Sure, it's possible that suicide is the best way out for some particular person. But it's just as possible that the decision to kill oneself is an overreaction to some experience or event which the person would get over in due time. Because you don't know, you might go wrong whatever you do. But there's an important point that breaks this apparent asymmetry: if you err on the side of stopping the suicide, the option of suicide remains available to the person -- s/he can do it later or the next day or the day after. If you err on the side of not stopping the suicide, there will be no second chance. For this reason alone, I think, it makes sense to stop the suicide -- even, if needed, by force (e.g., by restraining the person or by calling the police). Many of those who are seriously thinking about suicide are conflicted and uncertain. Others go forward with cold determination. I would think that the first group is considerably larger. But quite apart from this, members of this group are far more...

One important difference to torture is that the question here is whether the agent should impose a certain pain on her-/himself for the sake of others -- not whether the agent may or should impose pain on third parties. To illustrate the relevance of this point: it makes good sense for me to believe both (a) that a person with my sort of income ought to give at least 10 percent of it toward effective poverty relief and (b) that it would be wrong for me (or anyone) to force other people with similar salaries to do so. The analogue to torture would be forcing the potential suicidee to stay alive against her/his will -- and this was not what I was advocating. Now, do you have a duty to suffer for the sake of others' happiness? I think the answer depends on what is at stake for the others and what is at stake for you. Peter Singer has made a very convincing case for holding that you have a duty to rescue a drowning child from a shallow pond. Here what is at stake is the very survival of the child...

What about other decisions you face? Does it strike you as strange that anyone should ultimately have any reason to act other than in the service of their own personal happiness? If so, you are challenging all moral obligations and would find it just as strange that anyone should be "literally obligated" to refrain from rape and murder. I assume that this is not your view, that you accept some obligations toward others and are willing to take their interests into account, alongside your own, when deciding how to act. But if this is the way you think about your ordinary conduct decisions, then why should the decision about suicide be special? If your mother's feelings are a reason for you to call her on her birthday, then why are they not also a reason for refraining from suicide? The illusion that we have no obligation to consider others' interests when contemplating suicide may arise from two sources. First, many jurisdictions forbid suicide and also assisting those who want to die....

Yes: when the ends that matter to one are better served by suicide than by staying alive. Jan Palach killed himself to make a powerful point against the Soviet invasion of his country -- plausibly believing that nothing else he could have done would have had as great an effect (see question 1518). Victims of the Gestapo have killed (or tried to kill) themselves in order to avoid betraying their comrades. Admiral Chester Nimitz and his wife Joan killed themselves in old age, seeking to end their lives on their own terms rather than incapacitated in some medical facility. Each of these people had an end to which they gave more weight than to their own survival -- the end of ending Soviet domination, the end of defeating the Nazis, the end of dying on one's own terms. There is nothing irrational in ranking these ends above an additional period of life for oneself.

Suicide and highly risky acts of defiance can be, but rarely are, highly effective forms of political resistance. So one needs to analyze the conditions under which they are effective. The political suicide I remember most vividly is that of Jan Palach, a Czech student who burned himself to death with gasoline (in early 1969) to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion of his country. His suicide contributed greatly, I believe, to a deep and enduring change in attitude toward the Soviet Union on the part of young people esp. in Western Europe who, horrified by the brutality of the US war in Vietnam, had tended to view the Soviet Union as the more humane, less aggressive superpower. Many young people then did not really trust the established news media and vaguely suspected that the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia may indeed have preempted some sort of counterrevolutionary plot supported by the West. Jan Palach's suicide destroyed such excuses by focusing attention on the sentiments of young people in...

Suicide is outlawed in different societies and epochs for all sorts of different reasons. These fall broadly into three categories: to enforce religious commands, to protect persons from themselves, and to protect persons other than the would-be suicide. Are these good reasons to outlaw suicide? Reasons in the first category are not acceptable in modern democratic societies (and, in the US, violate the First-Amendment separation of church and state). Those in the majority must not impose their religion on their fellow citizens. Reasons in the second category -- so-called paternalistic (or parentalistic) reasons -- can be plausible. It is a good thing that the police can stop the attempted suicide of a young man who is in despair after his lover broke up with him. Chances are he'll get over it and fall in love again, even if this now seems inconceivable to him. But what if, a year or two later, the man still judges his life not worth living and wants to die? Who are we to overrule his...

It is fair to point to the harms that would befall others, because such harms are surely not morally irrelevant. They are relevant, for example, when the potential suicide has caused others to be dependent on him or her, e.g. his or her children whose lives are likely to be blighted by the suicide of a parent. And even if the harm that would befall others is not due to earlier decisions by the agent (getting married, having children), he or she has moral reason at least to do what can be done to ease the pain of parents, siblings, friends, etc., left behind. In these ways, perhaps suicide is not all that different from other actions people take: They may have a right to take these actions, in the sense that it would be wrong to prevent them from so acting. But this does not mean that such actions are beyond moral criticism: Their execution may be morally flawed in diverse ways, and sometimes these actions may be morally wrong altogether. Thus consider divorce. People have a moral right to walk...