ETHICS OF SUICIDE

Suicide has been condemned as necessarily immoral by most Western religions and also by many
philosophers. It is argued that suicide defies the will of God, that it is socially harmful and that it is
opposed to ‘nature’. According to Kant, those who commit suicide ‘degrade’ humanity by treating
themselves as things rather than as persons; furthermore, since they are the subject of moral acts, they
‘root out’ morality by removing themselves from the scene.
In opposition to this tradition the Stoics and the philosophers of the Enlightenment maintained
that there is nothing necessarily immoral about suicide. It is sometimes unwise, causing needless
suffering, but it is frequently entirely rational and occasionally even heroic. Judging by the reforms in
laws against suicide and the reactions to the suicides of prominent persons in recent decades, it appears
that the Enlightenment position is becoming very generally accepted.

1 The horror of suicide

The word ‘suicide’ is used here in the sense defined by Emile Durkheim (1897), the leading
sociological writer on the subject. He refers to ‘all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a
positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result’ (see Durkheim,
E. §3). The question of whether suicide can ever be morally justified has been extensively discussed
both by secular philosophers and by religious moralists. According to Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, St
Thomas Aquinas, Kant and Hegel suicide is always morally wrong, although Plato inconsistently
allowed some exceptions. According to another tradition which goes back to Epicurus and the Stoic
philosophers, suicide is not only frequently justified but on occasions highly admirable. ‘Against all
the injuries of life’, wrote Seneca, ‘I always have the refuge of death’. The Stoic view was revived in
the sixteenth century by Montaigne and it had the support of all the leading figures of the French
Enlightenment, notably Montesquieu, Holbach, Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire. David Hume’s ‘On
Suicide’, which could not be published during his lifetime, may be regarded as the classic statement of
the Enlightenment viewpoint. In Germany in the nineteenth century the Enlightenment position was
championed by Schopenhauer and also by Nietzsche, who even went so far as to suggest that
chronically sick people should be encouraged to commit suicide. ‘In a certain state’, Nietzsche wrote in
Twilight of the Idols (1888: §36), ‘it is indecent to live longer - to go on vegetating in cowardly
dependence on physicians and medications, after the meaning of life… has been lost, ought to prompt a
profound contempt in society’.

In the past, the anti-suicide viewpoint was frequently stated with extreme ferocity. Entirely
typical of sermons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is The Guilt, Folly and Sources of Suicide
by Samuel Miller D.D., delivered and published in New York City in 1805. According to Miller suicide
is ‘repugnant to every genuine feeling of human nature’. It is ‘as degrading as it is criminal’. It is a
crime of ‘complicated malignity’ against which ‘man, depraved, afflicted, and covered with evil,
requires to be guarded by restraints’. The person who commits suicide ‘is as great a monster in morals
as an atheist in religion or as the most hideous assemblage of deformities in animal nature’. Writing in
1908, the English poet and novelist G.K. Chesterton (1874-1935) declared suicide to be the worst of all
crimes. ‘Not only is suicide a sin’, according to Chesterton, ‘it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute
evil…. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is
concerned he wipes out the world’. It is of some interest to note that the Talmud contains a similar idea.
We are told that ‘there is none more wicked than one who has committed suicide’. This is so because
the world was created ‘for the sake of one individual’ and ‘thus he who destroys one’s soul is
considered as though he had destroyed the whole world’ (see Bioethics, Jewish §3).
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 If we take Chesterton literally, then Cato, Brutus, Cassius, Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Romilly,
Heinrich von Kleist, Gerard de Nerval, Ludwig Boltzmann, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Wilhelm Stekel,
Stefan Zweig, Ernest Hemingway, Percy Bridgman, Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan, Marilyn Monroe and
Arthur Koestler, to mention just a few, were criminals; and indeed far worse criminals than mass
murderers. Hitler’s extermination of millions of innocent men and women was a lesser crime than his
own eventual suicide. Chesterton did not at all deplore the ‘weird harshness’ that Christianity has
shown to the suicide: ‘The suicide is ignoble… he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the
universe’. We are assured that there is much rational and philosophic truth in the practice of driving
stakes through the bodies of suicides and burying them at crossroads. The suicide ‘was so bad that his
bones would pollute his brethren’ (Kant [1775/80] 1930: 151).

