Personal, Philosophical, and Religious: The Morality of Death

“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” - Benjamin Franklin

“There are, aren't there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it.” - C. S. Lewis

“Death solves all problems – no man, no problem.” - Joseph Stalin

“The goal of all life is death.” - Sigmund Freud

Death is a particularly uncomfortable subject, and not one I've written on in any detail lately. In fact, this isn't an entry about death, but my attitudes toward it, and how they've changed lately. I touched the topic briefly when I covered abortion and the death penalty a while ago, when I said that souls are sacred but lives are frequently a waste of good material. That about summarizes what I've thought for at least ten years at this point: death is inevitable, and in the objective sense it's good. It's sad for the people who are personally affected by the loss, but it's good news for everyone else because it's one fewer mouth to feed and the available resources to the rest of us just got that much more available.


Someone shared a link to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast recently.




@HardcoreHistory
DanCarlin.com

Dan talked about the Mongol conquests at length and he opened the first episode with two thoughts. One was about the his ethnic Chinese history professor insisting that you can't write about that level of death and destruction without including the human cost of it. You can't just focus on weapons systems and politics and tactics and just ignore the fact that between 20 and 80 million people died as a result of the Mongols' expansion. The second idea, the first thing he says in the first episode, is how controversial it would be to write about the good aspects of the Nazi regime and what benefit came of it. In fact, it's probably controversial to even mention that idea out of context, and I'd like to explain that I'm not a Nazi sympathizer, or admirer of Hitler, or think that they did the right thing at all. But where Dan brought the ideas together, his quasi-rhetorical point was about our ability to dismiss everyone the Mongols killed in analysis of what they did, while being unable to separate out everyone the Nazis killed from what they did.

This sort of brings me to my point: it doesn't matter so much how many people the Mongols killed because everyone they didn't kill still died. In fact, so did the Mongols involved. It's much harder to feel sympathy for someone who died a horrible death in the 1300s because no matter how it happened or how old they were at the time or what they did with their lives, every last person living then died anyway. And when you take that idea along with the Nazi comparison, the reason we still feel so strongly about their holocaust is because there are still people alive who survived it. It's worth taking a minute to think about the fact that the last veterans of World War I and the last survivors of the Titanic have all died recently. On one level, there are now no survivors of either event. You might ask yourself what was the point of surviving something if you're going to die anyway.

The idea that the nature of a person's death matters more than whether they died is not new. If you look up quotations about death, sort of like the ones I started with, you can find lots of conflicting and even contradictory philosophies about it. Of course, most people would say it was indeed worth surviving World War I or the Titanic, and that it made a huge difference to the people in question, and that's right. Everyone's life and death means a lot to them and to the people around them. But to the rest of us? Can you name any of the last survivors of the Titanic? Is your life any different because they didn't die in 1912 with the rest? Or if that one does personally affect you, how about the Civil War? There's nobody left from that either, and the nature of those who lived and died in that conflict carried on long after it was over. The last “Civil War Widow” died within the past 20 years, so law on the books was affected by whether people survived that war or not. Did it matter to you?

Why don't people think Stalin was as evil as Hitler when he killed more people? Why don't people think Genghis Khan was as evil as either when he killed more than both of them put together? The thing is, we don't consider death to be as evil as deliberate killing, and deliberate killing takes a back seat to the deliberate targeting and cruel treatment of specific portions of the population. In other words, what Hitler did wasn't wrong because people died, but because of who died and how. Stalin targeted Jews as well, just not as much. And Genghis didn't target anybody. He and his successors killed whoever they ran into, from Genghis's older brother to the last Shah of the Abassid Caliphate.

Of course, all of those examples are war deaths, and all of them arguably murders. But how should we feel about death as a whole? This is what I have been thinking about lately, and I'm on the edge of undecided territory. As I said, my general opinion is that death is good for the survivors. For Christians, death is good for everybody. Philippians 1:21 says “to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” If you're a faithful Christian, how could you not desire your own death, and the death of every Christian you know and care about? The sooner we die, the sooner we leave this world of pain and suffering and go on to our reward. I know this seems a tad unusual, and I'm not suicidal or homicidal, but that doesn't mean I'm sad to hear when a fellow Christian, especially one who's been sick and in pain for a while, finally gets released. It's hard on their families of course, just like it was hard on us when my grandmother died, but I'm still glad she's not sick anymore.

My opinions over the past five years have been even further down that road, though. If it's a good thing to let people go, and to let ourselves go so we don't have to bother with this anymore, then is it a bad thing to save lives? Is curing fatal diseases and preventing accidents only making things worse? I'm not arguing we shouldn't be feeding the hungry: if people are going to live, it only makes sense that their lives should be as painless as possible. But if people are dying anyway, is it sensible, or even good, to keep as many people alive as we can?


Until recently, I would have said no, that saving lives and taking lives were equally wrong morally, even if they weren't the same thing socially. I also have had a strong condemnation of giving birth. That's just making things worse for everybody. There aren't any problems that couldn't be solved by a reduced population. Lives were much shorter and fewer in number two hundred years ago, and while we might argue that those people didn't have the same quality of life we do today I think there's a serious case to be made that they were happier in their short and supposedly worse lives than we are with ours. My generation is going to be the first in American history that isn't going to live as long as the one before it, and it's largely because we don't want to.


I'm not so sure anymore if that's really the right way to think. I'm not sure what is the right attitude to have towards death now. I know “the more, the better” isn't exactly the most common anyway, but now I'm questioning it objectively. Is it really better to let people die and reduce the strain on resources rather than look for ways to increase those resources? If I could see a friend of mine about to fall to his death, and I could save him, would it be better for all of us, not just for me, to save him than let him go?


I don't think I can answer those questions just yet. Obviously I'd be saddened at the loss of my family and friends, but I certainly wouldn't hold them back, or even myself, if our deaths could benefit the larger species as a whole. I'm still opposed to procreation except for about once in every ten couples, and really for the next 20 years we don't need any at all, but does that mean that every pregnancy is as bad as I've thought of it? If life is for the living, are we better off with more or fewer? What would God want? The Bible is clear that we're not to murder, but there's nothing in there about saving lives. God doesn't care whether we live or die as long as we live obediently and die obediently. So with God's opinion being neutral, how are we to determine the morality of death?

If you know, you may be worth saving.