With the Canadian assisted suicide program skyrocketing in popularity in the past year, I’ve been thinking about principled arguments for and against allowing suicide. Specifically, I’ve been considering how most (all?) arguments against suicide are by nature limits on autonomy. If this is the case, liberal theories of value may have to allow for suicide, even in contexts less clinical than Canada’s MAID program.

Historically, proscriptions on suicide were religiously motivated — you cannot kill yourself because your life is not yours to take. Most people in the western world don’t really think this way anymore. They are instead motivated by the (lowercase L) liberal idea that each person has ownership of his body. On this irreligious theory, one should have total dominion over whether, when, and how he kills himself.

Thoughtful representatives of this autonomy view tend to point to an empirical problem with suicide: those who survive suicide attempts usually regret attempting in the first place.

I see two relevant complications here.

First, there could be a selection effect at play. There may be significant overlap between those who attempt suicide in ways they are more likely to survive and those who are unsure about their decision to kill themselves. To me, this seems logical. If you are completely sure that you want to die, you would probably try your best to maximize the lethal potential of your killing method. So, it could be that the people who survive, and can thus be asked about their experiences, are less committed to killing themselves than those we unfortunately cannot ask. Perhaps those who succeed don’t regret it, as grim as it may sound.

The second complication is that this regret-based critique of suicide is not intrinsic. In other words, if we could ensure that those people killing themselves do not regret it, the committed liberal would have to permit suicide on demand.

I know some academic liberals who would be okay with suicide on demand in such a world, and apparently, enough Canadians are okay with it, too (despite the fact that they may not have solved the empirical problem there).

However, I imagine the ordinary person’s intuitions cut strongly against allowing suicide in such a world. I also imagine the clinical context of MAID makes it easier for people to swallow — but, in principle, the argument for allowing someone to kill themselves via any of the old-fashioned methods would be the same: respecting autonomy.

I think what underlies the intuition against suicide is something more primal to human relations than a formal moral philosophy. It could be mere survival impulse in neurotypical people. Though many people don’t articulate it in the terms of religion anymore, I think that lens highlights important things. Our lives may not totally be our own. If not God’s, perhaps our lives belong to our spouses, children, parents, neighbors, and so on. There is a sense in which we feel that someone taking himself away from his community is a harm. Maximizing autonomy here may be to the detriment of our relationships.

I tend to gravitate toward some position like the above, and that’s why I want to be able to say suicide is intrinsically bad. The direction Canada and liberalism are headed in is one I find depressing. Your life is not just another trivial object to throw away.

What do you think? If people didn’t regret suicide, would you still have a problem with it? Why or why not?