Michael J. Cholbi - Kant and the Irrationality of Suicide

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Kant and the Irrationality of SuicideAuthor(s): Michael J. CholbiSource: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 159-176Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical PublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27744847 .

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History of Philosophy Quarterly Volume 17, Number 2, April 2000

KANT AND THE IRRATIONALITY OF SUICIDE

Michael J. Cholbi

The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

?David Hume, "Of Suicide"

To

Immanuel Kant, a person's life was certainly of greater moral

importance to the universe than that of the oyster, so much so

that Kant held that we rational agents are subject to a categorical

duty of self-preservation, not to take our own lives willfully. Not to

commit suicide, according to Kant, is "the first, though not the

principal, duty of a human being to himself as an animal being."1

Regrettably, Kant's characteristic rigor and systematicity are

absent in his discussions of suicide. The arguments he musters for

the duty against killing oneself are diverse, sporadic, and all too

brief. The lack of a single authoritative Kantian approach to sui

cide casts doubt on what is generally regarded as an extreme and

implausible position, to wit, that not only is suicide wrong in every

circumstance, but is among the gravest moral wrongs.2

My discussion of Kant and suicide has two broad aims. The first

is reconstructive. I intend to remedy the above-mentioned lack of

systematicity in order to show that Kant's position on suicide is

more appealing and credible than it seems at first glance. Kant in

fact offers three distinct lines of argument against suicide. The

first holds that suicide violates the divine will, for in willing our

own deaths we usurp God's right to determine the duration of our

existence; as God's property, we are not entitled to end our own

lives willfully. The second holds that suicide is incompatible with a

system of willed ends conceived analogously with a system of na

ture, so a maxim to commit suicide cannot be coherently willed as

a universal practical principle. The third argument holds that be cause suicide obliterates the rational will from the world, and as

159



160 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

the rational will is the source of moral worth, suicide cannot be

consistently willed by beings subject to moral requirements. To

authorize oneself to take one's own life, Kant claims, is to attempt "to withdraw from all obligation."3 We cannot, under the color of

morality, seek to cancel the will that authorizes all obligation in

the first place.

This third argument is demonstrably superior to the other two

in being both more philosophically plausible in its own right and more Kantian in flavor. The former two arguments, I will illus

trate, rely on conceptions of God and of our relation to Him as

autonomous beings (in the case of the first argument) and on con

ceptions of nature and natural law (in the case of the second

argument) that Kant did not accept. Only the last argument draws

upon Kant's considered conception of moral value, a conception based on the autonomous will's self-legislation as the sole source of

binding moral authority. On occasion, I will pose as Kant's foil

David Hume, whose "Of suicide" provides a useful contrast to Kant's views. While I do not claim that Kant was expressly formulating his arguments so as to meet Hume, I believe that wrestling with

Hume's arguments allows us to clarify Kant's central argument

against suicide.4

The second broad aim of my discussion is more didactic. As with

much in Kant's moral philosophy, the prevailing wisdom about his views on suicide has been shaped by misguided and even hostile critics. Kant is typically portrayed as occupying an extreme posi tion on the scale of permissibility and impermissibility with respect to suicide. He is generally called upon to exemplify the absolutist view: that no one may ever will his own death, nor let it occur. I will argue that Kant's prohibition on suicide is a good deal more narrow. In so arguing, I will also draw several important conclu sions about Kant's ethics from his treatment of suicide.

I

In his Lecture on Ethics, Kant proposes the thesis that suicide

opposes the purposes of God, who created us. The suicidal person, Kant claims, is a "rebel against God," who in willing to end her life

has "upset the wisdom" of the natural world that God graciously constructed.5 Inasmuch as we owe our existence to God, He is "our

owner; we are His property."6 To will to end one's own life is to play a role in determining the duration of our existence that belongs properly to God as our creator and the overseer of His universe.



KANT AND THE IRRATIONALITY OF SUICIDE 161

This first argument is regrettably imprecise, with Kant both

suggesting that suicide is ungrateful, as we fail to acknowledge God's goodness in creating both us and the world, and covetous, since we treat ourselves as if we, and not God, enjoyed sole domin ion over our lives. Nonetheless, the general idea seems to be that in taking our lives, we exercise a choice that belongs, for whatever

reason, legitimately to God. This first argument of Kant's is, to

speak bluntly, bewildering, for it contradicts numerous Kantian doc trines that he would later come to articulate in his critical philosophy.

