Valuing death, and the response to suicide?

Questions about Objectivism
1

The crux of Rand’s ethics, as I understand it, is the fundamental choice of life vs. death. Living things need values in order to stay alive, and those values should be in accordance with life. But can’t death be a value to a living thing - a goal toward which it works? If I set myself the goal of dying, I can use reason to decide how best to achieve this goal. Sure, upon the success of that goal, I no longer exist, and goals cease to have any meaning to my atoms, but while I am alive, I can have that as my goal and work towards it, no?

Aren’t many of the characters in Rand’s novels described as valuing death?

The argument that I see Rand making is the following:

  1. Values only exist for living things.

  2. For life to continue, you must continue to choose to live and set goals that are in accordance with this.

  3. Therefore living things should set goals that support their continued existence.

I agree with 1 and 2, but don’t believe 3 follows from that. The fact that there is an existing process called “life” which is maintained by the continued actions of its constituents - living things - doesn’t by itself imply that a given living thing should continue this process. It almost seems like the fallacy of division. Is there any more to the explanation?

Given that there are many people out there who make the statement, “I should kill myself” (without having the Cheryl Taggart outlook on reality), shouldn’t there be an Objectivist response that says, “no you should not, and here’s why.” As I understand it, the current response would simply be, “you should not kill yourself, because then you would not be alive”, or “valuing your own death is anti-life.” I don’t see how this would convince anyone to change their mind, rather it would simply support their existing value: death is death. If someone you cared about decided to take the (irrational?) stance that they should kill themselves, how would you talk them out of it without reference to the desires of yourself and others who care about this person (ie, a guilt trip of sorts)?

2

Are you asking why living beings should pursue the things they need to survive, just because they require them to survive? Why does it have to be that way just because it is?

3

The crux of Rand’s ethics, as I understand it, is the fundamental choice of life vs. death. Living things need values in order to stay alive, and those values should be in accordance with life. But can’t death be a value to a living thing - a goal toward which it works? If I set myself the goal of dying, I can use reason to decide how best to achieve this goal.

Life is the standard of value. If you choose death, you reject all values.

Now, there are special cisrcumstances in which an individual might seek death for rational motives. A terminal patient in unbearable pain, for example, who cannot get any relief can rationally choose to die because living has become a burden impossible to endure. But no one who has a whole life ahead of him, or even only a little bit, chooses death rationally.

Aren’t many of the characters in Rand’s novels described as valuing death?

Yes. Jim taggart, Wesley Mouch, Floyd Ferris. But see what they seek for themselves and others.

Given that there are many people out there who make the statement, “I should kill myself” (without having the Cheryl Taggart outlook on reality), shouldn’t there be an Objectivist response that says, “no you should not, and here’s why.” As I understand it, the current response would simply be, “you should not kill yourself, because then you would not be alive”, or “valuing your own death is anti-life.”

What? No “if you kill yourself you’ll regret it for the rest of your life?”

Seriously, the rational response is “Do you have nothing to live for?” Cheryl believed she didn’t, mistakenly, and killed herself. On the other hand, Tony, the Wet Nurse, believed he did and tried to stay alive. He failed, but he did his best.

What I want to ask is: what is this fixation of yours to make death a rational choice for someone who values life?

You see, all living things die. There’s no getting around it. No matter what you do, what choices you make, what you believe in even, you are going to die someday. You can affect the timing, perhaps, but nothing else. Death is guaranteed to you and everyone else. So why seek death a lot soner than you are likely to have to face it?

4

Are you asking why living beings should pursue the things they need to survive, just because they require them to survive? Why does it have to be that way just because it is?

To your first question I would respond, “yes”.

