“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (Camus, 1955, p. 1).
There has been a shift in recent years on many people’s views of suicide. In Canada, for example, we have decided that doctor assisted suicide is moral enough to warrant legalization (Parliment of Canada). In a collection of his writings, French philosophical writer Michel Foucault (2010) discusses the notion of “bio-power” (p. 257). He posits that the state held sovereignty of the power of life and death until, “[i]n concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved.” (p. 261). Foucault goes on to discuss this “bio-power” in terms of sexual liberation, along with the decriminalization of attempted suicide that occurred in the United Kingdom in 1961 (The National Archives). Up until this point, failed suicide attempts could lead to prosecution. Some writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche went as far as to say it was a duty. In, Twilight of Idols and The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche (2003) writes, “In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society” (p. 99). However, this openness to the morality and legality of suicide has not been, and still is not in many people’s minds, the popular view. In this paper I want to analyze the morality of suicide from several perspectives and disciplines. The historical perspective, the sociological perspective, the religious perspective through the religious texts and quasi-religious literature of the Christian worldview, and the philosophical perspective of the more secular view of some contemporary and historical ethical philosophers.
Before we begin to look at the texts, there are a groundwork of presuppositions that must be laid out. The first being that we need to analyze whether it is even reasonable to consider suicide a moral injunction. For the purposes of this paper, we will take for granted that for an action to be considered for moral judgment there are two criteria that must be met. Firstly, the action taken needs to be made consciously. Without conscious choice as a presupposition we run into the position of being able to pass moral judgement upon actions taken by inanimate objects such as volcanoes erupting, hurricanes, or even unconscious states such as acts committed during sleepwalking. Secondly, the action needs to affect the person acting, or other individuals, adversely. The second presupposition we can easily take for granted because not only is the person who commits suicide adversely affected, but so too are the person’s loved ones they leave behind. In contrast to this second presupposition, the first presupposition is a debateable issue depending on your worldview. It is obviously the case that the person who commits suicide does in most cases choose to do so, yet many contend that if the causes of this choice are unconscious, then the decision is not truly a conscious one. Spinoza (1996) in his work, Ethics, said, “No one, I say, avoids foods or kills himself from the necessity of his own nature. Those who do such things are compelled by external causes ” (p. 192) . For example, if someone is severely depressed by nature of a predisposition to depression in their family and they commit suicide, did they consciously do it? Or were they simply a slave to their depression? Likewise, there are cases of accidental suicide that occur due to conscious action, such as accidental ingestion of toxins, or stumbling off a building. Although a conscious action is to blame, the conscious intention was not there, so how can we pass that moral judgement onto the victim? I will elucidate further on this notion of intention later, but for the rest of this paper we will need to take for granted that suicide is a decision suitable for moral judgement, as historically this has been the popular worldview.
Historically speaking, the primary conjecture that the Christian worldview presents against suicide can be made most clear in how suicide was referenced before the term was coined. There were several Latin words most commonly used in antiquity to describe suicide. The two most common end up being translated in three ways based on context: “guilty of immorality against themselves”, “self murder”, and “self slaughter”. Many of the sources cited in this paper end up with one of these three translations, which makes the first argument against the morality of suicide quite oblique. It was taken for granted that suicide should be considered in the same light as murder for centuries, for example in ,The City of God, Saint Augustine (1984) writes, “[f]or it is clear that if no one has the private right to kill even a guilty man (and no law allows this) then certainly anyone who kills himself is a murderer, and is more guilty in killing himself the more innocent he is of the charge on which he has condemned himself to death” and, “[f]or when Judas killed himself, he killed a criminal, and yet when he ended his life guilty not only of Christ’s death but also of his own; one crime led to another.” (p. 27). There are several justifications for this line of reasoning present in the bible, however two of the most oblique are, “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him;”(Deuteronomy 30:19) and the commandment, “[t]hou shalt not murder”(Exodus 20:13). Even in the famous work, The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri (2013) there is a reference to this assumed immorality when Dante enters, “[t]he woods of the violent against themselves” in hell, “[m]en once we were, and now we are changed to trees; Indeed, thy hand should be more pitiful, even if the souls of serpents we had been” (p. 97).