First, the argument runs contrary to the metaphysical modesty Kant advocated in the first Critique. If our knowledge is confined

strictly to empirical experience and its necessary conditions, then to attribute to God such properties as owning us or shaping the natural world in a beneficent way amounts to theoretical specula tion. Therefore, arguments rooted in such attributions contain either false or unconfirmable premises about God, who represents the

unconditioned, which Kant unambiguously claimed is always sought by reason but never found. At most, we possess an Idea of God as

the ultimate ground of the unity of nature, but even this is only a

regulative principle that directs us to look upon nature as if it

originated in a self-sufficient cause. But a genuine transcendental

theology is impossible. Indeed, this argument even contradicts Kant's claims in the second Critique about the moral necessity of belief in God. Kant there claims that belief in God is necessary in order to ensure the highest good, that conjunction of virtue and happiness that Kant thought is unattainable in our finite and earthly exist ence precisely because nature is not so designed that happiness accrues in just proportion to virtue.

Secondly, the premise that God owns us is difficult to reconcile with the theory of property Kant latter offered in the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant is there concerned to show how "intelligible pos session," the rightful ownership of external objects of which one is not in direct physical possession, is possible. It is in this sense that we are God's "property" in the argument above; God has a moral

right to control our lives (much as property owners exercise intel

ligible control over their belongings), even though other factors, including both natural causal laws and our own free will, influence

what happens to us. God possesses us intelligibly and not physically. But can we be anyone's property to begin with? On the face of it, Kant's theory of property seems to allow that owning others as ser vants is morally permissible. Servants belong to the head of the

household, and they are his "by a right that is like a right to a thing."7




Yet Kant is careful to note that this right follows only from a

contract, and that even with such a contract in place, the owner

"can never behave as if he owned them, . . . for a contract by which

one party would completely renounce its freedom for the other's

advantage would be self-contradictory, that is, null and void, since

by it one party would cease to be a person and so would have no

duty to keep the contract but would recognize only force."8 As ratio

nal freedom is a condition for the legitimacy of a contract to start

with, no contract can demand that one party renounce that free

dom as a condition of its fulfillment. Moreover, the right of the

head of household over a servant can extend only for a specified time and not for the duration of the servant's life, lest the servant

be "used up" like a finite resource.

Kant therefore cannot claim, without a distinct speculative ac

count of divine ownership, that we are God's property such that He

retains the right over our fates that precludes justified suicide.

First, Kant is clear that such ownership only comes about via con

tract. But with what contract have we freely submitted to divine

authority? It may be thought that God's ownership of us is not

based in a contract but in origination, for if God created us, his

claim to own us is surely stronger than the right of ownership

produced via contract.9 But even if God did retain a right of owner

ship of this kind, the right is limited by our humanity and moral

freedom. As free rational beings, we presumably cannot be treated

however God might choose, for certain modes of treatment would

deny to us that very humanity and moral freedom. Our moral per

sonality is incompatible with being treated as property in the

unconditioned way suggested by Kant's first argument.

Even if Kant could meet the previous two objections, this argu ment also runs afoul of Kant's general rationalism about morality. The argument suggests that the moral wrongness of suicide is a

function of divine will or choice. By willing our own deaths, we

oppose God's plan for us or exercise a power of choice that prop

erly belongs to God. Yet Kant repeatedly states that moral obligation derives from the rational will of moral agents and not from some

external moral authority capable of influencing our conduct. Ac

cording to this argument, however, the wrongness of suicide rests

on a heteronomous source and not on the autonomous will of the

free moral agent.

It is safe to conclude, then, that Kant's first line of argument is

not compatible with key tenets of his later critical philosophy.




II

In the Groundwork, Kant for the first time describes the command

not to commit suicide as the sole perfect duty to oneself. He asks

the reader to imagine a person "sick of life" due to a "series of

misfortunes."10 This individual contemplates suicide and the right ness of that act, framing for herself the maxim, "From self-love I

make it my principle to shorten my life if its continuance threatens more evil than it promises pleasure." The agent immediately tests

this maxim against the categorical imperative (in its law-of-nature

formulation) and rejects this maxim as not universalizable. Self

love cannot be a law of nature, for it is only a feeling "to stimulate

the furtherance of life." This maxim is self-contradictory, for it

rests the justification of suicide on self-love, a feeling whose nature

directs us to improve life, not to end it. Hence the miserable agent's maxim is "opposed to the supreme principle of all duty." Kant

repeats this position in the second Critique, asserting that maxims are adoptable "in order that a system of nature could maintain

itself in accordance with such a law. Obviously in such a system of

nature no one could arbitrarily end his life, for such an arrange ment could not constitute a permanent natural order."11