Miller and Chesterton may be dismissed as religious fanatics and marginal figures. Immanuel
Kant was not a religious fanatic and can hardly be dismissed as a marginal figure, but his denunciations
of suicide are just as furious. According to Kant ‘suicide is in no circumstances permissible’. The man
who commits suicide ‘sinks lower than the beasts’. We ‘shrink from him in horror’. ‘Nothing more
terrible can be imagined’. ‘We look upon the suicide as carrion’. If a man attempts suicide and
survives, he has in effect ‘discarded his humanity’ and we are entitled to ‘treat him as a beast, as a
thing, and to use him for our sport as we do a horse or a dog’.

None of these writers showed the slightest compassion for a person who committed suicide, and
their ravings were directed even against philosophers who did show such compassion and who denied
that suicide was necessarily wrong or criminal. Hume in particular was denounced by clerical
enthusiasts. G. Clayton, author of The Dreadful Sin of Suicide (1812: 48n), called Hume’s essay a
‘source of incalculable evil’, and in a huge treatise, A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (1790
vol. 2: 54), Charles Moore denounced Hume as ‘a more pernicious and destructive member of society
than even the profligate and abandoned liver’.

2 Humans as God’s property

According to Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), the influential English jurist, the suicide is guilty
of a double offence. The first of these is ‘spiritual’ and consists in ‘evading the prerogative of the
Almighty, and rushing into his immediate presence’ (Blackstone 1765-9 IV: 189). We evade God’s
prerogative, according to some theologians, because we are God’s property and he alone has the right
to terminate our lives. This argument is found in Plato’s Phaedo (61c) where Socrates remarks that
humans are ‘the possession of the deity’ and ought not to kill themselves before the deity lays them
under a necessity of doing so: ‘if one of your slaves were to kill himself, without your having intimated
that you wished him to die, should you not be angry with him, and should you not punish him if you
could?’ This argument is repeated, almost verbatim, by Aquinas and also by Kant.

Kant relies primarily on purely secular arguments, but at the end of his most extended discussion
of suicide he also appeals to the Divine ownership of man. ‘We have been placed in this world’, he
writes, ‘under certain conditions and for specific purposes. But a suicide opposes the purpose of his
Creator; he arrives in the other world as one who has deserted his post; he must be looked upon as a
rebel against God’. Human beings ‘are sentinels on earth and may not leave their posts until relieved by
another beneficent hand’ (Kant [1775/80] 1930: 154). This notion had already been put forward in
Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. We are there told that all are the ‘servants of one
sovereign Master… they are His property’ and must not ‘quit their station wilfully’ (Locke 1690: §6).

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 The views just quoted are frequently accompanied by pronouncements that God created human
beings primarily for his glory. Zachary Pearce (1690-1774), Bishop of Rochester, may be taken as a
typical representative of this position. In his ‘Sermon on Self-Murder’ (1736), he declares that God had
two ends in view when he created humans. These ‘could have been no other than… the promoting of
His own Glory and Service, and of our true and real happiness’. We promote God’s glory ‘by the
practice of every virtue’. Patience and submission to the Divine Will are virtues that are ‘chiefly
exercised in a state of adversity’. From all of this it clearly follows that suicide is impermissible. ‘The
greater the adversity, the more conspicuous these virtues appear’, and it follows ‘very plainly’ that ‘the
most afflicted man is capable of advancing the honour and interests of his Maker’.

All these arguments are open to a number of serious objections, even if one allows that the
universe was created by God. In the first place, the fact that God created human beings does not mean
that they are his property. My parents created me, but I am not their property. Similarly, the assertion
that God presented me with the gift of life does not imply that I may not dispose of it in any way I
please. A donor surely has no right to dictate to the recipient what they are to do with the gift. It might
also be observed that human beings did not request the gift of life. Schopenhauer in one place remarks
that many a human being ‘would have declined such a gift if he could have seen it and tested it
beforehand’ ([1818] 1883, vol. 3: 390).

