^[1] The debate surrounding suicide and assisted-suicide is multi-faceted, but one central thread concerns the morality of taking one’s own life, with or without assistance. While arguing that suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia are immoral, Bishop Joseph Sullivan wrote that:

^[2] The idea that life is a gift bestowed upon us by a benevolent creator and for that reason we may not kill ourselves is neither new nor rare. Thomas Aquinas said that:

^[3] John Locke described us as ‘all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker’ and said that we are, therefore:

^[4] I call this the ‘gift of life argument’ and, in one form or another, it is a persistent theme in debates about the morality of suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The details vary slightly depending on the author, but there are five core assertions: (1) That there was a time at which I did not exist, and that this is the case for all other individuals. (2) That my existence has no necessity about it, there are many possible worlds in which I either do not exist as quite the person I am now, or in which I do not exist at all. (3) That I came to be as I am because God chose to cause my existence. (4) That in the light of this causative agency I am in some subjective relation to God, a relation that can be understood in terms either of a property relation (à la Locke) or a dominion relation (à la Thomas Aquinas) or both. (5) That in the light of this relation there are certain things I may not do. Specifically, in this case I may not cause my own death, thereby destroying the property or rejecting the dominion.

^[5] The gift of life argument, however, is not simply an argument concerning the immorality of suicide. It is part and parcel of an attempt to provide a secure foundation for a strong moral injunction; that individual lives, individual persons, have value. It is because of this value that we may not murder ourselves or others. In discussing this argument it is important to keep these two aspects separate. That lives have value because they were gifted to us, and that this value precludes suicide are two separate issues. In this paper I want to focus primarily on the prescription against suicide, for it seems to me that even without considering the vexed question of the existence of God, the gift of life argument against suicide suffers from a fatal internal incoherence. That said, however, there is still mileage to be gained from the description of life as a gift and in the concluding section I will indicate one way in which this might be so. Before embarking on the main argument, however, there is one ground-clearing remark that needs to be made.

^[6] The person of God plays a central role in the classic formulation of the gift of life argument. However, the gift of life argument need not buy into any specific description of God as long as ‘God’ is understood to mean a powerful, creative and personified force who chose, freely, to bring me into existence, and to whom I have certain overriding obligations in the light of that creative choice. For many people the argument loses its bite at this point, either because they reject the idea of an existent God, or because they accept the possibility of the existence of God but find too much epistemological doubt on the issue to ground ethical positions on that existence, or because they accept the existence of God, and are prepared to ground ethical positions on his existence and nature, but reject this description of God. To these objections this paper will provide no reply. It is not my purpose to argue for or against the existence, or particular description, of God. I merely explore the coherence of one particular argument that begins from a specific set of premises and draws a singular conclusion about the ethical rightness of suicide.

^[7] With this clarification out of the way, we can turn to objections, for the gift argument has not been without its critics. I will briefly discuss two common, but ultimately unsuccessful, strands of objection before tackling what I see as the major, and possibly fatal, problem for this argument. I call these two strands of objection the consistency problem and the freedom problem.

^[8] ‘Everyone’ asserted John Locke ‘is bound to preserve himself and not to quit his station willfully.’ In response to which point Hume argued forcefully that, if we are not allowed to willfully shorten our lives, then surely we should not be allowed to willfully lengthen them either. Or as he more colorfully put it:

^[9] The purpose of medicine has always been to increase the life span of human beings. By curing ills, promoting health, excising tumors, and mending bones more years of life are wrested from a universe that sometimes seems determined to make them as short as possible. It might seem, therefore, that anyone who claims that we should live out our allotted span, no more and no less, must reject the powers of medical science. After all, if God has allotted to us our share of days then it is to God we must appeal when we wish to alter the course of a disease. Perhaps the implications of the ‘allotted span’ position have been taken seriously only by the Christian Scientists. [5] If so, then those who accept the use of modern medicine, and yet prohibit suicide on the grounds of the gift of life argument would seem to be acting inconsistently.

