someone. But other people do it in the name of glory. There’s other people that do it in the name of duty to their family and the people around them. There’s other people that do it because they believe they’re serving the creator of the universe, sacrificing themself in the name of the thing that gave them life to begin with.

Well, Kant didn’t see room for this sort of nuance on the subject. No, Kant thought it was very simple: suicide is wrong. But what’s interesting about Kant is that in part of his argument he gives an entirely secular account for why suicide is always wrong. This separates him from many of the people we’ve already talked about, people where they’re appealing to some God that chiseled something into a mountain a thousand years ago. Kant thinks that if you even try to commit suicide—not even succeed at it—but even just trying to commit suicide is tantamount to “discarding your humanity.” You are now lower than the beasts, to Kant, lower than animals.

He’s not just having a bad day here. He’s not just throwing around a bunch of insults. No, Kant really does think that if you try to commit suicide and you survive the act that we can treat you like an animal now. Like, dog biscuits being fed to you. “Who’s a good boy?! Oh, who’s the bestest boy in the whole world?!” Kant says we should “treat him as a beast, as a thing, and to use him for our sport as we do our sport as we do a horse or a dog…” Now, where is Kant coming from here? It seems kind of harsh, right? Well, Kant says that by killing yourself, you’re no longer treating yourself as a human being. No, you’re treating yourself as more of a thing—nothing more, just a thing, which to Kant has a lower status than a human being, and apparently gets you fed dog biscuits and used for sport. He says, “Man can only dispose of things; beasts are things in this sense; but man is not a thing, not a beast. If he disposes of himself, he treats his value as that of a beast. He who so behaves, who has no respect for human behavior…makes a thing of himself…”

Now, the other argument that Kant gives that I think is the really interesting one—it’s this. It just doesn’t make sense that something could be a moral act while simultaneously the very act of doing it precludes moral acts from being able to take place at all. It’s a very interesting point here. In other words, Kant’s saying that if you kill yourself, you’re dead. That’s it. You can’t do moral things anymore. What Kant’s saying is, why would it be a moral act to “root out the existence of morality in the world?” Why does that make sense? How could something be considered moral that prevents you from doing anything else moral? No, by taking your own life, you’re robbing yourself of something, you’re robbing yourself of your rationality, of your ability to do your moral duty. You’re robbing yourself of everything that distinguishes you as a human making free-thinking choices. This is the reason why, Kant thinks, it’s not only morally wrong to commit suicide, but by even trying to do so, you have forfeited your human card. Hand it over. Get out your wallet; hand over your card. You are not a human anymore.

I’m going to do a bit of foreshadowing here. This whole conversation that we’re having right now—that we’ve been having over the Kant and Hume episodes collectively—it’s coming to a climax. This whole conversation that we’re having this episode is a micro to a much larger macro that’s going on in history right now. What Kant and Hume are doing here is crafting a way of looking at human life that is so beautiful, so freeing of the shackles that we burden ourself with willingly to know stuff all the time—actually, you know what? I’ll save that.

The point of this episode—the point of this episode is: don’t commit suicide.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.