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If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. (Wittgenstein 1961: 91e)
1.
Introduction
Kant's rejection of suicide is alarmed and adamant. Suicide is debasing (MS, 6: 423), depraved and worthless (ApH, 7: 259), abominable (VE, 27: 343), revolting (VE, 27: 372), and generally 'the most horrifying thing imaginable' (VE, 27: 372).1'Suicide is certainly the most dreadful thing that a man can do to himself' (VE, 27: 391), and 'is the supreme violation of duties to oneself' (VE, 27: 342). 'By committing it', Kant writes, 'the human being makes himself into a monster' ( ApH, 7: 259). To commit suicide is, indeed, 'to root out the existence of morality itself from the world' (MS, 6: 423). So claims Kant.
Many nonetheless argue that Kantian morality ought to permit suicide, at least in certain cases.2There is even debate about whether Kant himself occasionally permits it.3But there is consensus on a central point: the argument against suicide that Kant himself considered most canonical fails. That argument is the argument that a suicide maxim cannot be universalized. Kant offers the argument in both the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason (at G, 4: 421-2 and KpV, 5: 44). Paul Guyer calls it 'peculiar and not very convincing' (Guyer 2007: 116). Christine Korsgaard denies that it works to rule out suicide (Korsgaard 1996a: 100). Allen Wood claims it 'does not commit you to the immorality of suicide' (Wood 1999: 86). Thomas Hill, in an excellent paper on suicide and Kant, 'intentionally omit[s] Kant's unpersuasive argument' from universal law (Hill 1991: 92, n. 3). 'One of the few truly non-contentious claims in Kant scholarship and interpretation', Henry Allison remarks, 'is that this argument is unsuccessful' (Allison 2011: 184). The universal law argument against suicide would seem beyond saving. 4
This paper aims to save it. It does this via attention to Kant's use of an idea of 'nature' in discussions of suicide in the Groundwork and in the second Critique, as well as in the Collins lectures on ethics and the Metaphysics of Morals. It proposes that 'nature'...