The Choice to Live as Pre-Moral, What Would the Choice Not to Live Be?

The more I think about the decision to live as pre-moral, the more confusing I find it.

We simply are alive, and most of us never make a conscious choice to live. The issue we actually confront is not the choice to live but the choice, of some, to die. The choice to take one’s life does not seem to be pre-moral. Rather, it is the subject of serious moral evaluation, both for the person contemplating suicide and for others who hear that someone has taken his life or attempted to. The person contemplating taking his own life likely asks himself at some point whether doing so is moral; a parent may think it immoral to commit suicide given his chosen responsibilities to his children, and a Japanese businessman might think it immoral to remain alive after losing his job or bankrupting his company. Likewise, I think others properly can pass judgment on the moral legitimacy of a suicide. Granted, they may not have the full context; in particular, they can’t access the data of a person’s psychological state. But they can say, “Well, he had X responsibility, and he totally shirked it, which is immoral.” I don’t see what would be wrong with that. This also seems borne out by Peikoff’s denunciation of the person who decides to commit suicide without good cause (OPAR, 248). If the choice to live were pre-moral, how could we, as outsiders, evaluate that person’s choice?

FWIW, Darryl Wright addresses this question in “Reasoning about Ends,” the lead-off essay in Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue (25-32). His position seems to be that we feel that life is worth living even before thinking about or making the choice that it is. He writes, “If it is not particularly hard to experience one’s life as a value, then there are easily accessible non-deliberative grounds for making the choice to value one’s life.” He suggests there’s something defective about those who don’t “experience one’s life as a value,” and thus “The existence of nondeliberative grounds for the choice [to live] also supplies justification for a negative verdict on those who (again, in some fundamental way, rather than due to evil circumstances) do not value their lives” (29). I don’t disagree that we feel (or “experience,” I don’t know exactly what he means by that term) that life is worth living, but I’m not sure how this really grounds moral judgment about a person who doesn’t feel/experience it and who chooses to commit suicide. If the choice to live were pre-moral, it would be pre-moral and outside the realm of moral judgement. But the basic problem with this whole approach seems to be the idea that this is a choice that we actually confront. Rather, it is our default state, and we confront only the obverse, the choice to die, which, it seems, is not pre-moral.

Finally, to address your question directly, I think what you describe is an accurate description of apathy and depression, but not the choice to die. The choice to die is the choice to pursue a certain, permanent relief from suffering. For him, simply remaining in existence does not solve the problem of psychological and perhaps physical pain.