Another way of looking at it is with the suicide example: imagine that someone you deeply care about decides that they should kill themselves. They say, “I should kill myself.” To you, they are acting irrational. You would want them to live, because you think this is a temporary irrationality that can be overcome. So you’d want to convince them not to kill themselves. What would you say to them that could be convincing, but not be an appeal to the desires of others (yourself included) - after all, living only for the desires of others is immoral, correct? What’s left to say to them? What could you say that wouldn’t simply be the opposite of what they’re saying, and if only that, do you think that would be convincing at all?

Or would you simply say, “you’re acting irrationally, I cared for you once, but I no longer do” and walk away? Doesn’t this assume that once someone is acting irrationally, it’s impossible to get them to act rationally?

5

Life is the standard of value. If you choose death, you reject all values.

You’re begging the question. It’s true that only living things can have values. But, if you set death as your goal, you still have values until you die.

Yes. Jim taggart, Wesley Mouch, Floyd Ferris. But see what they seek for themselves and others.

I don’t understand. They’re described as valuing death, seeking death, yet apparently one cannot value death.

Seriously, the rational response is “Do you have nothing to live for?”

And if they say no, do you just walk away from your loved one, or do you try to convince them that they do have something to live for? What do you say? Do you appeal to the desires of others - their family and friends who love them; their coworkers who value their services, etc?

What I want to ask is: what is this fixation of yours to make death a rational choice for someone who values life?

I’m not trying to make death a rational choice. I’m reading through Rand’s writing and trying to see if it makes sense. The crux of it is the bridge from is to ought. I don’t think it makes sense, but if I am misunderstanding something I’d like to know where.

So why seek death a lot sooner than you are likely to have to face it?

Indeed, death is inevitable, so why go through the motions of life?

6

The argument that I see Rand making is the following:

  1. Values only exist for living things.

  2. For life to continue, you must continue to choose to live and set goals that are in accordance with this.

  3. Therefore living things should set goals that support their continued existence.

I agree with 1 and 2, but don’t believe 3 follows from that. The fact that there is an existing process called “life” which is maintained by the continued actions of its constituents - living things - doesn’t by itself imply that a given living thing should continue this process. It almost seems like the fallacy of division. Is there any more to the explanation?

For some reason it feels like we’ve been through this before.

#3 is NOT Rand’s argument. It is in error. Both Peikoff and Tara Smith deal with this specific topic of “Why should one choose life?”. Please see OPAR or Viable Values for the complete treatment.

Rand’s treatment looks more like:

  1. For life to continue, volitional living things must continue to choose to live and set goals that are in accordance with this.

  2. Values only exists for volitional living things that make the choice to live.

  3. Therefore living things that have made this choice should set goals that support their continued existence

The choice to live is not the province of a “should”. It is the choice to live that, when made, creates the concept of what one “should” do next.

7

I have no experience with dealing with a suicidal person, but I think that my first response would be something along the lines of “You must want to live, on some level at least, because you have told me your wish to kill yourself. If you were 100% determined to kill yourself, you would be carrying out the act rather than talking to me. So, at the risk of sounding callous, what is stopping you?”

I think that someone who communicates a wish to commit suicide to another person is rarely committed to it. Such an expression of suicidal intent is more likely a cry for help.

8

You’re begging the question. It’s true that only living things can have values. But, if you set death as your goal, you still have values until you die.

No. If there is a standard of value and you reject it, then you reject all values. Death is nothing. It’s the end of everything as far as an individual is concenred. So it can’t work as a standard of value, nor as a value to be achieved.

I don’t understand. They’re described as valuing death, seeking death, yet apparently one cannot value death.

Because if they consciously valued death, they would kill themselves. Instead they eveade that knowledge but act on the object they value: they try to destroy everythign in sight.

And if they say no, do you just walk away from your loved one, or do you try to convince them that they do have something to live for?

Well, what do you think?

What do you say? Do you appeal to the desires of others - their family and friends who love them; their coworkers who value their services, etc?

You’re attempting to lay a trap by making a very narrow missinterpretation of Objectivist morality. Yes, living only for others is immoral, but considering others is not. After all, we live in a society, we value friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. We even value people we don’t know and who don’t know us. So when you appeal to a potential suicide to consider the effect his actions will have on the people he cares about, you’re appealing to his values.