^[10] But this is clearly too hasty a conclusion. There is a well-developed position in both religious and secular thinking that we have an obligation to reasonably preserve ourselves, an obligation to strive for a long and healthy life. Kant, for instance, argues that our bodies are not related to our lives as ‘accidents or conditions’ but that our lives are ‘entirely conditioned’ by our bodies. [6] The duty of self preservation identified in the Groundwork therefore extends to a duty to maintain the body in the best condition possible. Aquinas has a two-step path to the same conclusion. Our obligation to preserve ourselves is based on our duty to be good stewards of the life we have been given which is in turn based on the natural law. The natural law commands all things ‘recognized by the practical reason of itself as being human goods.’ [7] Everything naturally strives to live, and to live as long and as fully as possible, and we are therefore commanded by natural law to preserve ourselves for a long life.

^[11] Whatever its foundation, the idea that we have a duty to preserve ourselves raises two interesting questions: (a) what means are we required to use in our preservation and (b) how long must we continue to preserve ourselves? The usual answer to the first question is that we should use all ‘normal’ or ‘non-extraordinary’ means but there are at least two apparent problems with this response. The first is that it begs the question. Non-extraordinary means are those which do not interfere with our living an appropriately long life, but an appropriately long life is one that is not extended, or cut short, by extraordinary means. Without some point of reference outside this circle of argument it can provide very little in the way of useful answers. The second apparent problem with this response is that it will produce conflicting answers over time. Diabetes used to be uncontrollable, then it was controllable but only with extraordinary means, and now its control is part of medical routine. Is someone born with a condition that can be treated only with extraordinary measures today doomed to die, while a clinically identical person born in five years time, when the procedures have become normal, is allowed to live? And what if cryogenics, the freezing of brains and bodies followed by a thawing out when a cure for their condition has been found, becomes normal? Is this measure of immortality permissible, or even obligatory?

^[12] The response to the second problem, of how long we should preserve our lives is similar and runs into a similar problem. ‘Ripeness is all’ said Edgar in King Lear; we must not quit our station willfully, and neither must we cling tenaciously to it past our time. But how are we to know when that time has arrived? And how do we know whether or not our technology is interfering with a timely departure? If we have been given the gift of life, there seems to be no sure indication of how long we are supposed to keep it.

^[13] At this point critics of the gift of life argument may feel that they have raised insurmountable challenges, but they should not be so confident. The proponent of the gift of life argument can respond to these challenges by saying that there is indeed an allotted span but that that span is not to be interpreted as a fixed period of time, time that is up when it is up whether the end comes quietly in one’s bed, under the wheels of a bus, or on the field of battle. The allotted span, to which we ought all to strive, is to be measured in terms of a natural life given the conditions of the day. In response to the objection that a natural span will last for differing periods of time in different cultures and times, the adherent can claim that this is not a difficulty. What matters is that we use all ‘normal’ or ‘non-extraordinary’ means of preserving a healthy and vital existence. We are morally obliged to avoid known and wanton health hazards such as smoking or playing Russian roulette, but we are not obliged to seek out cryogenics. This is more a question of virtues than deontology. We have to act responsibly in preserving ourselves, but not selfishly as we would be if we tried to avoid pain by leaving early or tried to cling to life beyond our years. If this produces different life-spans at different times, then that is a function of changing conditions on earth and is not evidence of vagaries in God’s will.

^[14] In response to the objection that non-extraordinary life preserving measures have a circular justification, the adherent can reply that such difficulties are not insurmountable. We do in fact have relatively clear concepts of a life that has been cut short and one that has been stretched beyond its natural end. A circle of praxis of this sort is large enough not to be viciously circular and, while it may not provide definite answers, it does provide responses that are useful. Hume’s objection, while it raises some difficulties for the gift of life argument, is not fatal. Responding to it requires theological elaboration, elaboration that goes beyond the strict bounds of the argument and is not without its own difficulties, but a fruitful response can be crafted.

