A Right of Self‐Termination?Author(s): J. David VellemanSource: Ethics, Vol. 109, No. 3 (April 1999), pp. 606-628Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/233924Accessed: 22-09-2016 16:49 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusteddigital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information aboutJSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available athttp://about.jstor.org/termsThe University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toEthicsThis content downloaded from 128.205.114.91 on Thu, 22 Sep 2016 16:49:48 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/termsA Right of Self-Termination?*J. David VellemanGetting cancer changed my feelings about people who smoke.I remember hearing a fellow philosopher expound, with a wave ofhis cigarette, on his right to choose whether to live and die smoking, orto quit and merely survive. I was just beginning a year of chemotherapy,and mere survival sounded pretty good to me. But I was the visitingspeaker, and my hosts were unaware of my diagnosis. Several of them litup after dinner as we listened to their colleague’s disquisition—they withamused familiarity, I with an outrage that surprised even me and wouldhave baffled them, if I had dared to express it. That I didn’t dare is acause for regret even now, ten years after the fact.One objection was already clear to me at the time. A few months withcancer had taught me that a tumor rarely invades a region smaller thanan extended family.Physically, the cancer was confined to my body, but even in that re-spect it was difficult to regard as mine. The tumor cells were growing inmy bone marrow, which didn’t live up to its poetic billing as the core ofmy being. The marrow in my bones, I discovered, was as foreign to me asthe far side of the moon: it was, in a sense, my far side—unseen, insen-sate—its depth inside me being a measure of remoteness rather thanintimacy. Of course, this fertile gunk in my pelvis and skull was also mysole source of blood cells, and my life depended on it. But so did the lifeof my sons’ father, my wife’s husband, my parents’ son, my brothers’brother, and I was never sure who among us would suffer the greaterharm if that life ran out of gunk.606Ethics 109 (April 1999): 606 – 628q 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/99/0903-0006$02.00* Work on this article was supported by a fellowship from the National Endowmentfor the Humanities, and by a sabbatical leave from the College of Literature, Science, andthe Arts, University of Michigan. An earlier and very different version was presented to thephilosophy department and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences atMichigan State University. I received helpful comments on that version from ElizabethAnderson and Stephen Darwall, both of whom have also contributed significantly to mythinking on this subject through their published work. I also received comments from BetteCrigger and an anonymous referee for the Hastings Center Report. For comments on thepresent version, I am grateful to Sally Haslanger, Connie Rosati, Tamar Schapiro, and BrianSlattery.This content downloaded from 128.205.114.91 on Thu, 22 Sep 2016 16:49:48 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/termsListening to my host laugh at his future cancer, I wondered whetherhe realized how many others would share it. What I would have said ontheir behalf, however, wouldn’t have expressed my strongest feelings,which were felt on my own behalf, in a sense that I couldn’t articulate. Iwas somehow offended, insulted. Watching smoke curl from the lips ofpeople unmindful of my mortality, I felt as I probably would feel listeningto anti-Semitic remarks directed at another person by a speaker unawarethat I, too, was a Jew. I was witnessing an insult to a group of which I wasalso a member.This symposium isn’t about the right to smoke, of course; it’s about theright to die. Not surprisingly, however, these rights tend to be articulatedin the same terms. A person claiming either right might describe it, forinstance, as a right ‘‘to live and die in the light of . . . his own convictionsabout why his life is valuable and where its value lies.’’I can’t recall whether the speaker in my story used these exact words,but I seemed to hear his voice again when I read them in the New YorkReview of Books, under the title ‘‘The Philosophers’ Brief.’’1This brief hadbeen submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a challenge tostatutes outlawing physician-assisted suicide. Reading it, I once again felta collective slight, and this time I couldn’t miss which group was beingslighted.So I think that I can now explain why I was once offended by onephilosopher’s defense of smoking, and the explanation leads me to re-ject The Philosophers’ defense of assisted suicide as well. As for assistedsuicide itself, however, I don’t know what to think. The complexities ofthe issue have thus far defeated my attempts to arrive at a settled posi-tion. On the policy question posed by this symposium, then, I am neitherPro nor Con. I’m, like, Not So Fast.The principle quoted above, which would settle the issue quickly, can bederived from two broader principles. The first principle is that a personhas the right to make his own life shorter in order to make it better—tomake it shorter, that is, if doing so is a necessary means or consequenceof making it a better life on the whole for him. The second principle isthat there is a presumption in favor of deferring to a person’s judgmenton the subject of his own good. Together, these principles imply that aperson has the right to live and die, in particular, by his own convictionsabout which life would be better for him.For the smoker in my story, of course, shortening his life was not aVelleman A Right of Self-Termination? 6071. Ronald Dworkin et al., ‘‘Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers’ Brief,’’ New York Reviewof Books 44 (March 27, 1997): 41– 47. The brief was submitted in the case of Washingtonet al. v. Glucksberg et al. Links to briefs and opinions in this case can be