A matter of life and death
Patrick Devlin
Suicide: The Philosophical Issues ed. M. Pabst Battin and David J. Mayo (Peter Owen pp. 292, £9.95) There still is not. I believe, a large and demanding public for books on suicide. There are what this book calls the suicidologists, ever eager for a debate on whether drinking the hemlock with Socrates or walking out into the Polar blizzard with Captain Oates would or would not be suicide. There are the libertarians ever anxious to establish a right which they do not intend to make use of. There are those of us who like to soliloquise gently and remotely on 'to be or not to be'. There are the sad and suffering few who long for the merciful release; but they belong to what is virtually a special branch of the subject, euthanasia.
This book will best suit the soliloquists. They can pass from dish to dish, taking a little nourishment from each. There are 24 dishes. That is to say, the book is a compilation of 24 articles or extracts. Books on specialist subjects, particularly treatises, are expensive, so compilations which diffuse knowledge cheaply are not to be despised. This book will equip the reader to move timidly on the fringe of intelligent discussion.
There is at the beginning an excellent historical background by the poet A. Alvarez, describing the attitudes of the Greeks, the Epicureans and the Stoics down to Augustine who after 15 centuries still dominates the orthodox teaching of the West. At the end there is a good section on the present state of the law in the West on suicide as a crime. In between there is great variety.
Peter Y. Windt on the Concept of Suicide is fairly tough going. It is, he writes, 'open-textured'. 'If we concede that death is a necessary condition of suicide,' surely not too much to ask 'then we also may want to concede that another necessary condition is the applicability of some reflexive description of the death'.
There are other passages in homelier style, as when Richard B. Brandt, a past President of the American Philosophical Association, is 'asked for advice by someone contemplating suicide'. Specific causes should first be probed; if, for example, the advisee is a rejected lover, he should remind himself of 'all the cases in which he has elicited enthusiastic response from ladies'. But in the end he should be told to decide whether 'the expectable utility' of some possible world course in which he goes on for another 20 years is greater than or less than the expectable utility of the one in which his life stops in an hour. If he falls short in expectables, he should act promptly to end his life. 'A patient' Herr Brandt writes 'who announces such a decision to his physician may expect amazement and dismay'; but then 'except for the area of the physical sciences his physician is likely to be almost a totally ignorant man'.
In this part of the book, which might be called the practical section, there emerges a difference of opinion about whether it is right or wrong to interfere with the act of suicide. Herr Brandt rather hesitatingly recommends intervention. 'If a person is discovered unconscious, with the gas turned on, it would seem to be the individual's obligation to intervene, and prevent the successful execution of the decision'. Robert M. Martin takes a more robust view. Let him get on with it, he urges, for, if he is successful, he cannot ex hypothesi have any regrets: 'a person who kills himself because of the false belief that he has a terminal disease won't regret his decision'.
The disadvantage of this sort of book is that there is no ordered argument. 'Will someone please tell me', I can imagine an exasperated reader exclaiming, 'why I cannot commit suicide if I want to?' I cannot direct him or her to any clear statement of the moral or philosophical pro's and cons. There is a number of pro's scattered about and two contributors quote Blackstone for the cons. There is, wrote this sage of the law two centuries ago, the offence spiritual 'in invading the prerogative of the Almighty, and rushing into his immediate presence uncalled for'; and the offence temporal 'against the King, who has an interest in the preservation of all his subjects'.
The language is quaint, implying that the offence is either the unmannerly interruption of the heavenly schedule or a trespass upon the monarch's preserves. But put into modern dress, the argument is still persuasive. Indeed, for the religious it has hardly altered. To commit suicide is to despair of the providence of God. For the irreligious to commit suicide is still to renounce allegiance. The allegiance which once was owed to the person of the sovereign is owed now to the nation. Should we come to be one nation, it will be owed to mankind and in the ascent of man there is no room for despair. No man's life is entirely his own. If it is not the king who now commands our loyalties, it is the group, large or small, to which we belong, and with whom we are in covenant. The group may be as large as the human race whose continuing adventure on this planet calls for the effort of us all.
Can the argument against suicide really be put as high as that, that it is a betrayal of the race? After all, if there were no more births the human race would go out with the whimper of the last centenarian but we do not try to avoid that by imposing an obligation to breed, the desire for children making that unnecessary. Likewise, the life instinct secures, except against universal catastrophe, the future of the human race; the suicide of weaklings will not imperil it. But that brings in the paternalist argument. Should we not protect the weaklings against themselves? How many, offered help and encouragement, really want to die? Thus the issues are swirled around in this book. It is conversation without precise conclusions. There is no dialogue to hammer out a pattern of thought. I think that what emerges is a general feeling for the middle course; not complete prohibition but not unrestricted licence: no suicide without good cause. But then who is to judge the cause, the individual or the State? It can only be the individual, you may say, since the decision must be his and in taking his own life he commits no crime. But there are still penalties for those who assist in suicide and easeful death is hard to come by without skilled assistance from those who, like doctors, nurses and chemists, are generally obedient to the law. In the end the argument assimilates itself to the argument for or against euthanasia. In this, this book succeeds no better than any other in moving from the theoretical to the practical. It is easier to accept the principle of euthanasia than to devise satisfactory plans for carrying it into effect. How hard it is in the regulation of death to render pathos without falling into comedy. One recalls Max Beerbohm's parody of H.G. Wells The General Cessation Day, the ceremony of Making Way, the procession of the morituri, the pause at the Gate for 'the few well chosen words about the Future'. In the book the Legal Adviser. to the Euthanasia Society is quoted as offering a notice to be exhibited where? forbidding any laying on of hands except for the purpose of removing organs for transplantation', reminding would-be rescuers of the penalties for assault and instructing executors to 'initiate proceedings against any person who attempts ' unsuccessfully to resuscitate me'. This is likely to be even less effective than the familiar notice that Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.. . Perhaps it is best after all to leave it to the 'ignorant' physicians. Maybe they, who have been at so many deathbeds and seen so much of the body's and the mind's distress, know more about it than the contributors seem to think. THIS WEEK'S CONTRIBUTORS Christopher J. Walker is the author of Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. Anthony Huxley is on the council of the Royal Horticultural Society and the author of An Illustrated History of Gardening.
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