Are there any philosophical arguments against self-harm?
Suppose I decide to live an unhealthy bohemian lifestyle. Doctors warned me that I am cutting my life short, but I don't care. Friends tell me they don't want me to die of old age, yet I have no desire nor intention of achieving old age. If I am not hurting anyone else, only shortening my life span, I ought to be able to do that. Yet, I feel that it is wrong for me to make decisions that cause self-harm.
I wonder if anyone knows of a philosophical position that suggests self-harm is wrong?
I wonder if anyone knows of a philosophical position that suggests self-harm is wrong?
Comments (31)
Passive activities or casual hobbies that degenerate or increase in an observable way factors that detriment health. Opposed to active self harm. Which usually involves others just saying.
Not sure "where you be" per se but unless you live in a society where neighbors toss their dead into the woods to be eaten by wolves... someone pays for it. One way or the other.
At what point does preference become self harm? Some things inflict more self harm than others, how do you determine what amount is ok or not?
Also, ate you talking ethically permissible self harm, or using some other goal/metric.
I purposely structured my OP to provide a scenario where I didn't harm anyone else.
It's all hypothetical in which I've yet to determine whether self-harm is wrong in the first place. One thing at a time.
Quoting DingoJones
It could be ethical, or existential. I'm thinking of Camus's reason why we shouldn't commit suicide.
Ok, well perhaps a distinction between different types of self harm would be helpful? Some things are more pure self harm, like stabbing yourself in the eye, while other things have a clear trade-off like eating junk food or going to the beach and suffering harm from the sun. You trade harm for pleasure of experience.
Would that kind of cost/benefit analysis be useful forvwhst yiu have in mind?
I don't think you need a philosophical argument why you shouldn't stab yourself in the eye. It's just plain stupid. I'm talking about cases where you get something out of it. I mentioned in the OP, living a bohemian lifestyle, which might include smoking and gambling.
Utilitarian - taking actions which fail to generate the most utility. Depending on the case, I imagine that a longer, healthier lifespan would facilitate doing more good.
But I am doubtful of that there are 'categorical imperatives' of either kind. Only perfectly ordinary hypothetical imperatives of the form 'if you value X, you ought to do Y'.
Alright, then I dont think you are talking about something that can be said to be ethically wrong. Those are preferences, and a matter if risk managment not morality/ethics.
Explain why you "feel" a potentially life-shortening "bohemian lifestyle" is one of those "decisions that cause self-harm"? After all, there are still plenty of elderly beatniks & hippies around. Sounds more like a question of risk management rather than ethics like DingoJones said. And consider: is pursuing a military career itself - also potentially life-shortening - an ethical problem? I don't think so.
When you gotta go, you gotta go. If there is choice around that, then that is your choice.
I was thinking of chess player Mikhail Tal when I wrote that. His wiki page states that he lived a bohemian lifestyle and that he died relatively young.
Quoting 180 Proof
I'm not sure if I agree with this opinion.
I don't think it is necessary to explain further. I already awarded the answer to @Welkin Rogue, so it's all moot now.
Self-harm is a contradiction since nothing can possibly want to hurt itself. It is only possible to really want what one thinks is good for oneself. If you argue that it is wrong to hurt others because it goes against their will, the same holds true for hurting yourself because it is actually against your own will. If you think you want to hurt yourself, you are simply mistaken about your own will.
The basis of Aristotelean virtue ethics is to be in harmony with one’s nature, and obviously by hurting oneself, one destroys this harmony.
Obviously the immorality of self-harm is one that requires an individual's thought. The immorality of harming others is a belief that is forced on you by others. Most people who think it is immoral to hurt others have no working definition of morality... it's simply whatever reduces negative attention towards them.
Yeah that's another arguable reading. Using the universalisation maxim of the categorical imperative, you could argue that self-harm fails the contradiction in conception test in just the same way that suicide does: the principle that sustains life is being used to oppose it. In neither case do I find the argument compelling, however. Do I necessarily kill myself out of self-love? Do I necessarily harm myself out of self-love or something similar? If not, then it may be perfectly coherent to conceive of a world in which everyone follows a maxim of self-harm.
Suicide is completely justifiable if opted for because of circumstances that are both intolerable and irremdiable e.g. severe pain of cancer. There are other conditions that fit the description "intolerable and irremediable" and it isn't hard to imagine scenarios that leave only one option - death/suicide - as the most rational.
Moral theories too seem to offer little resistance to suicide as justified in certain situations. In other words, no moral codes are violated in taking one's own life, in fact some moral theories may even recommend suicide e.g. utilitarianism suggests a benefit from suicide if done because of extreme suffering and so makes suicide a favorable act.
This from the individual's standpoint.
Coming to society, it's quite clear that just like many employees choosing to leave an organization indicates that something's wrong with that organization, high suicide rates point to issues with the environment in which it occurs. What kind of society/environment has that much of what I called "intolerable and irremdiable" that people are ending their own lives in signficant numbers? On the flipside, what kind of people would consider what is just minor deviations from the normal "intolerable and irremediable"?
This from society's side.
