Stewart-Williams, still excerpting from his book,
continues to use the name of Darwin in an incantatory way to defend things that have nothing to do with Darwin one way or another. In this case it is euthanasia and voluntary suicide. And his argument is extraordinarily weak; it boils down to the claim that since human life is not infinitely valuable (as his
muddled argument last time was intended to prove), "then there is no reason to assume that the duty to preserve human life should always take precedence over other considerations". But this is simply confused; since not all arguments for exceptionless prohibitions are based on claims about infinite value, the most that one could say if human life is not of infinite value is that there is no reason to assume that the duty to preserve human life should always take precedence if the infinite value of human life is the only thing to be considered. But there are any number of other things that enter into these assessments; consistency, for instance, or overall consequences. (On the other side, it should be noted that infinite value of human life does not of itself rule out suicide absolutely; infinite value overbalances any finite value, but we are still left with the question of how to handle cases where the scales are weighted with infinite values all around. A concrete case would be where one's own suicide would save someone else's life. Thus the infinite value thesis is not only not a necessary condition for the prohibition, it isn't a sufficient one, either. It is merely one element capable of contributing to an overall case.)
It's interesting to compare and contrast Stewart-Williams's argument with
Hume's argument in favor of voluntary suicide, to which it is considerably inferior, for all that Hume wrote before Darwin. And even Hume was in some parts simply updating even older Stoic arguments for suicide.
ADDED LATER: Stewart-Williams ends his post with an argument that suicide, although permissible, should not be undergone lightly:
The evolutionary process that gave us life involved the suffering of untold millions of people and other animals. Does this not oblige us to cherish our existence if we possibly can, to make the most of the life that our forebears unwittingly bequeathed us with their torments and agonies?
To which the obvious answer is, "No, why would it?" And this really is one of the problems with Stewart-Williams's arguments so far: he keeps making claims about obligations, but appears to have no substantive account of what makes something an obligation -- none, at least, that can be discerned from his arguments.
