What is Wrong with Rational Suicide (original) (raw)
Related papers
Suicide is Neither Rational nor Irrational
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2006
Richard Brandt, following Hume, famously argued that suicide could be rational. In this he was going against a common ‘absolutist’ view that suicide is irrational almost by definition. Arguments to the effect that suicide is morally permissible or prohibited tend to follow from one’s position on this first issue of rationality. I want to argue that the concept of rationality is not appropriately ascribed – or withheld – to the victim or the act or the desire to commit the act. To support this, I explore how the concept is ascribed and withheld in ordinary situations, and show that it is essentially future-oriented. Since the suicide victim has no future, it makes no sense to call his act rational or irrational. The more appropriate reaction to a declared desire for suicide, or to the news of a successful suicide, is horror and pity, and these are absent from Brandt’s account, as is a humble acknowledgement of the profound mystery at the heart of any suicide.
Choosing death: the moral status of suicide
Psychiatric Bulletin, 1996
Our moral conception of suicide is examined. It is argued that a neutral definition of suicide is difficult to achieve and that how we treat the question of suicide shows what value we place on the sanctity of life or on life as a means to other ends. The case is made that autonomy, the principle of self-governance, has acquired special importance in the modem world to the detriment of other ethical principles such as beneficence.
2021
The motivation behind attempting suicide ranges from egoistic to altruistic, with societal preconceptions varying significantly between the two. In this ethical review, moralist, relativist, and libertarian theories are utilized to explore the morality of suicide. The hedonistic act utilitarian theory, which assesses the righteousness of an action solely based on the amount of pleasure or displeasure it creates, is used to evaluate the morality of suicide. According to the beneficence principle, there is sometimes a moral justification for suicide to alleviate suffering. On the other hand, Mill's rule utilitarianism views actions by their effect on overall human happiness and directs us to perform actions that maximize utility. For some individuals, like those undergoing immense suffering, the right to painless suicide would maximize utility. Kantian theory focuses on an individual's duty to uphold honour, dignity, and rationality. Collectively, these three virtues set the foundation of Kantian deontology. Furthermore, the libertarian view emphasizes the inherent right of human beings to individual security, liberty, and property with minimum government intervention. Libertarians recognize that suicide can be a rational and reasonable response to intolerable suffering. The ethical theories have proven to be interdependent; together, they propel us toward a better understanding of the morality of suicide.
The Morality of Suicide and the Individual as Creators and Evaluators of the Self
The investigation of suicide often leads one toward issues concerning morality, value judgment, power, and relationship. This is attributed to the idea that the victim is also the perpetrator which follows the rational suggestion that the given qualities are inherently and fundamentally related to the self to which external critics and judges produce the choice to internalize the victim’s/perpetrator’s burdens in an attempt to rationalize. Performing such a deed is not non-sensible, since it not only leads to an understanding of the suicidal individual, but to an understanding of our social atmosphere and the forces that may lead one toward such a seemingly tragic end. Henri Wijsbek’s essay “To Thine own Self be True: On the Loss of Integrity as a kind of Suffering” explores such an idea in which he relates a middle-aged woman’s, Mrs. Boomsma, loss of integrity to a rational reason to commit suicide. Meanwhile, the work of Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus provides supplementary and relevant material to Wijsbek’s essay in which the investigation of the morality and the self-relational characteristics are advanced. However, suicide is not immoral because the self is one of the most intimate relationships we generate and hold, giving the individual the power and the authority to judge the value of their lives. Most thinkers aim to extract the individual to isolate and study the suicidal person and avoid re-depositing the individual. This essay will analyze Wijsbek’s work by first examining the individual and how it relates to Mrs. Boomsa’s suicide, followed by taking this established perception of the individual and applying it to social relations. In doing so, this will show internal and external factors and demonstrate under what circumstances suicide can be moral thereby exhibiting the flaws in Wijsbek’s work while proving his conclusion correct.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Suicide
Throughout history, suicide has evoked an astonishingly wide range of reactions-bafflement, dismissal, heroic glorification, sympathy, anger, moral or religious condemnation-but it is never uncontroversial. Suicide is now an object of multidisciplinary scientific study, with sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry each providing important insights into suicide. Particularly promising are the significant advances being made in our scientific understanding of the neurological and genetic bases of suicidal behavior , Joiner 2010 and the mental conditions associated with it. Nonetheless, many of the most controversial questions surrounding suicide are philosophical. For philosophers, suicide raises a host of conceptual, moral, and psychological questions. Among these questions are: What makes a person's behavior suicidal? What motivates such behavior? Is suicide morally permissible, or even morally required in some extraordinary circumstances? Is suicidal behavior rational? This article will examine the main currents of historical and contemporary philosophical thought surrounding these questions.
