Giving One's Life

[Content warning: suicide]

This will be a morbid post; forgive me. It will be hard to write this well. I will write it badly.

You are young or middle aged -- healthy you think. You get a fatal diagnosis out of the blue, let's suppose. You have a few months to live and no cure.

You will seek whatever pleasure, peace, and companionship feels right in those last months.  You will complete a few important projects maybe, and prepare your loved ones as best you can for a world without you.

But you also have an unusual opportunity. You could give your life. You could die in a good cause, if you knew a good cause that would be advanced by your death. Perhaps this is worth contemplating. In the past, you have given money and you have given time, but now you could, if it seemed right, give something very different from money or time.

Socrates drank the hemlock. Would Plato have been as inspired if Socrates had fled Athens and died quietly ten years later in Corinth? Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in the streets of Saigon in 1963, shocking the world and drawing attention to the oppression of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Many, many soldiers have hopelessly charged the enemy, or stayed behind to cover a retreat, accepting the likelihood of death in what they believed to be a good cause.

Need volunteers to sprint into the intense radiation of a nuclear meltdown and contain the damage?

Is there some great scientific advance that could be achieved only by exposing an experimental subject to some fatal intervention? Of course we would never want to do that -- but now, maybe, the "of course" needn't be quite so certain.

Is there some terrible but ethically compelling crime one could commit, a crime that would result in one's death or a life sentence, yet leave the world substantially better?

In the spirit of "effective altruism", one might wonder whether there is some way to use those final months to accomplish something that cannot be accomplished by gifts of money.

I have touched on four categories: symbolic martyrdom, dying to save others, lethal research, and ethical crime. I will not explore them systematically. Something in me rebels against doing so; perhaps it's too close to recommending suicide. This isn't a domain where I want to apply the cold equations of effective altruism. Nor do I want to breathe even the whisper of a suggestion that anyone who does not think this way in their final months is being selfish. As Kant would say, with considerable plausibility, one's life -- even the last little bit of it -- should not be treated merely as a means for the benefit of others, but valued for its own sake.

Still, if I received a terrible diagnosis, thoughts of this sort would arise in me, I think. They might even constitute some kind of comfort -- some new applied philosophy of direct practical importance to vividly consider, and a way to think of my situation as an opportunity -- before I, presumably, just died in the ordinary, sensible way that most people with fatal diagnoses do.