Suicide

Suppose someone is thinking about killing himself. Can philosophers or philosophy give him reasons for or against doing it? Or isn't suicide a philosophical subject?

Comments

It certainly is. I suppose the first thing to ask the person was why he or she thought murder was acceptable.

I think that the primary thing that is wrong with murder is that it ends a life that is valuable, both for the person living it and for people who love her or otherwise benefit from her existence. In contrast, I think that often, when people consider suicide, they believe that their life is no longer worth living. They are in a great deal of physical or psychological pain, and they don’t foresee that things are going to get much better. They don’t believe that their existence is particularly important to others, and they can’t imagine that their value to others will change soon. They don’t believe that their life has much point, and they can’t figure out what could possibly give their lives meaning. For them, non-existence seems to be an improvement over existence, not because they assign a positive value to non-existence, but because existence seems to have such a negative value. If they are right, then suicide is not wrong in the way that most murders are wrong. However, I think many people who consider suicide are very much mistaken about the value or potential value of their lives, and if they were to end their own lives, they would perform an act, like murder, that is very wrong.

Death and suicide figure prominently in Plato's work, in the Crito, Phaedo, and Apology.

Suicide is not murder unless you understand "murder" to mean "to kill a person". But we don't so understand it, as we don't usually speak of the hangman's murdering the convict, or of a soldier's murdering his enemy, or of someone's murdering in self-defense a man who was trying to kill him. The point is that murder involves a killing one had no authority to commit. To claim that suicide is murder, one would have to argue that I have no authority to take my own life. But why not? For a fascinating defense of the claim that I do have such authority, read David Hume's essay "Of Suicide". As for the claim that suicide is wrong because it makes something of value disappear from the world, consider (1) whether I do not sometimes have the right to destroy things of value and (2) whether events can sometimes so conspire against us that our lives simply don't have value and there is no reasonable prospect for a change in that regard.

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