On the face of it, Kant's second argument rests on counterfactual

considerations about possible systems of laws or of nature; we seek

to determine whether any hypothetical system of nature in which

suicide was willed would constitute a permanent order. Kant con

cludes that a system of ends in which all rational agents could

permissibly will their own deaths could not constitute such an or

der. But if this is Kant's argument, it seems odd at best and patently deficient at worst. First off, it is not at all obvious why suicide, both occasional and widespread, could not play a role in a perma nent natural order. Hume put the point with typical flair by

comparing suicide to trivial alterations of nature.

And may he not lawfully employ that power which nature has en dowed him? ... Is it because human life is of such great importance, that it is a presumption for human prudence to dispose of it? ... A

hair, a fly, an insect, is able to destroy this mighty being whose life is such importance. Is it an absurdity to suppose that human pru dence may lawfully dispose of what depends on such insignificant causes? . . . Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of

blood from their natural channel?12

In what sense, Hume urges, could suicide be intelligibly deemed

"unnatural"? For the turning of a few ounces of blood from their




natural channel to constitute a morally impermissible act, Kant

must be thinking of nature in special way, as prescribing ends for us, one of which is our self-preservation. But, as I will suggest, to ground the prohibition against suicide in some natural end is both contrary to

Kant's insistence that morality's justificatory source must not be a

heteronomous end of nature and to Kant's conception of natural laws.

To appreciate the problems with this second argument, recall

Kant's law-of-nature formulation of the categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a

universal law of nature."13 Kant's use here of the law-of-nature for

mulation of the categorical imperative raises some vexing difficulties.

Kant of course thought that all the formulations of the categorical

imperative were logically equivalent, with the role of formulations

such as the law-of-nature formulation being to render more intui

tive the core form of the categorical imperative expressed in the

formula of universal law. But Kant provides little guidance as to

how to employ the law-of-nature formulation; the most concise state

ment of the test is that the agent is to will the universalization of a system of nature "of which you yourself were a part."14 Further

more, neither the suicide example nor the three subsequent examples from the Groundwork (false promising, the cultivation of talents, and benevolence toward the less fortunate) make explicit use of the

notion of willing a law of nature. These four arguments depend for

their force mainly on failures of universalization. Consequently, most commentators have ignored the law-of-nature formula alto

gether, treated it as just a re-expression of the formula of universal

law, or claimed that "nature" here stands for human nature and not for "nature" in the sense of the Critique of Pure Reason.15

However, I believe it is important to take Kant at his word here

and at least see what sense can be made of the law-of-nature formu

lation, particularly with respect to Kant's conclusion that the maxim to end one's life from self-love fails the categorical imperative. I

will attempt to understand Kant's position on suicide with regard to other formulations of the categorical imperative later.

The law-of-nature formulation contains a crucial ambiguity re

garding its central concept. On the one hand, we may take it to mean that among the many universal laws of nature, suicide has no

part. That is, suicide is not a candidate to be a law of nature in the sense given in Kant's theoretical philosophy; it cannot be willed as

one of the lawlike causal generalizations characteristic of natural

scientific inquiry as Kant conceived of it. We may also interpret this formulation as asserting that suicide could not be the law of




nature. That is, no total system of moral ends, akin to the system atic totality of scientific laws that Kant believed unified science, can accommodate suicide.16

Let me deal with the former sense of the formulation first.

Roughly, Kant thought of scientific laws of nature as causal gener

alizations, as indicated in the first Critique s Second Analogy. To

will such a law is not impossible, since one could will a law to the effect that a particular act should always be performed in order to

bring about a particular end. But the object of such an act of will would be a hypothetical imperative, "in order to X, always Y," but valid Kantian moral maxims are categorical and universal in na

ture. Therefore, such acts of will would merely reflect instrumental reason and would have no moral worth apart from the ends speci fied by their associated maxims. So interpreted, willing a "law of nature" is compatible with willing one's own death in order, for

example, to relieve oneself of misery or hardship. But such "max ims" are only hypothetically binding, and so could hardly make sense of Kant's adherence to the categoricity of moral require

ments such as the injunction against suicide. Perhaps what Kant had in mind was that such a maxim would contradict the natural

teleological purpose of self-preservation. We are after all equipped with a natural inclination to pursue our happiness and our preser

vation, so willing one's own death is to "misuse" this inclination: "One sees immediately a contradiction in a system of nature whose law would be to destroy life by the feeling whose special office is to

impel the improvement of life."17 But absent an argument that the

agent must accept this purpose, the moral requirement to preserve one's life has only contingent normative force. Nothing prevents the suicidal agent "from willing both the instinct [for the preserva tion of life] and its purpose be scrapped."18