Suicide, Euthanasia and Human Dignity
Acta Analytica, 2001
Kant has famously argued that human beings or persons, in virtue of their capacity for rational and autonomous choice and agency, possess dignity, which is an intrinsic, final, unconditional, inviolable, incomparable and irreplaceable value. This value, wherever found, commands respect and imposes rather strict moral constraints on our deliberations, intentions and actions. This paper deals with the question of whether, as some Kantians have recently argued, certain types of (physician-assisted) suicide and active euthanasia, most notably the intentional destruction of the life of a terminally-ill, but rational and autonomous patient in order to prevent certain serious harms, such as enduring or reccuring pain or the loss of the meaning in life, from befalling him really are inconsistent with respect for the patient's human dignity. I focus on two independent, though interrelated explications of the rather vague initial idea that the patient (as well as the doctor), in intending and bringing about his death, treats his person or rational nature merely as a means and so denigrates his dignity: (i) that in doing what he is doing, he does not act for the sake of his person, but for the sake of something else; (ii) that, by trading his person for pain relief, he engages himself in an irrational and hence immoral exchange. After critically discussing some suggestions about how to understand this charge, I eventually find Kantian objections to suicide and (active) euthanasia, based on the idea of human dignity, less than compelling. For all the paper proves, suicide and (active) euthanasia may still be morally impermissible, but then this must be so for some other reason than the one given above.
The “mad” intentions of those who suicide
inter-disciplinary.net
There is a tension in understanding agency in suicide. On the one hand, those who suicide must be recognised as the authors of their deaths. On the other hand, those who suicide are often reported as having suffered from mental illness such as depression. This renders them agentic, but only to a certain degree. They killed themselves but only because they were not in their "right" mind, since presumably no one in their "right" mind wants to suicide. Can agency in suicide be called rational, or is it inevitably attributed to madness and therefore irrational? What if it is rational even when someone is "mad"? What if it is rational precisely because someone is "mad"? I respond to these questions in three parts. First, I examine how suicidology interprets the notion of intent in suicide, and how this relates to the broader understanding of agency. Secondly, drawing on Judith Butler's work on performativity, I consider whether agency is relational. Thirdly, I explore whether intent in suicide is multi-dimensional, and what this offers towards recognising the agency of those who suicide, and honouring those who remain to grieve and remember. My argument is that understanding intent in suicide is dependent not only on individual actions, but also on social norms and assumptions -all of which must be considered when the one who suffers from depression wants to end it all.
University of California, Davis law review, 1989
To express the national concern over the growing problem of suicide, on October 7, 1987, House Concurrent Resolution 194 was introduced expressing, as such, "the sense of the Congress that efforts to allow people to assist others to commit suicide and efforts to promote suicide as a rational solution to certain problems should be opposed." H.R. Con. Res. 194, 100th Cong., 1st Sess. (1987). Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicagoin a letter to all congressional membersadvocated passage of the Resolution and the condemnation of those efforts by right-todie advocates to legalize acts of assisted suicide. Bernardin Condemns Legal Assisted [Vol. 22:275 Suicide or Self-Determination? suicide from an accidental or natural death, particularly among the elderly, precise data is scarce. 7 Indeed, most experts are of the opinion that suicide is under-reported. 8 Under-reporting occurs primarily because attending physicians and involved families often cooperate in disguising or ignoring the less-than-obvious suicides to avoid any social stigma from attaching to the surviving relatives. 9 Suicide may be defined "as doing something which results in one's death, either from the intention of ending one's life or the intention to bring about some other state of affairs (such as relief from pain) which one thinks it certain or highly probable can be achieved only by means of death or will produce death." 1 0 Since death is a necessary element of suicide, reflexive descriptions of death are important to allow a full understanding of the very term, suicide. Thus, one description would be simply that one has killed herself; another would be that one has let herself be killed. Additionally, one might perform a suicide by deliberately, with premediation, taking her own life, or by ordering an agent to accomplish the act, thereby getting herself killed. By falling into a pool and refusing to swim to save herself, an individual could let herself be killed. She could even kill herself by provoking a physical confrontation while offering little resistance and defense, thereby letting herself be killed. Thus, for a suicide to occur the deceased must kill herself, get killed, or let herself be killed." As can be seen, suicide as a form of behavior has developed its own particular praxis. Voluntary euthanasia has been variously described as "assisted suicide,12 or "within the knife's edge between suicide and murder."' 3 Sui