A Modest Proposal

Yes that's Jonathan Swift in the thumbnail

Every so often these days you come across a screed proclaiming the virtues of Medical Assistance in Dying (commonly abbreviated as MAiD), also known as euthanasia or assisted suicide, or a bunch of other euphemisms (I’m most amused by “death with dignity,” personally). This practice is now becoming legal throughout the White West, with its supporters arguing that it helps the elderly to avert suffering and avoid being a burden in their last days on Earth. After all, what is the point in squeezing a few more months or years out of your life, at extreme expense, when your quality of life is going to be terrible anyways, and you might be in horrible pain the entire time?

I am not going to argue about that in this post. Instead, I am going to propose a bolder course of action than merely shouting about it on the Internet. Advocates of state-sponsored suicide typically argue that it is wrong for us to determine how others see fit to end their lives, making a sort of libertarian appeal to individual autonomy. Who are you to tell me that I can’t kill myself if I want to?! Well, you see, that’s the thing—I really can’t. I mean, I can tell you not to kill yourself, sure; and if anyone ever asks, I will indeed tell them not to do it.

But I can’t actually stop you.

The act of suicide is unique in the degree to which it can be carried out free from consequences. Once it’s done, what is anyone going to do to you as punishment? The state can make you suffer for doing literally anything else, but not this, this one thing you are truly free to do, if it’s actually that important to you.

It is therefore absolutely baffling that the primary goal of the state-sponsored suicide movement is, y’know, to make it state-sponsored. A real libertarian, focused on individual autonomy, wouldn’t sit around asking the government for permission to kill himself. He’d just… do it. I suppose I need to make clear before going any further that I oppose all forms of suicide, including and perhaps especially state-sponsored versions, and I will always tell people not to kill themselves, in all circumstances. Just on the slim chance that anyone tries to accuse me otherwise.

But if I were someone who supported suicide, I would immediately realize that there is no reason it needs to be state-sponsored. If the state will not grant you suicide on demand, go out and do it for yourself! Talk about a unique opportunity to assert your individual agency in spite of whatever the government might say you can or can’t do. I am going to call this practice self-determined suicide. This is differentiated from regular suicide in that self-determined suicide means going out on your own terms, when you’re near the end anyways, for the usual reasons that people support MAiD. Now some of the objections to this will be predictable, so let’s start with a few of those:

1.      Suicide doesn’t always work: That’s only because people really aren’t trying hard enough. That might sound ridiculous, but if you think about it for two seconds, it’s true. If you get a large enough firearm with a big enough bullet, the odds that you will survive a self-administered headshot quickly go down to zero. That’s not to mention the no-doubt countless other ways in which it is certainly possible to kill yourself in a painless fashion without any assistance from a doctor, if you really sat down and did some research.

If you were truly serious about the benefits of suicide, you’d put some more effort into the practice instead of giving up instantly because “well maybe I’ll screw it up.” Furthermore, once you have a proper self-determined suicide movement underway, you’d have people sharing tips and tricks in no time. The most efficient suicide methods would quickly be discovered, refined, and spread throughout the population.

You would only complain about this or not participate in it if you didn’t think people should be free to kill themselves when and why they wish to. After all, giving someone the knowledge to do it without any need for approvals from doctors or governments is surely a furtherance of that ideal.

2.      Loved ones will be upset: I don’t see why this doesn’t apply to state-sponsored suicide, I guess the idea is that if the government says it’s okay, your loved ones won’t mind if you kill yourself. But putting that aside, this is actually another huge argument in *favor* of establishing a strong and vibrant self-determined suicide movement. The only reason you’d worry about how suicide might affect your loved ones would be if you still lived in a culture where the act was heavily stigmatized.

Supporters of state-sponsored suicide quite clearly wish for the practice to be accepted and viewed positively by the world, such that your friends and family will understand your decision and won’t be distraught over it. Normalizing self-determined suicide would obviously achieve this outcome and then some. You don’t shift cultural standards by letting them cow you into submission; you shift them by doing the stigmatized thing anyways.

Eventually, when enough people have actively bucked the stigma, suddenly it’s not a stigma anymore. This has been the case with countless social shifts, such as the eventual acceptance of casual marijuana use, of homosexual relations, of abortion, divorce, the list goes on. There is no reason why suicide must be any different.

3.      By the time people want to kill themselves, they are too demented or otherwise infirm to do so: Yes, and again, this is quite another reason to go ahead and do it before you get that bad. Imagine a culture in which each citizen, along with their will, has a plan for how they’re going to go out; and the day on which they get a terminal cancer diagnosis or an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, is the day they put that plan into action.

If you are truly worried about being trapped in an existence of suffering, and if suicide is truly a worthy means by which to avert that fate, why would you dawdle and lollygag until it’s no longer certain whether you’ll be able to do the deed or not? Just get it over with. Perhaps you’ll lose a few months, or even a couple years. Does that matter in the long run? Fretting over that is entirely inconsistent with the premise that life isn’t always worth living.