What is obviously needed is an argument that shows why suicide cannot be willed as an end. At first glance, Kant's aforementioned discussion at Groundwork 422 seems designed to accomplish ex

actly that. He seems to claim that the aim of adopting the principle of self-love is teleological, namely, to further one's own life, but to will that one could take that life is contrary to the conception of this principle. Yet again this argument expresses only the hypo thetical requirement that if one wills the furtherance of one's own

life, then it is contradictory to will its demise.

The serious question then is how suicide is a morally impermis sible end of the rational will. One way to understand this possibility is by considering the second interpretation of the law-of-nature




formula that I proposed above, that suicide is not a permissible end within a system of ends analogous with the system of nature that is apparently teleological as a whole. As Kant put it in the Critique of Judgment, we attribute to nature as a whole an inexplicable purposiveness that makes sense of the apparent unity of natural

phenomena and the seeming comprehensiveness of an ideal system of science. Whatever order appears in the particulars of nature and the empirical generalizations derived thereby is only contin

gent, although the supposition that nature as a whole is governed by a purposiveness whose purpose we cannot ascertain but is sub

jectively necessary for our cognition of nature is a principle of

teleological judgment, according to Kant.

We might suppose then that morality, as a system of ends, must be guided by an overarching end such that suicide is a precluded subordinate end. Kant seems to suggest this interpretation when he claims that self-love can never be the basis for morality because it fails to generate a harmony of ends.19 The difficulty with the second interpretation of the law of nature is that Kant does not here specify this overarching end or why agents are necessarily committed to it. In the absence of such an end, suicide is not

precluded from being compatible with some system or another of ends. Taking strictly the analogy with the totality of nature in Kant's philosophy of science, the individual scientific laws derive their apparent purposiveness of design only from the teleological character of nature as a whole. Similarly, the permissibility of sui cide can only be assessed with a system of willed moral ends whose

comprehensive principle Kant does not identify in this argument. Without the specification of that comprehensive principle, whether or not a maxim forbidding suicide conflicts with it is undetermined.

While purposeless purposiveness might do as a systematizing prin ciple of judgment in natural science, morality must have its

purposiveness (i.e., the highest end around which morality is ori

ented) spelled out.20

Thus, Kant must provide an end that subsumes other moral ends and that indicates why suicide is incompatible with the re

quirements of rational willing. How is it that suicide is an end our

practical and lawlike reason may not adopt? Clearly, the answer must have something to do with our practical nature.

Ill

Throughout his discussions of suicide, Kant is especially con

cerned to refute one apparently persuasive argument for the limited




permissibility of suicide, an argument of a Humean or

consequentialist flavor. The argument, more or less, is that we are

sometimes deeply troubled by the prospect of living any longer. In certain conditions, then, as when our suicide would not gravely injure others or render them unhappy, we may will our own death in order to end this misery. Purusing our happiness does not itself violate any moral requirements, and so the requirement to preserve one's own life may be overridden in cases like these. Now that is what Kant expressly rejects?that our happiness, the satisfaction of our

empirically contingent desires, is an aim that morality ever commands

unconditionally. Kant denies that one's own happiness is, by itself, an

end of moral worth. And this denial is the basis for Kant's deeper (and in my opinion, more nuanced) position on the moral impermissibility of suicide. Let us try to reconstruct this position.

Despite Kant's image as puritanical and anti-sensualist, he does

recognize the inherent embodiedness of human existence. "Our life is entirely conditioned by our body, so that we cannot conceive of a

life not mediated by the body."21 The body is a constituent of the self for finite rational beings such as ourselves. Although our wills'

being subject to empirical, physical determination is the causal source of motivational heteronomy, we make use of our rational

wills only through our bodies. Furthermore, having a body allows us to gain theoretical knowledge of the phenomenal world, knowl

edge useful in formulating maxims and in carrying out the means

adequate to our ends. In exercising our wills to destroy the body, we destroy life; our will is destroyed in the process.22