Another objection relates to God’s perfect goodness and wisdom. It is not easy to see why such a
being would be so concerned about his own glory, gripped by what Hume called ‘one of the lowest of
human passions, a restless appetite for applause’ ([1777] 1965: 300). Nor is it at all obvious that a
human being in a state of extreme physical or mental agony, especially with no relief or improvement
in sight, would be promoting God’s glory by continuing to live. Moreover, if God is good and kind he
will hardly wish human beings to suffer for his sake.

Furthermore, although it is, according to Kant, ‘God’s intention to preserve life’, this is
apparently consistent with human life being destroyed by all manner of causes other than by suicidal
acts. Why is it not equally consistent with the latter? Kant remarks that ‘human beings are sentinels on
earth and may not leave their posts until relieved by another beneficent hand’ (Kant [1775/80] 1930:
154). Why cannot the desire to die on the part of a person whose ‘patience’, in Hume’s words,has been
‘overcome by pain and sorrow’ qualify as one of the manifestations of such a ‘beneficent hand’? In
such a situation, Hume adds, ‘I may conclude that I am recalled from my station in the clearest and
most express terms’ ([1777] 1965: 301). If it is remembered that ‘relief by the beneficent hand’ may
take such forms as cancer or murder at times when the person very much wishes to live, it is not easy to
see that committing suicide when the individual does not wish to live will not also qualify as relief by
the same hand.

3 Adverse effects on survivors

As mentioned above, Sir William Blackstone condemned suicide as a ‘double offence’. The first,
the ‘spiritual’ offence, was discussed in the previous section. The second offence is ‘temporal, against
the king, who hath an interest in the preservation of all his subjects’. This argument is found in
Aristotle’s Ethics, and stated more fully by Aquinas who writes:

It is altogether unlawful to kill oneself, because every part, as such, belongs to the whole. Now
every man is part of the community, and so, as such, he belongs to the community. Hence by killing
himself he injures the community. (Summa theologiae IIaIIae.64.5)

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 Some writers have been less concerned with harm to the community than with the grief and
suffering that a suicide may bring to friends and family. ‘It is not wisdom but barbarity’, in the words
of the great Italian poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi ([1827] 1893: 225), ‘to reckon as nothing the
grief and anguish of the home circle, the intimate friends and companions’.

A little reflection shows that such considerations fail to establish the conclusion that suicide is
always wrong. The most they show is that a responsible individual would carefully take into account
the effects on others before taking such a drastic step. One need not deny that an individual has
obligations to society or to family and friends. However, apart from the fact that some people have
neither family nor friends and that some people are justly aggrieved against the society in which they
live, there are two objections to all arguments of this kind. In the first place, in any number of
situations, a person’s welfare may rightly take precedence over obligations to others. If by suffering a
little, a person can avoid a great deal of suffering on the part of friends and family or the whole of
society, his suffering is justified. If, on the other hand, the continuation of the person’s life involves
terrible pain, far exceeding the sufferings which their suicide would produce on other people, the
person is not obliged to go on living. Hume discussed this topic at some length. Allowing for the sake
of argument, he writes, ‘that our obligations to do good (to society) were perpetual, they certainly have
some bounds; I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself’
(Hume [1777] 1965: 304). In a great many cases, furthermore, a person who commits suicide acts, at
least in the long run, for the benefit of others. Although death may produce grief it also produces relief.
‘Suppose that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of society’, Hume writes, ‘suppose
that I am a burden to it; suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to
society; in such cases, my resignation of life must not only be innocent, but laudable’. Since we are
here dealing with utilitarian considerations it may not be amiss to observe that the suicide of a
malevolent tyrant may bring great joy to large numbers, and not only to those he has harmed. Millions
of people were happy to hear of Hitler’s death, but the fact that he committed suicide gave greater
satisfaction than if he had died of cancer or heart disease: it was, in effect, an admission of defeat.