Clearly, suicide is not always a problem of those who take their own lives for there are perfectly good reasons to do it. However, what kind of society is it that generates, and sustains the right conditions to make people encounter what to them are "intolerable and irremediable"?
Suicide is, in this sense, a social disorder.
A very fine, very inventive player.
Well, you're clearly not referring to suicide, so arguments that suicide is immoral clearly are inapplicable. You seem to be referring to living in a not very healthy way. I'm not sure, though, just what you mean by "bohemian" as that normally is used to describe someone socially unconventional and, in the old days, a beatnik. But I assume you're not referring to wearing a beret, smoking, playing bongos and hanging out in coffee houses or jazz clubs listening to Charlie Parker or reading Allen Ginsburg and such.
Provided no one else is harmed, though, I think it would be difficult to maintain it's wrong to be unhealthy.
The only avenue of attack I see against it is the question: "Why are you only yours?", and that way lies madness, jackboots and Philosophy in the Bedroom.
As you wish.
And how does “it is contradictory to hurt yourself” follow from “there is no meaning”? Where is the contradiction? How are those two even related?
At a given moment people may seemingly want to hurt themselves, and since people do it all the time, that appears to be good evidence for what they wish. But no, all of us do stupid things that we later regret, realizing that we didn’t actually want it. A wish must be considered in a broader perspective. You may feel you want to drink a lot, but then you’ll be badly hung over, and you don’t want that. Still looking back at a last weekend, you may think that the fun you had outweighed your hang-over – it’s debatable. However, when it comes to self-harm that had no perceivable benefits, it’s easy to conclude that the person didn’t really want it beyond the moment of insanity. Cutting off your fingers because you are angry with the world may seem a good idea to a disturbed mind when it happens, but if he ever regained his reason he would understand that he had acted contrary to his own wish.
Now, I may concede that your objection has some merit, only I wouldn’t consider it a harm if it’s a temporary alleviation with no side effects. I have myself combated tooth ache by inflicting some other distracting pain, and it actually felt good in a way. But for that reason and because the contrary pain soon disappeared, it can’t really be counted as self-harm.
The logical conclusion remains: No one can want what is bad for themselves.
If you think you have an obligation to something outside of yourself, to God or society, and also if you think your life has an external meaning, that may provide you with a reason why it would be bad for you to hurt yourself. But then you’d first have to argue for that meaning and obligation and that’s ultimately a matter of belief. However, if we restrict the argument to internal reasons, we avoid that difficulty. A self cannot want to harm itself since it contradicts what it means to be a self.
“ But for that reason and because the contrary pain soon disappeared, it can’t really be counted as self-harm.”
When someone self harms they are doing exactly what you did for your tooth ache. When they self harm the contrary pain (emotional) disappears. For them it is more harmful to sit with their emotions than to cut themselves. The benefit is avoiding a greater pain.
“Moments of insanity” hardly exist. They are not the reason people self harm. If they were self harm would be spontaneous and random not habitual as it almost always is. When people self harm they are doing so precisely because they don’t want what is harmful for them (the emotional pain) and choose a lesser harm.
If your toothache thing doesn’t count as self harm then most self harm wouldn’t count as self harm by your definitions.
BUT, There’s a more interesting Kantian style answer though. This is from David Brink “ The self is not to be identified with any desire or any series or set of desires; moral personality consists in the ability to subject appetites and desires to a process of deliberative endorsement and to form new desires as the result of such deliberations. So the self essentially includes deliberative capacities, and if responsible action expresses the self, it must exercise these deliberative capacities. ... The proper aim of deliberation is a life of activities that embody rational or deliberative control of thought and action.”
I think what he’s trying to say here is that living according to your base desires, let’s say drinking beer all day, or whatnot is not a true exercise of your rational capabilities. Therefore, it violates your very nature as a rational human being. The exercise of morality is tied up in being a rational being who deliberates. If you choose to not deliberate and just give in to your quickest desires, you are morally wrong because you are violating your very rational, moral nature that qualifies you as an adult human.
That said, a bohemian can live a very fulfilling life dedicated to art and creativity. Not every bohemian is necessarily Charles Burkowski on a weekend bender.
If the harm they choose is indeed a lesser harm, it is not a matter of self-harm at all. We do that all the time. A student goes through the pain of doing homework to avoid the greater pain of flunking the exam. So a person may conceivably cut himself to escape an emotional pain if the physical pain is really smaller. If that is the case, this example is just like any other instant of sacrifice for a greater good. But sometimes that immediate relief from emotional pain will later cause more pain than what it was meant to relieve. The cutting may cause permanent damage and end up making everything worse, but the person, maybe understandably, had no thought of that at the moment of anguish. It is still not what he really wanted, because he couldn’t possibly want to make everything worse than it already was. Our immediate action, what we think we want at the moment of decision, is not always what we really want once we have thought it soberly through (that’s what I meant by “insanity”, not in the literal sense)
Self-harm in the proper sense, that is something that does more harm than good in total, is not something we can possibly want, since everyone wants what is good for oneself. Self-harm, hurting oneself against one’s wish, is therefore immoral.