Many publicly-funded health systems apply cost-benefit frameworks in response to the moral dilemma of how best to allocate scarce healthcare resources. However, implementation of recommendations based on costs and benefit calculations and subsequent challenges have led to ‘special cases’ with certain types of health benefits considered more valuable than others. Recent debate and research has focused on the relative value of life extensions for people with terminal illnesses. This research investigates societal perspectives in relation to this issue, in the UK.

Kant’s most canonical argument against suicide, the universal law argument, is widely dismissed. This paper attempts to save it, showing that a suicide maxim, universalized, undermines all bases for practical law, resisting both the non-negotiable value of free rational willing and the ordinary array of sensuous commitments that inform prudential incentives. Suicide therefore undermines moral law governed community as a whole, threatening ‘savage disorder’. In pursuing this argument, I propose a non-teleological and non-theoretical nature – a ‘practical nature’ or moral (...) law governed whole – the realization of which morality demands. (shrink)

In Ian Brassington’s article in a previous issue of this journal, he argues that suicide for the purpose of avoiding suffering is not, as Kant has contended, contrary to the moral law. Brassington’s objections are not cogent because they rely upon the exegetically incorrect premise that according to Kant the priceless value of personhood is in the noumenal world that we have no perception of. On the basis of Kant’s normative, metaphysical and epistemological theory, I argue, contrary to Brassington, that (...) according to Kant personhood’s moral value is explicitly in the sensible, phenomenal realm. While I argue that suicide solely to avoid suffering is immoral, I show that Kant’s normative system allows some acts of suicide to be morally permissible. In the course of the discussion of the value of humanity’s rationality and the immorality of suicide, I will discuss the broader modern medical ethical implications of Kant’s arguments, such as the moral impermissibility of using rationality depriving drugs, such as ketamine, solely to avoid pain. (shrink)