Here is the key to Kant's opposition to suicide. In Hume, the

good is that of which our naturally endowed moral sense approves. Reason, for Hume, has only an instrumental role in moral matters. This is not so for Kant. In Kant, reason is the origin of the a priori normative constraints that all rational agents recognize. The good is not some abstract or natural object to be discovered by reason, but is expressed in a formal principle rational wills legislate for themselves. Practical reason can be pure of itself, according to

Kant, only because we have the property of autonomy, of setting binding ends for ourselves. Duty is not alien to reason, but is reason's own imperative. Kant maintains that our subjection to duty is an

undeniable fact; suicide destroys the rational will, the source of that duty. Hence, it is contradictory to suppose that reason, the source of obligation, could ever allow itself to be annihilated. To

imagine that we are "authorized to withdraw from all obligation, that is, to freely act as if no authorization were needed"23 for suicide




is to formulate a maxim that no rational will can intelligibly formu

late: '"As a rational will and the author of obligation, I make it my

principle to destroy myself." Suicide makes moral obligation, the

highest end of rational wills, impossible.

To annihilate the subject of morality in one's person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing

humanity in one's person.24

For Kant, suicide motivated by some contingent end (one's hap piness, pleasure, a desire for posthumous fame, etc.) amounts to

treating the rational will, the very genesis of obligation, as a means

to a conditionally valuable and morally discretionary end. Unlike our desires for happiness, our moral freedom "cannot subsist ex

cept on a condition which is immutable"25 (i.e., our possession of an autonomous rational will). Duty is a practically necessary obli

gation, whereas our happiness is idiosyncratic, mercurial, particular, and most importantly, a heteronomous source for moral choice. Suicide (at least the sort motivated by the considerations Hume

mentioned) places a greater weight on bodily happiness than on

practical necessity. To kill oneself is to treat oneself as a means

only, typically in order "to maintain a tolerable state of affairs till

the end of life."26 Human beings, oneself included, are not things, and suicide is incompatible with the idea of humanity as an end in itself.

Furthermore, if suicide were permissible as matter of self-re

gard, as Hume suggested, then suicide is reduced to a means like

any other. To treat suicide as an occasionally permissible hypotheti cal imperative, as Hume seems to, is to allow each individual's assessment of their present and future well-being to cancel out

rational obligation. "Suicide is not abominable and inadmissible because life should be so highly prized; were it so, we could each have our own opinion of how highly we prize it, and the rule of

prudence would often indicate suicide as the best means."27

Kant acknowledges that one's happiness is an indirect duty, since

being happy wards off the temptations that may cause us to weaken our moral resolve. So we are allowed to dispose of the negative "atten dant circumstances" of our bodies, but taking one's life is taking one's

person; suicide is contrary to duty because it eliminates the condition of all other duties by limiting the use of free will, whose exercise is

"possible only through the existence of the Subject."28




IV

We must keep in mind that Kant's denial that suicide is morally permissible is a denial that we can frame suicide as an end for ourselves. No one, not even a sovereign, can bind a rational agent to have suicide as his end, because the rational agent is autono

mous and selects her own ends independent of any external empirical determination. Now, Kant's claim that suicide can never be an end for us does not entail that we have an absolute duty of self-preser vation. Indeed, for the sake of consistency with his argument that suicide opposes the very notion of rational obligation, Kant must claim that rational obligation, whatever that may come to in a

diversity of circumstances, is the highest moral objective, while we

also have a lower-level duty of self-preservation. Hence, Kant must, and he does, claim that the ends of self-preservation and moral

obligation can come into conflict, and when they do, moral obliga tion is to be heeded. That is, since suicide is willful self-murder, cases of intemperance, imprudence^ excess, and fate leading to one's own death do not amount to suicide. In some instances, however, one's life is threatened unless one does an act one knows is con

trary to duty. In these cases, Kant grants that we are to obey the dictates of duty rather than preserve ourselves. Though defending our honor and struggling against those trying to coerce us into

doing a vicious act is the more worthy option in Kant's eyes, there is no wrong in submitting to what we might call "indirect" or "pas sive" suicide. Morality and living honorably are necessary, while life itself is not. "If I cannot preserve my life except by violating my duties toward myself, I am bound to sacrifice my life rather than violate these duties."29

It may be objected that my focus here on the permissibility of suicide as an end is misguided, since suicide appears to be justified as a means, according to the examples I just mentioned. This objec tion wrongly supposes that when allowing oneself to be killed, or even willing one's own death, that one is willing this result as an

end or under that very description. Yet in each of Kant's examples in which an apparent suicide is permissible, what one wills is not one's own death unconditionally, but one's own death as a means

to some other morally required end. Therefore, Kant is immune to the objection that suicide is itself willed in these examples.

