suicide

suicide Current attitudes toward suicide derive from the debates of centuries long past. Aristotle condemned suicide on political grounds, arguing that the allegiance individuals owe to the state precludes them from taking their lives. Plato had likened the state to a parent in the Crito, a position which might seem to support a similar restriction of the individual's right to commit suicide. But Plato actually objected to self- destruction on religious grounds, claiming that human beings are the gods' possessions and risk punishment for daring to decide when to die. Nevertheless, a precedent for the right-to-die position may be found in the Phaedo, where Socrates argues against prolonging life at any cost.

The death of Socrates seemed to embody both reason and self control, qualities prized by the early Stoics, and euthanasia was practised among elderly members of the school. In theory, suicide was an option available to the Stoic at any time. In practice, however, only the first century statesman and philosopher Seneca glorified death to the point of advocating self-destruction as an end in itself. His own death at the command of the emperor Nero was entirely consistent with the principles he espoused. Witnesses described how he managed to stretch the event over the course of a full day, drinking wine and conversing with his friends while periodically opening his veins until he eventually bled to death. Seneca's willingness to end his career in cold blood earned the admiration of his contemporaries — and his was but one of the many heroic suicides that have come down to us from Roman antiquity. The legends of Lucretia, Cato, Brutus, Portia, Antony, and Cleopatra became models for the suicide of honour. To die for some higher ideal, for the sake of virtue, patriotism, or faith, as would become the case with the early Christians, was to make death a cause for celebration.

The Christian case against suicide was formally stated by St Augustine, who prohibited the act as a violation of the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. But Augustine was actually ambivalent on the question of suicide, permitting it in instances where individuals behaved with divine sanction in ending their lives. This exception was necessary to allow for the voluntary sacrifice of Jesus, who freely chose to die on the cross for humanity's sins. In subsequent centuries the escape clause was widened to admit the martyrs of the early Church, whose sacrifices were essential to the mythology of medieval Christianity.

The Church policy regarding suicide that emerged during the Middle Ages was loosely based on Roman law. Picking up on ancient Greek traditions, the Romans had punished self- destruction, but only under certain conditions: when an individual killed himself to escape legal prosecution or in the case of a soldier or a slave. The act of suicide was not itself considered blameworthy. Rather, the suicide's civil status, combined with his presumed motivations — the cowardliness of the accused man who sought to pre-empt the law, the disobedience of the soldier or the audacity of the slave who disposed of a life that was not truly his — determined whether the act should be punished. (The legal status of Roman women was akin to that of the slave. An unmarried female was treated as her father's dependent; the pater familias held absolute power over his daughter's life. With marriage, this power was transferred to her husband.)

The Christian position was different. What made suicide a sin was its voluntary nature. Self- destruction was prohibited because it represented an individual's choice to do wrong, a deliberate challenge to divine authority. Following the publication of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, suicide came to be seen as a crime against society as well. Aquinas revived Aristotle's view of suicide as an act of political insubordination and also condemned self-destruction on the grounds that it went against the natural instinct for self-preservation. To the traditional religious objection, which served to deny the sinner a Christian burial, Aquinas thus added a provision which could be used to support the implementation of civil penalties against people who killed themselves. During the high Middle Ages, civil legislation against self-murder was enacted in the majority of Western European states. Under no circumstances were men or women permitted to sacrifice themselves without divine sanction or to place their needs above the needs of the community to which they belonged.

The Enlightenment brought into question the moral implications of self-destruction. For the eighteenth-century philosophes, the issue proved to be an effective weapon in their crusade against absolutism and the Christian religion. Voltaire and others revitalized the classical tradition in the name of rationalism and freedom, portraying Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca — all advocates of the right to die — as early upholders of the secular cause. The Romantics turned self-destruction into a literary convention, further weakening the stigma attached to the act. Driven to despair by the death of their beloved or, worse still, loving and being loved by someone who belonged to another, countless characters in nineteenth-century fiction actively courted the solace which death alone could provide.

Suicide was decriminalized during the French Revolution, and neither Napoleon nor his monarchist successors reinstated the laws against it. And with the emergence of the psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century, the tendency to interpret the act as the inadvertent consequence of psychological problems, which could be diagnosed, treated, and cured, displaced the religious impulse to judge it in moral terms. Thus, while the Catholic Church continues to regard suicide as a sin, the modern inclination to attribute it to depression makes the deprivation of a religious funeral rare.

The greatest controversy today is over the question of assisted suicide. It is a felony to help someone commit suicide in Great Britain and in twenty-eight American states, but in neither country is it illegal to kill oneself. In effect, this means that only healthy people are allowed by the law to take their lives, since people who are seriously ill are often unable to kill themselves without assistance. Supporters of euthanasia aim to do nothing more than to decriminalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill, as has been done in the Netherlands. Opponents of the right to die range from Christian activists who invoke religious arguments against the taking of human life to physicians who think the need for assisted suicide would vanish with more effective strategies for pain management in the last months of life. On a policy level, some argue in favour of allocating limited health care resources toward people whose lives can be saved instead of prolonging the existence of someone already near death, particularly when that person no longer wishes to live. This line of argument has been criticized by those who envision the day when sick people will be hurried to their deaths for reasons of economic expediency.

Current thinking on suicide also owes much to the development of the social sciences, and to the work of Durkheim in particular. What distinguishes the sociological approach from the psychological is that it diminishes the importance of individual intentions in assessing the causes of suicide. Even the most private of human activities, the decision to end one's own life, turns out to be socially determined. Like other forms of collective behaviour, its incidence is governed by regular laws. To isolate the social factors conducive to high rates of self-destruction is the object of suicide prevention programmes today.

Lisa Lieberman

Bibliography

Kushner, H. I. (1989) Self-destruction in the Promised Land. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick and London.
Lieberman, L. (2003) Leaving You: the cultural meaning of suicide. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago.

See also euthanasia.