ABSTRACT
Hobbes founds his political philosophy on the premise that human beings universally and innately seek to embrace and preserve their lives. Thus he allows for a sole right of nature, the right to self-preservation. Hobbes’s (in)famous depiction of the state of nature in Chapter 13 of Leviathan is intended to stir terror and make the reader receptive to his call for absolute sovereignty as a necessary precondition for human physical safety. His powerful depiction of the war of all against still has the power to give readers pause even in the most peaceable countries in contemporary society. The effect would have been heightened in Hobbes’s century whose everyday conditions --- never mind the condition of civil war he describes so vividly – entailed a precarious hold on life. The constant threats of disease, high rates of infant mortality, maternal death, were the regular condition of all Europeans regardless of social rank. Since the seventeenth century, advances in technology and medicine have dramatically added to the quality and span of human life. Indeed, the natural world and its resources face pressure precisely because of the successes of developments in technology and medicine. Technologies which make food available for billions of people, medicines and treatments for a myriad of diseases which were historically catastrophic, have allowed for a dramatic enhancement of the quality and span of human life that would have been unimaginable in the seventeenth century. Indeed one dilemma which confronts the modern state and citizens is a direct consequence of these successes: the demand for the right to physician assisted suicide. The state must now contend with the fact that there are many do not wish to avail themselves of all these marvelous medical advances but also when afflicted by a tragic illness wish to commit suicide, consciously, and with the assistance of a medical doctor. In so many ways this quintessentially modern dilemma clashes with the founding assumptions of Hobbes’s philosophy. How, then, is it possible to make sense, from a Hobbesian perspective, of contemporary debates concerning demands to sanction legally a right to die? In this chapter I will think through some of the problems connected to the issue and argue that while this demand may initially seem incompatible with Hobbesian premises it may be reconciled with them.
