Do we own our own lives? A discussion on the morality of suicide and voluntary slavery.

[The Grand Nudger]

A few days ago I was having a discussion with a very religious friend of mine, and we found ourselves talking about the morality of suicide.

Personally I don't think that suicide is a morally deplorable act. I never had any serious suicidal thoughts, since I love life and its endless possibilities, but I can understand how a person could rationally come to the conclusion to end his life, and according to my opinion it should be within his or her rights to do so.

My friend accepted that his religious argument against suicide (i.e. "god is the real owner of your life") doesn't work if you don't believe in a god, but he brought up a really interesting argument based only on rationality alone.

He argued that if we reject slavery we claim that a human lives can't be owned or used as objects. According to my friend this means that you can't end your life because it doesn't belong to you (regardless of the existence of a god who owns it).

I countered his argument with the idea that every human being owns his own life. We reject slavery not because lives can't be owned, but because the lives of a person belongs to him and not to another person.

My friend replied that if I were right, we should approve voluntary slavery. If we own our lives, we should be able to sell them, like any other item that we own.

I didn't (and still don't) have a strong argument against this conclusion, but I don't really like the idea of voluntary slavery being morallly acceptable.

So I thought to bring these questions to the forums and to see what other people think of it. Is suicide morally acceptable? Do we own our own lives? And if we do, can we sell them to someone else?

The current concept of rights that we hold is that some rights are not subject to waiver. Specificlly the right to self determination, in this context. One of the reasons for this is that no corrective or punitive means to compel another (who has sold themselves to you, for example) is consistent with our application of rights. "Selling ones self" would abrogate the right to self determination, in any case-to which we assign a greater value than the right of ownership. Its a concept called (by some) primacy.

Some rights, as the foundations or fundamental underpinnings of others, take center stage when two rights may -in some scenario- come to odds with each other.