^[15] The second objection to the gift of life argument is that by our nature we are autonomous beings, endowed with free will. Human freedom must include the freedom to do even what our benefactor would wish we did not do, otherwise it is really no freedom at all. The freedom to commit suicide is therefore an essential part of the freedom that is our nature. As Bruno Schüller says, to argue that we do not possess life, that God possesses it and we do not therefore have the freedom to deprive ourselves of our own lives ‘amounts to a tautology – we are not free because we are not free (we are, after all, God’s property).’ [8] If we are to be free, then, we have to be free to make the ultimate choice.

^[16] When we ask why we are not free to make the ultimate choice, two possible responses come back: (a) that God is logically incapable of allowing us the freedom to commit suicide or, (b) that God’s relation to us, born of his act of our creation, gives him the right to forbid us to commit suicide.

^[17] The position that God is logically incapable of granting us the freedom to commit suicide is defended by Milton Gonsalves. Gonsalves argues that God could not give us the right to ‘consume and destroy’ ourselves because:

^[18] This position, that we are taken when we have done what we were put here to do, raises a huge number of questions. Does this mean that people who are taken young have to cram a lot of virtue into a few short years? Or were they such moral over-achievers that they were unexpectedly promoted to the next class? (Perhaps there is good reason to be satisfied with being on the moral median and not trying to excel.) What meaning are we to read into plagues and other natural disasters that kill multitudes? Did so many people come to moral ripeness at once that this was the only way to collect them all? And what about those who do not develop virtue or do good deeds, the wicked of this world? When they have long lives does this mean that they are being given further chances to repent? And when they have short lives does this mean that God realized they had no chance of becoming good and so got them out of harm’s way? Or is he just punishing them in the old-time way?

^[19] There is a further, and more serious problem. If I choose not to perform certain good deeds then God will have fewer to take into consideration when my time comes. This would entail, on Gonsalves’ reasoning, that God cannot give me the moral freedom not to perform recommended acts, on the grounds that this would give me supremacy over him. But this essentially robs us of all moral freedom and so a position such as Gonsalves’ must take with one hand much more than it gives with the other—we achieve the gift of life only at the cost of losing what makes the gift worth having.

^[20] Even if this position seems increasingly untenable it gets to the heart of the free will objection to the gift argument. Life is given as a gift, yet it is a gift with strings attached. We do not have the disposal of it, merely the stewardship. The question is, can something come with these strings and still be a gift? In its common usage, ‘gift’ has the connotation of being condition-free. It is an untrammeled change of ownership with no expected quid-pro-quo. Our contemporary society has a fairly well developed vocabulary for talking about gifts of this sort, but a much less well developed vocabulary for talking about gifts that entail stewardship. We even lack a clearly defined word for them. In earlier times we would have talked about a ‘charge’ and the responsibilities and obligations attendant with that would be fairly clearly understood. The nearest we have today is ‘loaner,’ as in ‘my car is being repaired, this is a loaner,’ but even that does not capture the full connotations of the word ‘charge.’ While I may request and even demand a loaner, a charge was often acquired involuntarily. English monarchs were known to use charges as a way of raising money. Land could be gifted to an unwilling noble, along with the obligation to pay taxes on it, or to raise troops. It was the power of the giver vis-a-vis the recipient that enabled the sometimes onerous conditions of stewardship to be set.

^[21] This illuminates the second possible reason why we are not free to make the ultimate choice. We are not simply given our lives but charged with their stewardship, and the authority of that charge comes directly from the power of God, a power demonstrated in his creation of us ex nihilo. God’s benevolence in granting us the stewardship of our lives is also a part of the equation, but it is the power that is most significant, like the English monarch’s power to gift nobles with land and attendant obligations. Without the position of power, from which so much harm can be wrought, the benevolence would not be so notable.