What this objection rightly calls attention to is that the duty not to commit suicide is a perfect duty, a duty not to adopt suicide as




a means, which in turn follows from a duty of self-preservation. Since the duty of self-preservation is perfect it prescribes both an

end and a universal means (not aiming at one's death) as well. There is no duty precluding suicide apart from the duty of self

preservation. Preserving one's life is a duty, then, only when it

accords with the demands of rationally imposed duty. Our first, but not our principal, duty to ourselves is self-preservation; as we are

both animal and rational beings, discharging our moral obligations is the principal duty for us. Yet suicide can never accord with our

human dignity. Thus it is possible for us to be subject to a morally required end for which the necessary means is one's death, but this does not oppose the duty of self-preservation.

The most plausible and most Kantian view therefore places the

wrongness of suicide in the agent's erroneous belief that one is

authorized to destroy a source of rational obligation.30 Contrary to

Hume, happiness is not just one more element in our subjective motivational set. Rather, morality is a condition of happiness for Kant. Happiness, although not to be held in utter moral disrepute, is an elusive goal in this life, a wayward state that can never serve as the law for autonomous rational wills who recognize a categori cal imperative. The highest good contains happiness as a constituent, but happiness is to be accorded only in proportion to an agent's moral worthiness. Happiness is a contingent moral good; moral

obligation arising from a formal principle autonomously legislated is a necessary good. A common form of suicide, suicide undertaken to relieve one's misery, inverts this relationship.

This third argument neither supposes nor draws upon the decid

edly un-Kantian speculations about God and our relation to Him

found in the Lectures on Ethics . Suicide opposes God's purposes, Kant claims, but "suicide is not inadmissible and abominable be cause God has forbidden it; God has forbidden it because it is

abominable."31 We are, in some sense, Gods unto ourselves in Kant's moral theory. As the source of law, rational wills cannot suppose that their self-destruction is ever warranted. Just as "a being who existed of his own necessity could not possibly destroy himself," nor can human beings, possessors of rational wills that obligate necessarily, destroy themselves. Necessity cannot cancel necessity.

Were God merely a human construction, suicide would still be

anathema to reason.

Nor does this second argument rest on a confused sense of will

ing a maxim as a natural law. Since suicide cannot fit into a system of ends in which the autonomy and dignity of the rational will is




the source of moral normativity, it cannot be a morally permissible end. In retrospect, however, we can see how the law-of-nature for

mulation Kant urged upon us in the Groundwork can be understood as to disallow suicide: Because no system of ends, analogous to a

system of nature governed by particular scientific laws, having sui

cide as a component is consistent with moral valuation in general, suicide is morally prohibited. What is crucial is that suicide may not consistently be willed as a law of nature, lest the rational will

subject itself to intractable contradiction, for it is the will, and not

nature, that grounds obligation.32 Similarly, we can now see why, in

light of the understanding of the rational will as self-legislating according to a law, the Groundworks argument makes sense in

terms of the formula of universal law. In willing one's own death from the motive of self-love, an agent prescribes for all rational

agents what is contrary to rational agency itself. However, among all the expressions of the categorical imperative, perhaps the for

mula of the end-in-itself best captures the flavor of Kant's prohibition on suicide. The will is a law unto itself, and as the rational will is

its own end, there can be no law or principle according to which

the destruction of the will through self-murder is permissible. Un der each formulation though, the contradiction in question is

practical, as the will offers forth a maxim whose end opposes the

will's own autonomy and ground of obligation.

V

Let me now conclude with some observations gleaned from the above discussion.

First, despite the severity of his own language, Kant would seem

to make room for some kinds of intentional self-killing. If we un

derstand "suicide" simply as killing oneself, or allowing oneself to

be killed, where this is knowing and/or intentional, Kant's view

has room for such acts as morally permissible. Where Kant is clear is that we may not will our own deaths either as an end in itself or as a means to some morally impermissible end. To describe Kant's view as absolutist therefore neglects his more subtle treatment of the various ways in which conduct resulting in one's one death should be evaluated, namely, in terms of the ends willed by the

maxims prescribing such conduct.

