In this talk, Richard Swinburne claimed that, if God exists, suicide is intrinsically wrong.
The reason, according to Swinburne, is that “…it is a wrong to God, who has given us life, to throw the gift back when it is not as satisfacto
ry as it should be.” This is because (since God created us, and everything we love) we owe him a debt of gratitude; and to kill ourselves, to throw our lives away, would be supremely ungrateful.
Swinburne concludes: “The gift of life is such a large gift, that we should do our best to make our life a good life, however difficult the circumstances.”
This is an interesting argument: It tries to show that suicide is wrong without exception, a famously difficult claim to establish. It also brings God into the picture in an interesting way: suicide is wrong because God gave us life, so cutting it short shows ungratefulness to him. This way, the wrongness of suicide depends only on God’s existence—not on any of his commands.
Alas, I’m not convinced. If suicide is always wrong, then it’s wrong for some other reason.
Why? Suppose we grant, for argument’s sake, that we owe God a debt of gratitude for creating us, the people we love, the things we enjoy, etc. Let’s also concede, for this reason, that suicide is sometimes wrong. This is a plausible concession: imagine a person, Peter, who cuts his life short because he’s run out of things to watch, and because his head looks like a turnip. Plausibly, if God exists, Peter would disrespect God in doing this: by committing suicide, Peter would be chucking the gift of his life—a great gift—back at God, his benefactor, for trivial reasons. This would be very ungrateful behaviour. Naughty Peter.
Swinburne, however, wants to say suicide is always wrong, not just that it’s wrong in cases where the reasons for it are trivial. This, I think, is where the argument breaks down.
To motivate his claim about gratitude, Swinburne gives the example of a small child who throws away a toy he’s been given the moment it starts to malfunction. This is fair dinkum, as far as it goes. But consider a modified case:
GRATEFUL SON: A father lovingly knits a jumper for his son with a rare and expensive wool, which he gives to him on his birthday. The son receives it gratefully and wears it all the time. One day, out of nowhere, the son has an allergic reaction to the wool. This causes him intolerable pain. (Note: by “intolerable pain”, I mean a pain so bad that someone might prefer to kill themselves before enduring it. I don’t mean the pain is *literally* impossible to tolerate.) Unfortunately, the jumper has shrunk in the wash. It can’t be taken off. In fact, the only way to remove the garment is to cut it off with scissors. This would end the pain but destroy the jumper.
Question: Would it be immoral to destroy the jumper? Answer: Clearly not. Just because you shouldn’t destroy a precious gift for trivial reasons, it doesn’t follow that you shouldn’t destroy it if it’s causing you a ridiculous amount of pain.
Likewise, if your body malfunctions and starts causing you intolerable pain, the fact that it’s a precious gift from God —if it is a precious gift from God—doesn’t, by itself, show that killing yourself would be wrong.
Now; it’s true that a body is more precious than a jumper. But this seems irrelevant: If we accept that you can destroy a precious gift if it malfunctions and causes you intolerable pain, then it seems that—even if the standards are higher for a body than for a jumper—there must be some level of pain, some threshold, at which you would not be wronging God by destroying his gift to you. And if there is such a level of pain, then suicide can’t be intrinsically wrong for the reason Swinburne gives.
Swinburne might counter that your life is so precious a gift that ending it on purpose is always an impermissible display of ingratitude to God. But not only does this claim lack motivation; it also seems obviously false: Imagine, at age sixty, your body suddenly expressed an incurable genetic mutation that made all your nerve cells feel like they were being pressed against burning coals. It seems implausible that destroying your malfunctioning body by suicide in this case would be violating your duty of gratitude to God. Indeed, just as in the GRATEFUL SON case, it seems like destroying the harmful gift might be exactly the kind of thing a loving Father would want you to do.
There may be other good arguments against suicide; but I don’t think Swinburne provides one, at least in cases of extreme suffering (which, after all, are just the cases that matter for the euthanasia debate.)
Swinburne's Argument Against Suicide
There is nothing wrong with helping a suffering person to get his/her final rest. I remember when my cousin was so sick and in pain. The laws here were against it so we had to seek help from a private source. Fortunately for us my Doctor friend was able to put us in contact with a colleague who could help. We reached out to "aymanalemd (at) gmail (dot) com " and he actually helped us with my cousin's peaceful exit . I believe you can get help too if you reach out to him and ask. Im forever grateful to him because I was happy when I saw the smile on my cousin's face and she took her last breath. I knew
Thought you might be interested in this: https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/why-suicide-is-always-wrong