Even though The Suicide Act in the United Kingdom was put in place in 1961 (The National Archives), there were several writers who wrote not only of the freedom to commit suicide, but even the moral obligation to under certain circumstances. Marcus Aurelius (2006) wrote in, Meditation, “A man of any sense and sensitivity would depart the company of men without ever tasting falsehood, pretense of any kind, excess or pomp” (p. 84), and Plato (2007) in his work, The Republic, wrote, “No, he thought that no treatment should be given to the man who cannot survive the routine of his ordinary job, and who is therefore of no use either to himself or society” (p. 105). The two common themes in this view are that the morality of suicide is a matter of values. They are not necessarily saying that suicide is moral, but rather that for Marcus Aurelius, moral righteousness, and for Plato, duty, are more valuable than life. Aristotle (2004) makes this point very clear in, The Nicomachean Ethics, where he writes, “[b]ut to kill oneself to escape from poverty or love or anything else that is distressing is not courageous but rather the act of a coward, because it shows weakness of character to run away from hardships, and the suicide endures death not because it is a fine thing to do but in order to escape from suffering” (p. 141). Clearly in these cases, the circumstances are the adjudicator of the morality of the action. This is unlike Augustine’s (1984) view, but, there is hypocrisy in this, as he equates suicide with murder, though goes on to say that murder is morally permissible when asked by God or forced by the state (p. 32). Clearly there are cases when murder is reasonable, so what if someone is asked by God or the state to kill himself? Some would argue for example that Jesus committed suicide in a sense to cleanse the sins of humanity. Jesus before dying says about his life, “[n]o one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” (John 10:18). So, it seems that the Greco-Roman, and Catholic view, do not differ as much as they initially seemed to. Unfortunately, this means that contrary to what was said earlier, Greco-Roman, and Catholic worldviews suggest that unless you are in a vary narrow set of circumstances, suicide is immoral.
I want to end this paper exploring one final aspect of the question of the morality of suicide. Is suicide a rational choice? At first, this may seem to have nothing to do with morality, but there have been examples throughout history of individuals who try to deductively reason morality, from Spinoza’s (1996), Ethics, , to John Stuart Mills’ (2007), Utilitarianism, , to even more contemporary examples such as Sam Harris’ (2010), The Moral Landscape . Additionally, if intention is paramount in determining the morality of suicide as has been presented earlier, then if suicide is rational there is an argument to be made that you are simply following your faculty of reason to commit it. Spinoza (1996), for example, states that suicide is illogical, since all things strive for self preservation unless provoked externally (p. 192). A line of reasoning that is relevant to this debate is a question of whether life has intrinsic meaning. The argument goes that if life has no meaning, then there is no rational reason to continue living. This would satisfy Spinoza’s criteria of an external force to humanity, being that rational thought tells you that you should. The religious can put their life meaning in serving a God or gods, but the secular is seemingly out of luck. Existential philosophies, such as absurdism, seek to tackle this existential void and provide alternative meanings to life that would argue that life does have meaning, and provide a reason not to commit suicide. Albert Camus’ (1955), The Myth of Sisyphus, is an entire book dedicated to secular existential reasons not to commit suicide. Several philosophers propose that suicide is a purely rational solution to existential dread and needs further examination to contend with. Nietzsche (2017) in, Beyond Good and Evil, writes, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night” (p. 86) , implying that suicide as an intellectual exercise can provide comfort. You can then rationalize suicide as an attempt to improve one’s wellbeing through the avoidance of continuous suffering. Consequently, it could be argued that utilitarianism would validate suicide as moral (Mill, 2007). Therefore, in large part, this question comes down to your ideology. If you get your morality from Greco-Roman/Catholic notions of morality, then it seems to be immoral in almost all circumstances. However, if you are secular there seems to be room for debate on this question
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