The Nobel Prize–winning author and psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s death last year was the result of an assisted suicide, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Kahneman, the Israeli American author of books including Thinking, Fast and Slow and Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, co-written with Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, died in March 2024 at the age of 90. The day before his death, he emailed friends the message, “This is a goodbye letter I am sending friends to tell them that I am on my way to Switzerland, where my life will end on March 27.”
Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, and has been since 1941. Notable people who have ended their lives in the country include opera conductor Edward Downes and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.
Jason Zweig, the Wall Street Journal journalist who reported the story of Kahneman’s suicide and who was friends with him for nearly 30 years, wrote, “I think Danny wanted, above all, to avoid a long decline, to go out on his terms, to own his own death. Maybe the principles of good decision-making that he had so long espoused—rely on data, don’t trust most intuitions, view the evidence in the broadest possible perspective—had little to do with his decision.”
In the New York Times, philosophy professors Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer wrote that Kahneman told them in an interview days before his death, “I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done. I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the U.S., the national suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