4 An offence against nature

One of the most widely used arguments against suicide is that it is opposed to ‘nature’. Thus, in a
much-quoted judgment, Mr Justice Brown in 1562 declared suicide to be a crime on the ground that it
is ‘an offence against nature: because to destroy oneself is contrary to nature, and a thing most
horrible’. In Aquinas the appeal to nature is the first of his three reasons for condemning suicide.
Suicide, he tells us, ‘is contrary to the inclination of nature and to the charity whereby every man
should love himself’ (Summa theologiae IIaIIae.64.5). It follows from this that suicide is ‘always a
mortal sin’. The argument is also found in numerous Protestant tracts of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Samuel Miller employs his usual hell-fire rhetoric. ‘Suicide is repugnant to every genuine
feeling of human nature,’ he tells us. ‘It is an outrage on the dignity of those faculties with which the
Author of Nature has endowed us’. Although most writers who used this argument were believers in
God and also employed theological arguments, the appeal to nature is meant to be of a purely secular
character. Leopardi, a total atheist, expressed himself in similar language. ‘Nature itself’, he wrote,
‘unmistakably teaches that it is not permitted to quit this world by our mere will and our own act’. It is
implied that if humans were to cut off their arms or pluck out their eyes, this would be horrendously
unnatural. Such acts, however, are not nearly as unnatural as to extinguish one’s very life. Such an act
is ‘the one most opposed to nature which a person can commit’ (Leopardi [1827] 1893: 215).

The sufficient answer to this argument is that the suppression of an instinctive urge is not
necessarily wrong. A surgeon who gets extremely hungry in the course of an operation can surely not
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be blamed for suppressing a passionate desire for a roast beef sandwich. Furthermore, instinctive
desires may and frequently do conflict with one another, and then the right action, whatever it is, will
have to frustrate our instincts. It may be granted that our desire to continue life is natural, but it is just
as natural to avoid intolerable pain with no relief in sight. In such a situation suicide may be no less ‘in
accord with nature’ than continuing to live. The best comment on the arbitrariness of the orthodox
position has come from Henry Romilly Fedden in Suicide - A Social and Historical Study (1938). ‘A
monk’, Fedden writes, ‘denies sex, the suicide disregards self preservation: both should be equally
guilty, yet one is a saint and the other a sinner’ ([1938] 1972: 282).

5 Kant’s arguments

Kant appeals not only to the alleged fact that man is God’s property for his blanket rejection of
suicide. He also offers a number of purely secular arguments. Two of these deserve some discussion.
According to one of these, people who commit suicide are ‘abasing’ and ‘degrading’ their humanity by
treating themselves as no more than things:
Man can only dispose of things; beasts are things in this sense; but man is not a thing, not a beast. If he disposes of
himself, he treats his value as that of a beast. He who so behaves, who has no respect for human nature makes a thing
of himself. (Kant [1775/80] 1930: 151)

Kant is surely wildly wrong here. I am treating people as things and debasing their humanity if I
try to dominate them so that they will, under the force of my superior will, automatically do what I
want. Setting aside the notion of treating somebody as a thing, it is unquestionable that people
frequently debase other human beings. I am debasing people if I humiliate them, if I get them to the
point at which, to preserve their jobs which I control, they have to fawn and beg for mercy or to confess
to wrongs they never committed. In such circumstances I have no regard for the others’ feelings,
especially for their pride and dignity. In reply to Kant it must be emphasized that a great many cases in
which people committed or attempted to commit suicide do not at all resemble debasements of this
kind. If I commit suicide I am not necessarily the victim of the stronger will of somebody else. I am not
indifferent to my own feelings or dignity, but on the contrary I may compassionately decide to
terminate what I regard as my pointless (perhaps even degrading) suffering. I have not become a thing
and I have not at all debased myself.

