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. For example, suicide has long been a central concern within many academic disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry. These disciplines converge in the multidisciplinary field of suicidology. But there remain many controversies within suicidology, including which methodologies are best suited to identify the causes of suicide and whether the study of suicide can be fully disentangled from researchers’ political or institutional commitments (Maung 2020). (For concerns about the political dimensions of suicide research, see work within ’critical suicidology’ such as White et al. 2016.)
But perhaps the most enduring controversies 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? Is aiding others to commit suicide morally permissible or even required in some extraordinary circumstances? This article will examine the main currents of historical and contemporary Western philosophical thought surrounding these questions.