Indeed, death is inevitable, so why go through the motions of life?

Because life is all you’ll ever have.

9
  1. Values only exists for volitional living things that make the choice to live.

So what are people doing when they decide to die? They are volitional, they are alive (for the moment at least). They don’t have values (according to you). They do have a goal though (death) and will use reason to achieve this goal.

The choice to live is not the province of a “should”.

According to what?

Is this just a definitional difference - ie, you’re separating the ultimate choice to exist from the realm of “should” by defining “should” in that way? Why is it that most people throughout history have defined the ultimate choice to be “the province of a ‘should’”? Please note: I’m not appealing to tradition or authority - it’s a simple fact that words get their meanings from the history of their usage, and if Rand is simply redefining the realm of “should” and “value”, it seems like she’s just side-stepping the whole debate, no?

10

So what are people doing when they decide to die? They are volitional, they are alive (for the moment at least). They don’t have values (according to you). They do have a goal though (death) and will use reason to achieve this goal.

They are making an amoral decision. Neither immoral nor moral. What does having a goal and using reason to obtain it have to do with anything? It is certianly not the definition of a value.

“should” is the province of an ethical system. Ethics are only necessary to those who choose to live. The choice to live is pre-ethical.

Is this just a definitional difference - ie, you’re separating the ultimate choice to exist from the realm of “should” by defining “should” in that way? Why is it that most people throughout history have defined the ultimate choice to be “the province of a ‘should’”? Please note: I’m not appealing to tradition or authority - it’s a simple fact that words get their meanings from the history of their usage, and if Rand is simply redefining the realm of “should” and “value”, it seems like she’s just side-stepping the whole debate, no?

What debate? You can’t make life into a value in and of itself. Life is the standard of value. If you choose life, then there is morality and a set of shoulds. If you dont, well then you dont. Please, instead of asserting it is all just semantics, read the relevant literature on it. It’s clearly articulated by both Peikoff and Smith. Is there a reason you don’t want to do this?

11

What debate?

The whole is-ought debate. What is the fundamental mistake everyone has been making for the last several centuries with regard to thinking there is an uncrossable gap between is and ought? Were they simply mistaken in their understanding of the domain of “ought”?

Is there a reason you don’t want to do this?

I do want to do this. I’m reading Loving Life by Biddle right now. That’s what prompted my post. I’m following his (or, Rand’s) reasoning step-by-step, and this was the first wall I ran into.

They are making an amoral decision. Neither immoral nor moral.

So what would you say to a suicidal individual in the situation I’ve described:

Imagine that someone you deeply care about decides that they should kill themselves. They say, “I should kill myself.” To you, they are acting irrational. You would want them to live, because you think this is a temporary irrationality that can be overcome. So you’d want to convince them not to kill themselves. What would you say to them that could be convincing, but not be an appeal to the desires of others (yourself included) - after all, living only for the desires of others is immoral, correct? What’s left to say to them? What could you say that wouldn’t simply be the opposite of what they’re saying, and if only that, do you think that would be convincing at all?

12

The whole is-ought debate. What is the fundamental mistake everyone has been making for the last several centuries with regard to thinking there is an uncrossable gap between is and ought?

Thinking that there is no relation between is and ought (subjectivism) or that the ought is inherent in the is (intrinsicism). The ought and is are related through the idea of life, and volition. The choice of life and volition mean that the facts of reality give rise to necessary actions, given the choice to live.

I do want to do this. I’m reading Loving Life by Biddle right now. That’s what prompted my post. I’m following his (or, Rand’s) reasoning step-by-step, and this was the first wall I ran into.

Well, there’s a bit of useful information. Any chance you could give us the relevant passage from LL, and maybe that will help set context?

So what would you say to a suicidal individual in the situation I’ve described:

Depends on what’s making him/her suicidal - your senario is awfully broad to comment. What’s causing the “temporary irrationality”? This doesn’t really test your ideas as there are many things that can be said that don’t involved telling them they “should” live. Also, for certain situations, I’d tell them just that, or even forcibly restrain them from committing the act.

The real question is what do you tell a perfectly rational, lucid person about why they should choose to live. Answer: nothing. You can’t tell someone rationally why they should choose to live. You can highlight possible values that one could pursue in living, but only they can choose if those are things they want to do.

13

Here is a section of OPAR. Bold is mine.

When they hear about the Objectivist ethics, philosophy professors from both groups ask, as though by reflex, the same question. “If the choice to live precedes morality,” they say, “what is the status of someone who chooses not to live? Isn’t the choice of suicide as legitimate as any other, so long as one acts on it? And if so, doesn’t that mean that for Rand, too, as for Hume or Nietzsche, ethics, being the consequence of an arbitrary decision, is itself arbitrary?”

In answer to this, I want to mention first that suicide is sometimes justified, according to Objectivism. Suicide is justified when man’s life, owing to circumstances outside of a person’s control, is no longer possible; an example might be a person with a painful terminal illness, or a prisoner in a <opar_248> concentration camp who sees no chance of escape. In cases such as these, suicide is not necessarily a philosophic rejection of life or of reality. On the contrary, it may very well be their tragic reaffirmation. Self-destruction in such contexts may amount to the tortured cry: “Man’s life means so much to me that I will not settle for anything less. I will not accept a living death as a substitute.”

The professors I just quoted, however, have an entirely different case in mind. They seek to prove that values are arbitrary by citing a person who would commit suicide, not because of any tragic cause, but as a primary and an end-in-itself. The answer to this one is: no.

A primary choice does not mean an “arbitrary,” “whimsical,” or “groundless” choice. There are grounds for a (certain) primary choice, and those grounds are reality—all of it. The choice to live, as we have seen, is the choice to accept the realm of reality. This choice is not only not arbitrary. It is the precondition of criticizing the arbitrary; it is the base of reason.

A man who would throw away his life without cause, who would reject the universe on principle and embrace a zero for its own sake—such a man, according to Objectivism, would belong on the lowest rung of hell. His action would indicate so profound a hatred—of himself, of values, of reality—that he would have to be condemned by any human being as a monster. The moment he would announce his decision seriously he would be disqualified as an object of intellectual debate. One cannot argue with or about a walking corpse, who has just consigned himself to the void—the void of the nonconscious, the nonethical, the non-anything.

Ethics is conditional, i.e., values are not intrinsic. But values are not subjective, either. Values are objective.

And on mistakes of the is-ought relationship.

Despite all their differences, intrinsicists and subjectivists agree on fundamentals. This is true in ethics as in epistemology. Ethical principles, both schools agree, are rationally indefensible; there is no logical relationship between the facts of this world and value-judgments ; morality requires a message from the beyond. One school then claims to have received such a message, while the other, rejecting this claim, throws out the whole field as noncognitive.

14

If someone you cared about decided to take the (irrational?) stance that they should kill themselves, how would you talk them out of it without reference to the desires of yourself and others who care about this person (ie, a guilt trip of sorts)?

Under those imposed constraints, you would give them examples of the things they can do if they reconsider and choose to live: the foods they can eat, the people they can meet, the books they can read, and so on. You would show them what happiness is possible to them, through the pursuit of various values.

I assume that depression is a leading proximate cause of suicidal thoughts. These, in turn, are caused by evaluations of one’s situation as being hopeless. So, the remedy would be to demonstrate that the situation is not hopeless, and that happiness is an achievable goal. [Not saying this is easy, but that’s basically what one has to do.]

Of course, there may be some situations – e.g. the terminally ill person or the person who is functioning just above the vegetative – where they really have nothing to look forward to from continuing to live.