^[22] Of the two alternative explanations for why we are not free to choose suicide, that God is logically incapable of allowing us to commit suicide and God’s power as demonstrated by his creation of us puts him in a position to bestow gifts with attendant obligations, the second seems to me to hold up best and be most consistent with the thrust of the gift of life argument.

^[23] It is possible at this point to ask why the mere power of God provides a reason to obey him. What, one might ask, of the moral justice of the demands he has placed on us? However, to ask this question is to mistake the presuppositions of the gift of life argument; the moral universe within which it is working. The gift is not an exchange among equals but an obligation with benefits, bestowed on an inferior by a superior. As Locke says, ‘we are all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order …we are his property.’ Aquinas sees the gift and the recipient as ‘subject to His power’ and the more modern Bishop Sullivan writes that ‘Life is…a gift which has grave obligations …inseparably affixed thereto.’ We did not ask for the gift, we logically could not ask for it, but we find ourselves the recipients of it and its attendant obligations.

^[24] What this reveals, however, is that the defender of the gift injunction, and the supporter of the freewill justification for committing suicide, are arguing not with each other but past each other. The language of stewardship and charge is that of an intensely hierarchical world view. There are strict orders of being, with attendant powers and responsibilities attached to each station. The abstract justice of that system is not open to question. Each person has a place, and with that place come benefits and obligations. The defender of the free will justification for suicide, on the other hand, is arguing from within a modern conception of the individual as a free and autonomous being, with that autonomy having a high, if not ultimate, value. Social position is not the defining issue, choice is. This is a debate between station and autonomy, between two very different cosmologies and conceptions of human nature. The two positions seem incommensurable, there is no common ground from which they may both be adjudicated and each must appeal to the intrinsic attraction of their assumptions. Whether you accept either argument depends on whether you accept those grounding cosmologies in the face of the objections and it does not seem to me that either is self-evidently correct or false.

^[25] Neither the consistency problem nor the freedom problem therefore seem to be insuperable objections to the gift of life argument. The consistency problem can be met by saying that we have a virtue-based obligation to reasonably preserve our lives, and that differences in life span brought about by changing technology are a function of changing conditions on earth and are not evidence of vagaries in God’s will. The freedom problem can be met by pointing out that the assumption that an individual has autonomy and control over all aspects of their lives is the product of an egalitarian, individualist world view and that the obligations placed on the gift of life are grounded in a more hierarchical world view in which each station has attendant privileges and obligations. Unless one can show why the hierarchical moral universe is necessarily incorrect or inferior to the egalitarian equivalent, the gift of life argument survives.

^[26] However, once we look more closely at the internal dynamics of the idea of life as a gift, two much more serious objections arise. The first concerns what it means to receive the gift of life, the second concerns what sense can be made of rejecting or returning such a gift.

^[27] There is a serious ambiguity about exactly what is meant by ‘life’ in the phrase ‘the gift of life.’ By a ‘life’ do we mean a discrete object or property that can be jettisoned by the individual, or do we mean the quality of being as opposed to not being.

^[28] At first sight the definition that is required, or at least assumed, by the gift of life argument is that life is a discrete property or object. In a passage quoted earlier Bishop Sullivan says that ‘Life is given to man’ where the implication is that life is given to man in the same way that the world and its animals are given to man. And when Aquinas says, ‘Whoever takes his own life, sins against God, even as he who kills another’s slave sins against that slave’s master’ the analogy is drawn between the master and God, between the murderer and me, and between the slave and my life. Just as there is a necessary distinction between the murderer and the slave, so there is a necessary separation between me and my life.