Kant’s other argument is based on the undeniable fact that if people commit suicide they can no
longer perform any moral acts. ‘It cannot be moral’, he says, ‘to root out the existence of morality itself
from the world’. The suicide ‘robs himself of his person. This is contrary to the highest duty we have
towards ourselves, for it annuls the condition of all other duties’ (Kant [1775/80] 1930: 152). To this it
must be replied that people who commit suicide do not root out the existence of morality itself from the
world. They do not do so any more than when they die a natural death or are killed in battle. They ‘root
out’ any new moral acts on their part, but presumably there will be other people left. They would root
out ‘morality itself’ only if they wiped out the human race.

Kant’s argument involves a confusion between: (1) I ought to do my duty as long as I am alive,
and (2) It is my duty to go on living as long as possible. Kant’s basic value judgment that doing one’s
duty is the highest good implies (1), but it does not imply (2); and only (2) could serve as a basis for
condemning suicide. It should be noted that Kant himself in various places rejects statement (2). In one
place he remarks ‘there is much in the world far more important than life’ and that ‘it is better to
sacrifice one’s life than one’s morality’. Furthermore, it is entirely permissible and even laudable ‘to
risk one’s life against one’s enemies, and even to sacrifice it, in order to observe one’s duties towards

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oneself’. Kant also fully endorses the right of ‘the sovereign’ to ‘call his subjects to fight to the death
for their country’. Those who die in battle, Kant goes on, are not suicides but ‘victims of fate’. They are
to be admired as ‘noble and high-minded’ in contrast with soldiers who run away to save their lives.
Yet the deaths of the noble ‘victims of fate’ root out the existence of ‘morality itself’ from the world
just as much as the deaths of people who commit suicide, while cowardly soldiers who saves their own
lives thereby preserve the condition for further moral action. Hence the mere fact of not preserving the
presupposition of future moral action cannot be a sufficient reason for condemning suicide.

6 The legal punishment of suicide

Until relatively recently suicide was regarded as a capital crime in the legal statutes of most
Western countries. Unfortunately from the point of view of the punishers, it is not possible to carry out
a death sentence in the case of successful suicides. This does not mean, however, that nothing has been
done by the state or church to show their extreme disapproval. The suicide was declared a felon and
their property confiscated. Regular burials were strictly forbidden and Christian rites denied. The body
was usually taken to the crossroads, a stake driven through it and a stone placed over the face. The
Prussian Code published in 1788 and confirmed in 1794 declares that ‘the corpse of a suicide shall be
duly executed, if, in the opinion of the judge, the act would operate as a deterrent’. Such laws are
perhaps not as absurd as they appear at first. Most people, almost regardless of their philosophical or
religious views, are concerned about the disposition of their body and repelled by the notion of its
mutilation.

In the case of suicides whose attempts fail, the authorities were in a position to carry out the execution of the
‘murderer’. It is not known how often this was actually done but we have an appallingly gruesome description of one
such case that took place in England in 1860 (Carr 1981: 336).

Laws against suicide were abolished in France in 1790 largely as a result of the influence of
Beccaria, Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire. Other European countries and several US states followed
the lead, but in Britain people were prosecuted as recently as 1955. Several of these cases are described
in Glanville Williams (1958). The ‘criminality’ of attempted suicide was finally abolished in Britain in
1961 following a recommendation (1959) by a commission appointed by the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Much of the report repeats, in very strong language, some of the older Christian
condemnations, but in the end, after quoting extensively from the writings of Hastings Rashdall, Dean
Inge and Canon Peter Green, it is grudgingly admitted that, in certain situations, suicide is not immoral.

Assisting suicide remains a crime in thirty-two US states but, as is generally known, such
prohibitions are commonly disregarded by humane physicians. Dr Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan
pathologist, has openly defied this law. He has been tried several times and acquitted on each occasion.
In two (April and May 1996), one in New York City, the other in San Francisco, Courts of Appeal
found statutes forbidding physician-assisted suicide to be unconstitutional. Both cases are under appeal
at the time of writing, but there is every indication that, before long, physical-assisted suicide will be
regarded as a constitutional right.

PAUL EDWARDS

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge