from hopeless and irremediable agony. Social attitudes toward other forms
of suicide remain obstructive. It needs to be established that suicide can be
rational as a preemptive choice and act.

What follows is devoted to showing how an aging individual may
rationally choose to commit what I call "preemptive suicide," which differs
from surcease suicide or self-destruction forced by immediate torment and
desperation. The point of preemptive suicide isn't escaping actual, intol-
erable circumstances, but avoiding foreseen demeaning decline and need-
less suffering. I intend what follows as a contribution to broad societal
reconsideration of suicide as an elective choice, rather than only as the most
drastic response to irremediable wretchedness.

The question most basic to my project is whether suicide can be rational:
whether suicide can be a fully warranted course of action, the deliberation
and enactment of which meet established standards of sound reasoning and
equally sound valuation of options and relevant factors. The answer to this
question is most straightforward in cases of surcease suicide, or when reason
and values recommend and warrant suicide because there's really no other
option. Paradigms of these cases are those where individuals are in agony
that can't be alleviated and can be escaped only through death. Yet, as will
emerge in the course of this book, suicide can be rational in cases where
there isn't any contextual coercion of this sort.

In contrast with rational suicide are self-destruction that is arational
because of pathological circumstances, and self-destruction that is irra-
tional because of impaired reasoning or unwarranted valuations of circum-
stances and prospects. However, "rational" has several different
contextually determined senses, and to claim that suicide can be rational
is to say several different things about the taking of one's own life. What
concerns me, and is at the heart of my project, is whether suicide can make
good sense; whether it can be coherent to choose to die for anticipatory
reasons, or whether there's some conceptual inconsistency in a living
being's electing to cease to live except as escape from insupportable
torment. Reference to coherence and consistency shouldn't be taken as the
posing of a purely logical question. The issue isn't a logical or abstractly
formal one about whether it's contradictory to exist yet choose not to exist.
Existing and choosing not to exist are a fact and an intention, which can't
conflict in the same way that two propositions conflict when one contra-
dicts the other. The coherency issue is one of whether we're capable of fully

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