Indeed, Kant does not attempt to provide an authoritative deci sion procedure or test by which any conceivable dilemma surrounding self-preservation could be answered. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that although the duty not to take one's own life is




undeniable, many "casuistical questions" remain. May one will one's

own death for the good of one's country or for humankind gener

ally? Should a man bitten by a rabid dog seek his own death rather

than risk exposing others to his fatal illness?33 Kant does not an

swer these questions because self-preservation, as with all wide

duties, involves both reduced stringency and, hence, more sophisti cated judgment. That is, while the maxim not to will one's own

death is categorically binding, it may be limited by other maxims.34

Furthermore, because suicide is a question not of Right but of

virtue (i.e., its requirements cannot be enforced by an external

lawgiver), we lack a general method for the application of broad

maxims such as that against suicide. "Ethics," that part of moral

philosophy dealing with virtue, "inevitably leads to questions that

call upon judgment to decide how a maxim is to be applied in

particular cases."35 Therefore, questions like the permissibility of

suicide are not settled by any decision procedure, be it based di

rectly on the categorical imperative or on any general maxim. The

imprecision of such duties thus throws us back upon the shoals of

hoary casuistical questions.

As mentioned above, Kant's arguments nearly always return to

the claim that one's own happiness never overrides the duty of self

preservation. The need for casuistry, along with Kant's continual

attempts to refute arguments that allow suicide when it furthers

one's happiness, suggest to me that we should read Kant's discus

sions of suicide less as attempts at applying his account of right action to provide a systematic account of when suicide is permis sible and when not than as an elaboration of Kant's views of moral

and non-moral value in general. Kant tries to show that one's own

happiness is irrelevant to suicide because that is a source of heter

onomy, whereas moral value is a function of the ends and maxims

willed as universal laws by the rational and autonomous agent. We can here see Kant further spelling out his theory of value in his

discussions of suicide; his desire for a final and authoritative an

swer as to when we may kill ourselves is a complementary objective of his discussions. The above remarks have been perhaps too sug

gestive. Yet it is worth noting that Kant's prohibition on suicide is

hardly as severe as it seems at first blush and is much more tenta

tive than conventional interpretations acknowledge.

Let me conclude with some remarks on the harsh tone Kant has

for suicidal individuals; he claims they degrade themselves below

the level of beasts and are worthy of the highest moral scorn.

Undoubtedly, many (myself included) are inclined to treat the sui




cidal individual sympathetically, wondering what sort of grave dis

content or misery could lead a person to contemplate such a

frightening act, and if we have in some way contributed to that state or failed to recognize its urgency. While we may have moral

qualms with the intentions of suicidal individuals, these qualms seem out of place when dealing with an individual whose self-worth

already teeters on the edge of emptiness. In the one known in stance in which Kant came face to face with suicide, captured in

his correspondence with Maria von Herbert, his reaction was part indifference and part ineptitude.36 To condemn the suicidal person strikes me as callous, even if we believe that Kant has captured the core of suicide's moral incorrectness.

Moreover, Kant's account of the phenomenology of suicide seems

inaccurate, or at least incomplete. Serious suicides, those in which death really is the aim instead of calling attention to one's suffer

ing, etc., are less rational than Kant's account suggests. Kant

portrays the typical suicidal person as a calm Humean or

consequentialist, weighing the meager prospects for future happi ness against the relief death would bring and opting for the latter. I suspect that many suicides, especially those caused by severe

depression, alienation, or isolation, are more desperate than this

and rarely involve such careful weighing of the alternatives. A sense

of despondency pervades many suicides. The individual does not

select one value over another, but lacks the capacity for care, moral or otherwise. Such cases represent not the triumph of prudence over duty, as Kant would have it, but the suffocation of hope by nihilism. Considering what a Kantian account of suicide that took

stock of these points might look like is surely a fruitful enterprise.

For all this, I suspect that my reconstruction of Kant's analysis of suicide's moral significance is closer to our ordinary moral sen

sibility than we might imagine. The kinds of considerations Kant raises are those that I think many of us would call upon to explain

why suicide is such a profound moral tragedy. Human beings enjoy autonomy and exercise their rational wills to place themselves un

der obligation. This amounts to a sort of dignity, a dignity that no

person or circumstance, not even the agent herself, can rightfully terminate.

University of Virginia




NOTES

References to Kant's works are as follows. All references, except those

to the Lectures on Ethics, are to the Berlin Akademie edition pagination and to Mary Gregor's translations in Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). References are to the

Metaphysics of Morals (MM), Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

(G), and the Critique of Practical Reason (C). References to the Lectures on Ethics are to page numbers in the edition translated by Louis Infield (London: Methuen and Co., 1930).