^[29] But this cannot be what the majority of proponents of the argument mean, for this would remove the creative role played by God. God would give me life, but would not make me me. I would have to already exist in order to receive the gift. With the creative role gone the foundation for the property or dominion relationship goes too. Surely, therefore, the gift I am given is the gift of my own existence. It is not that, before I received it I was a disembodied soul surfing the ether and waiting for my turn, but that before I received it I was not, I was literally nothing. It is God’s power that makes me be ex nihilo and it is in virtue of that creative act that He has a property or dominion relationship over me.

^[30] However this notion, that the gift I am given is the gift of brute existence, seems to make nonsense of the idea of life being a gift, at least when the term gift is taken literally. Gifts are things, possessions that are transferred from one person to another, but before I receive the gift of life I am literally nothing. There is nothing there to receive the gift. The same is true if we read ‘gift’ as ‘charge.’ There exists, admittedly, a potential me, but that is the logical possibility that I might come to be and not a shadowy me waiting in the wings of existence. Before I receive the gift of life I am not. But if I am not, then how can I be given anything, or charged with anything? It seems then that the argument is on the horns of a dilemma, either I existed in such a way that I could receive a gift, in which case the creative power of God is nullified, or I did not exist and was therefore in no position to receive a gift.

^[31] This is, however, too hasty a rejection of the idea of being given life as a gift. Although I can clearly experience nothing before I exist, I am quite capable of experiencing my own existence, once I have come to be, as a boon. I can experience it both in itself in the simple appreciation of being alive, and as a precondition to all the other benefits I enjoy. Analogously, if I suffer from a debilitating and progressive mental illness I may feel that I am losing myself, or at least characteristics that are essential to my being who I am. I may lose my equanimity, my intelligence, and my patience, becoming unstable, irascible and slow witted. The psychiatrist who provides the corrective drugs may be said to be returning to me parts of my lost self. He is giving me back my identity, my existence as myself. With each returning characteristic I become a new person and that new person appreciates the return of the very characteristics that made him that person. In the same way that discreet bits of myself can be given back to me, so I can be given to myself in toto and appreciate receiving and being in possession of myself. This sense of ‘gift’ is more analogical than descriptive, life is not strictly a gift, given by one person to another, but an unfettered beneficence that is experienced as being like a gift. It is something I value immensely, and something I did nothing to deserve or earn. I could have done nothing to deserve or earn it, but yet I still have it. It is the all-time great freebie.

^[32] Thus there is no great difficulty in talking, at least analogically, about receiving the gift of life. There is some cost associated with turning to analogy for analogies are always weaker than direct descriptions, but the gift of life argument still has some traction at this point. However, once we look at the idea of rejecting or returning the gift, the argument against suicide runs into its greatest difficulties.

^[33] A fundamental question that the proponents of the gift of life injunction against suicide must answer concerns life’s duration. Is the gifted life a finite span of years on earth or an eternal life here and elsewhere? The ‘gift of life’ often seems to refer to our corporeal existence here on earth—that which has an allotted span of fourscore years and ten (D.v.). When Locke tells us we may not ‘quit [our] station willfully,’ and the Catholic Church says that ‘life is a good that must bear fruit already here on earth,’ the implication is that life means life in the earthly here and now. Yet the Declaration on Euthanasia can still say ‘It is true that death marks the end of our earthly existence, but at the same time it opens the door to immortal life.’ [10] The question has to be asked, therefore, does the gift of life refer to the finite span of an earthly existence or does it refer to an eternal life, whatever and wherever that may be?

^[34] If the gift is of a finite span of years, then it is possible to see how one could reject or return it in the same way that one received it. It is not that I existed and was then given the gift of life, but that the gift brought me into existence. Likewise, it is not that I return the gift and then continue to exist, albeit in a somewhat impoverished condition, in the realm from which I came, but rather that I choose to cease to exist. Of course, this time I am in greater control over the process. I can choose to end my existence but I cannot choose to initiate it.