The idea that life has inherent value is what you’d expect to hear from someone who believes in the naïve idea of a “culture of life.” You don’t want to indulge in the ideas of crazy irrational religious people, do you? No, certainly not. Remember, we’re all just random particles moving around randomly for no apparent reason; the universe won’t notice your passing, so don’t get so hung up on it!

Once again, this approach has clear advantages over the state-sponsored version that we’re used to seeing people push for. No need to trouble doctors, the medical system, or the government, with any of this at all. No need to do it on someone else’s timeline or justify yourself to strangers. Just take care of the problem yourself; claim your own agency. This is the surest way to avoid being a burden to the rest of society as you approach infirmity.

4.      My dead body will traumatize people: Hey, Japan’s got you covered on this one, they already figured it out! Welcome to the Suicide Forest, a real-world place which is exactly what the name suggests. Culturally-designated suicide zones deep in the wilderness are a perfect solution to this supposed problem. Yes, blowing your head off at home will leave quite a mess for someone to clean up, but if you do it way out in the woods? Well, then you can just let Mother Nature mop up after you!

Just like the actual Suicide Forest in Japan, knowledge of the location’s nature would quickly spread throughout the population once it comes into common use, and people who don’t want to see dead bodies will know to simply stay away. Meanwhile, when you’re planning out your own exit strategy, you’ll have spots like these available as pre-determined locations to pick from in your personal Death Plan, standardizing and streamlining the whole affair.

As you can see, all of the common objections to suicide really don’t hold up very well once we accept the premise that suicide is A Good Thing, Actually. In short, all of these issues are issues precisely because people attach an extreme stigma to suicide and thus no societal efforts can be made to really improve the process. If you get rid of that stigma and give people the freedom to really try and do suicide properly, all of these little kinks could be worked out in pretty short order.

I’d like to move on now to making the affirmative case for why self-determined suicide is not only feasible, but even highly desirable (once again, granting the premise that life has no value and thus there is nothing inherently wrong with suicide): We have too many damn old people. Proponents of state-sponsored suicide are eager to point out that the elderly often linger in life for quite a while after becoming severely ill, dementia-ridden, or otherwise infirm; and that this tendency places a tremendous strain on the medical system and other care services.

Likewise, we know that we face a sort of inverted-pyramid age demographics problem across the developed world. We have a huge wave of Baby Boomers who will soon start to reach that end-stage of life where they start costing us tons of money to stay alive, and not nearly enough young people to replace them in the workforce. Our social safety nets are insolvent and face an uncertain future as a result of this well-known demographic crisis.

With all of that being the case, don’t the elderly have a near-obligation to remove themselves from the equation, and free our shoulders from the enormous weight their existence burdens us with? Leaving it up to the government to oversee the whole affair seems like a timid half-measure. Sure, the government might eventually get around to deciding that old people are obligated to die at a certain point, but how long will it take to get there? How many hoops will people be expected to jump through in the meantime? The state moves at a snail’s pace, and even when it finally acts, it often does so in ridiculously inefficient and incompetent fashion.

Why would we place this issue in the hands of bureaucrats when people could, collectively, just take care of it for themselves? Few other issues, if any, have such a high capacity for individual action completely divorced from the state’s input. When you think about it that way, self-determined suicide could be seen as a sort of ultimate expression of libertarianism; a movement that our neurotic first-world governments, staffed by anxious liberals, would be largely powerless to stop.

Finally, the last reason you should support self-determined suicide is that it would result in state-sponsored suicide becoming legal almost immediately. Imagine the absurdity of continuing to deny people medical assistance in dying when they are already doing it for themselves in massive numbers. Right now, one of the best arguments against state-sponsored suicide is that there are still so few people who actually want to kill themselves, even when they are old and infirm. A flourishing self-determined suicide movement would overturn that social norm immediately and irresistibly.

In conclusion, if you are a lover of MAiD, I feel that you are nigh-obligated to go ahead and start drawing up your Death Plan. You might be young and healthy now, but there is no reason you shouldn’t go ahead and start planning out how you are going to do the right thing, when the time to do it eventually comes. Sure, in an ideal world you’ll reach old age and there will be a nice efficient considerate MAiD program waiting for you, but what if there isn’t? There’s no telling what the world will look like decades down the road, nor can you predict when or where you might be struck with a debilitating illness or injury that renders your life miserable and your continued existence into a societal burden.

So go forth, brave utilitarians, and be the change you want to see! I can’t say I’ll be rooting for you, but I will at least find some morbid amusement in the whole affair. Sadly I cannot join you on your journey, as I am cursed with belief in God, and therefore beholden to the barbaric notion that Suicide is Bad, Mm’kay. Terrible, I know, what is wrong with me? You’ll just have to forgive me, I will have no choice but to go on existing even as I grow old and weak, until the Lord finally sees fit to grant me my peace. But hey, if enough of you rational atheist types take my arguments in this post seriously, you can at least rest easy in the knowledge that you’ll have made the world a much more comfortable place for people like me to grow old in! That’s what utilitarianism is all about, right? Bravo to you!