1. MM 422-23.

2. Numerous portrayals of Kant's view as absolutist, extreme, and

indefensible can be found in the literature. A notable example is John

Donnelly's anthology, Suicide: Right or Wrong? (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990). Simon Blackburn, in his entry on suicide in the Oxford

Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), calls Kant's view "conservative" and allied with the traditional Christian pro hibition of suicide. Barbara Herman, though a defender of Kant generally, dismisses at least the Groundwork argument in "Murder and Mayhem," chapter six of her book The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1993).

3. MM 422-23.

4. That Kant's writings on suicide were likely not a response to Hume's now-influential essay can be established by two considerations. (1) The ancient Stoics undoubtedly cast the greatest shadow on Kant's views on suicide. For the details of the relation of Kant and the Stoics on suicide, see Michael J. Seidler, "Kant and the Stoics on Suicide," Journal of the

History of Ideas, vol. 44 (1983), pp. 429-54, and David N. James, "Sui cide and Stoic Ethics in the Doctrine of Virtue," Kant-Studien, vol. 90

(1999), pp. 40-58. (2) Kant may not have had Hume's "Of suicide" avail able to him. Hume submitted the essay to his publisher around 1755, but withdrew it due to its likelihood to generate opposition from religious authorities. A number of copies of the essay were distributed in advance of publication, and it appeared in a French translation in 1770. The essay was first published in English in 1777, but neither Hume's name nor his

publisher's appears on the title page. The first edition acknowledging Hume's authorship appeared subsequently. Mossner mentions in The Life of David Hume (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1954) that an edition in German

appeared by the end of the eighteenth century but does not provide a

precise date. Thus, the availability of the essay to Kant, even subsequent to Hume's death in 1776, is uncertain. See Eugene F. Miller's notes to the essay in his volume of Hume's Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (In dianapolis: Liberty, 1987).

5. LE 154.

6. LE 154.

7. MM 283.




8. MM 283.

9. I appreciate an anonymous referee's making me aware of this

possibility.

10. G 422.

11. C 44.

12. " Of suicide," 583 (in Miller, op. cit.).

13. G 421.

14. C 69.

15. A noteworthy recent exception to the trend of assimilating the law of-nature formulation to the universal law formulation is Christine

Korsgaard, "Kant's Formula of Universal Law," Pacific Philosophical Quar terly, vol. 66 (1985), pp. 24-47. An earlier commentator who, in my opinion, misconstrues how the law-of-nature formulation is to be applied is H. J. Paton, in chapter 15 of The Categorical Imperative: A Study in

Kant's Moral Philosophy (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1947). Herman treats "nature" as human nature in "Mutual Aid and Respect for

Persons," Ethics, vol. 94 (1984), pp. 579-80.

16. These two senses correspond very roughly to Korsgaard's two ver

sions of "the Teleological Interpretation" of the formula of universal law. See "Formula of Universal Law," part II.

17. G 422.

18. Korsgaard, "Formula of Universal Law," p. 35.

19. C 28.

20. A worthwhile discussion of Kant's opposition to "natural obliga tion" can be found in Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 123-24. Kant's use of the law-of-nature formula in the Groundwork ex

ample obviously raises the possibility that Kant was making use of a natural law idiom that, while familiar to his readers, was vastly different from Kant's use of a law of nature here.

21. LE 147-48.

22. This is a peculiar claim in light of Kant's practical postulation of the immortality of the soul in the Critique of Practical Reason. The rec onciliation of these two assertions undoubtedly turns on the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, but Kant's point here, that death annuls the condition of our exercising the commands of our rational will, is straightforward enough.

23. MM 422-23.

24. MM 423.

25. LE 156.

26. G 429.

27. LE 154.




28. LE 149.

29. LE 151.

30. Seidler ("Kant and the Stoics on Suicide," pp. 441-452) provides a

similar account of Kant's fundamental argument. Seidler claims that be cause Kant grounded moral value in autonomy, he could not allow for suicide, despite his admiration of the Stoic justification of suicide when factual cir cumstances threaten the agent's moral worth, functionally understood.

31. LE 154.

32. Kant emphasizes the distinction between a law of nature and will

ing a law of nature in his three other "illustrations" of the law-of-nature test at work. See G 422-24.

33. MM 423.

34. MM 390.

35. MM 411.

36. For a fascinating account of Kant's cruelty toward her and his silence in the face of her suicidal impulses, see Rae Langton, "Duty and

Desolation," Philosophy, vol. 67 (1992), pp. 481-505.



Michael J. Cholbi - Kant and the Irrationality of Suicide

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