^[35] However, the cost of this alternative is immensely high and the idea that the gift of life is a gift of a finite number of years after which one no longer exists at all is not one that proponents of the injunction against suicide will find appealing. First there is the question of punishment. While a no-longer-existing person can certainly be blamed for an action, they cannot be punished and one of the sanctions against suicide is the threat of eternal punishment for what Aquinas called ‘the unrepentable sin.’ If I cease to exist when I return the gift I can hardly be punished for returning it. Second, and more devastating, is that thinking of the gift of life as a gift of a finite number of years means giving up on the central belief in immortal life and giving that up in order to save the argument is far too high a price to pay. So it looks as if the gift cannot be of a finite life. However the alternative, that the gift of life is the gift of unending existence, brings with it an even more serious problem.

^[36] If, when I am created ex nihilo I am given an everlasting existence, albeit in a succession of forms, then I can never reject that gift. Death, the Declaration says, ‘opens the door to immortal life.’ As long as there is any sense in which it is truly I that have the eternal life, as long as the I that was given the gift of life is the same I that goes on to immortal life, I have not rejected the gift. As long as I am I, I cannot reject the gift.

^[37] It would seem, then, that the gift of life argument, as an injunction against suicide, has some fatal flaws. The ‘gift’ can either be interpreted literally or analogically. If it is interpreted literally there are serious problems in understanding who it is that receives the gift. If it is understood analogically the question arises whether the gift is understood to be a finite or everlasting existence. If it is a finite existence then (a) it is hard to see how I could be punished for bringing that existence to an end for I will not be around to be punished, although I could clearly be blamed in the same way we blame Stalin for the gulags, and (b) a finite existence means giving up the idea of eternal life at all, a price that is too high to pay. But if the existence is infinite it is impossible to see how one can be punished for ending one’s life because one cannot end it. As long as the I that goes on to immortal life is the same as the I whose body was received by the mortuary then I am not dead in the sense of no longer existing. And if I am not dead I can hardly be punished or blamed for killing myself.

^[38] It is at this point that the gift of life argument fundamentally loses traction as an argument for the immorality of suicide. The argument can survive the problem of consistency and the problem of freedom. It can even negotiate the problem of receiving the gift of life by construing that gift as a boon experienced by the being that was brought into existence by the gift. It cannot, however, effectively deal with the problem of what it means to return the gift – either the gift is a gift of a finite number of years in which case it can be returned early but only at the cost of giving up the idea of the immortal soul, or the gift is the gift of eternal life, albeit in a series of forms, in which case it cannot be returned. Suicide is not returning the gift of life, it is just choosing to exercise that gift in one realm rather than another.

^[39] I said at the outset of this paper that there were two aspects to this discussion of the gift of life argument, that of the injunction against suicide and that of the explanation for why lives are valuable. Even if the injunction against suicide fails this does not mean that the explanation of why lives are valuable fails along with it. It seems to me that understanding the gift of life literally, as an object or property transferred from God to me, brings with it insurmountable metaphysical difficulties but that understanding it metaphorically, as a gratuitous and wonderful boon we experience, does touch on what makes individual lives so precious. For us the unearned nature of that which is the precondition for all our pleasures invests it with a particular significance. For others the extraordinary contingency that such a person, singular and unlike any other, should exist in this way at this time invests them with a degree of worth. Like any substance that is valuable because it is rare, the unique have value in their singularity; when they are gone there is no way, this side of science fiction, to replace them.

^[40] To understand the gift of life in this way is to understand some of why we invest individuals with a value that is not related to their extrinsic benefits. Of course, to understand the gift of life in this way requires no recourse to a creative God. My existence is just as contingent (and unlikely) if I am the result of blind evolution and the random force of genetics as it is if God conceived me in a moment of free creative force. When Pierre de Leplace was asked why he did not believe in God he replied, ‘Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis,’ and indeed it seems that we have no need of a creative deity to invest the idea of life as a gift with meaning. But lacking that foundation does not mean that the idea can not still capture an important moral verity. [11]