Do We Ever Have a Duty to Die?

Abstract

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist analogy to justify a woman’s right to abort an unintended pregnancy may not have succeeded in its primary aim, since it can be argued that she did not properly distinguish between killing and not saving someone’s life, but it is very useful to use as a starting point in exploring the issue of whether we ever have a duty to die. In this chapter I consider this well-known case from a different perspective, as well as five other cases. In each of the six cases, it might be said that a person has a duty to die. I use these cases to explore our intuitions on this subject and, at the end, I draw some conclusions about whether one could conceivably ever have a duty to die.

I argue that it is extremely difficult to find a case (although not impossible) in which it can be said that we have a duty to die. I think that it can also be said that for the most part, the stronger the obligation to perform an action that will lead to one’s death, the less likely it is to be a situation that could be characterized as having a duty to die. Although it is generally true that we do not ever have a duty to die, sometimes we do not have the right to something that may be necessary to sustain our lives.