Topics Suicide

Question Could someone ever be considered significantly responsible for another's suicide? I don't mean to include cases in which, e.g., someone gives a weapon to an unstable person. The person I have in mind causes severe emotional distress to another person who ultimately kills herself.

Accepted:
February 12, 2008

Comments

Yes, though I wouldn't want to have to adjudicate responsibility in a particular case.

Here's the philosophical principle I've got in mind: If a person A provides sufficient motivation for person B to commit an act, then A might be responsible for B's act. If A intended to provide sufficient motivation, intending that B commit the act, then I can't imagine A not being responsible. And if B would not have committed the act but for A's motivating actions -- in other words, if whatever A did was also necessary to B's committing the act -- and A knew this, then A would definitely be responsible.

The problem with applying this general principle to suicides is that what counted as sufficient and necessary motivational conditions for a particular suicide are almost never known for certain. Most suicide victims (as I understand it) are assumed not to be in full rational control of their actions; e.g., there is mental illness involved. If suicide is an irrational act, then assigning responsibility will be a formidably difficult, if not moot, task.

In the case you describe, if the person causing severe emotional distress intended to push the victim to suicide, and the victim would not have committed suicide but for the infliction of the severe emotional distress, then yes, s/he is responsible. If the person causing the distress never intended to push the victim to suicide, but knew (or should reasonably have known) that it might, and the victim would not have committed suicde but for the distress, then I'd say yes again. But if the victim would have committed suicide anyway, then the person causing the distress would not be responsible, even if s/he intended to do it (though some might disagree with me here). If the suicide has been successful, could we ever know what role the emotional distress actually played?

(This isn't a precise illustration, but I think it might be relevant to sorting out the issue: Depressed patients given anti-depressants show a significant rate of suicide, so there's been some concern that anti-depressants are responsible for patients commiting suicide. But one of the more notable symptoms of depression is extreme lethargy. So these patients may have been intending suicide all along, but they didn't have the energy to carry it out until the anti-depressant alleviated the lethargy. In logical terms, the anti-depressant didn't provide a sufficient condition for the suicide, but rather a necessary one. Normally providing a necessary condition doesn't assign responsibility unless it was done with the intent of providing a necessary condition. The doctors who prescribed anti-depressants for these patients never intended to provide the necessary energy for the patient to go through with a previously-planned suicide, so they wouldn't be responsible.)