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Suicide Defined
There are different definitions of suicide which are used by
different groups of people for different purposes.
Dictionary definitions
describe how the word "suicide" is used in everyday life,
a Legal definition
would be of use in a court of law, or by insurance companies, and a
suicidological definition
would be used
by suicidologists.
However, we strive for a deeper analysis. Obviously, suicide is a kind of "self-killing", however, this is much too general as a definition: somebody involved in a car accident may die because of his actions, but we would not usually call it a suicide (although it is possible). Rather, it is likely that such an event would be classified as an accident. The process of devising more accurate or "philosophical" definitions, which are able to handle borderline cases of arguable suicide, requires specific methods of inquiry, which have inherent limitations. In this process, distinctions are made which provide tools to sort out different cases of supposed or actual suicide. The following distinctions are presented roughly according to the chronological order in which they are applied within a suicide (or non-suicide) act.
Before the act: Foreknowledge of one's own death is not sufficient to classify a death as a suicide. Additional criteria such as the kind of motivation for the act (e.g., altruistic or under coercion) and the strength of intention are necessary.
For addressing strength of intention Consider the following cases:
- A man smokes heavily with the intention of dying.
- A man endeavors in some dangerous recreational activity, like mountain climbing.
During the act: Can a suicide not be self-inflicted? To answer this, first we have to distinguish between a narrow sense, and a broad sense of "self-inflicted"[2]. In a narrow sense, self-inflicted means that the person, wanting to die, acted in a way which directly led to his death. In a broad sense, a death is self-inflicted if the person wants to die, and knowingly and willingly places himself in circumstances where death, even if not inevitable is exceedingly likely, and he dies as a result. A classic example for a self-inflicted death in the broad sense is death from hypothermia, where the person is not active in his death, rather he allows the cold situation to take its effect.
Somewhere in between the narrow and broad sense is the following case: a man pointing an unloaded gun at a team of policeman in order to force them to fire. On one hand the man did not directly kill himself, rather he was killed by others, on the other hand, he did take action, that of provoking the policemen. In cases like "suicide by cop" there is an additional complication, in that from the perspective of the policemen, killing the person was manslaughter. However, does this prevent us from classifying this death as a suicide as well?
The distinction between positive and negative action is similar to the issue of self-inflicted death since it involves the degree of "activity" of the person. Usually suicide involves performing an action which brings about death. However, it is possible to kill oneself by deciding not to do something. Such an action is called a negative action, in contrast to most suicides which involve positive action. Acts involving negative action are less likely to be classified as suicide, however, it is possible to perform suicide with negative action. For example, a person who requires routine medical treatment without which the person would die. [3] calls suicides based on negative action by the name "passive suicide". A classic case of passive suicide is a diabetic who refuses to have injections with insulin. Diabetics can commit suicide anytime they want, and they are legally protected in doing so due to the right to refuse treatment. No one can impose involuntary treatment for diabetes.
That some forms of passive suicide are legally allowed and other forms of suicide are not, is another indication of the inconsistent and haphazard attitudes held in our culture. Anti-Euthanasia advocates reason that patients who request Euthanasia are depressed, so the request is likely to be irrational. If so, what about people who refuse treatment? Following the same logic, refusal of treatment is also irrational. To hold an Anti-Euthanasia position with any consistency, one should also support forcing treatment upon patients.
A different perplexing problem is that of deviant causal chains. consider the following examples
- A man wants to commit suicide by jumping from a mountain, on the way he is caught in an avalanche.
- A person who has decided to commit suicide, throws himself in front of a bus, but before the bus hits him, he is killed by a bullet which was shot in the process of a shootout between some criminals and the police.
It would seem that these cases would be classified as accidents rather than suicide, since they were not carried out according to plan. However, in life, things seldom work out exactly as planed. Some room for deviation from the original plan should be allowed, and we should still be able to call the act suicide.
After the act: The most obvious result of an act aimed at self-killing is whether it succeeded or not. When it did not succeed it is called a suicide attempt. Most languages lack a word for describing the action which is intended to lead to one's own death, regardless of the final outcome. One has to resort to expressions such as "he tried to commit suicide", or "he attempted suicide". This is similar to the verb "to commit murder", which is only appropriate when a person has indeed died. In contrast, a verb such as "to cook" is appropriate even if the meal was burnt beyond being eatable.
After the act, unresolved debate about whether it was or was not suicide may have a political context, where two sides try to ascribe responsibility of the act to the other side. A classic case is that of Bobby Sands, an imprisoned IRA member who went on a hunger strike in protest against the government's refusal to grant him (and others with him) political prisoner status. The British establishment considered his death a suicide, laying the responsibility on Bobby Sands, whereas Sands' supporters viewed his death as caused by the government's (lack of) action. They viewed him as a martyr. The analysis for the cases of Jesus and Socrates is similar.
In [1] the difference between martyrdom and suicide is defined as follows: "To call X a suicide amounts, amongst other things, to ascribing to X the moral responsibility (and sometimes, but not always, the blame) for X's death. To call X a martyr amounts, amongst other things, to ascribing the moral responsibility (and usually, the blame) for X's death to someone else (usually a government, an institution, or an organization)."
References
[1] Suzanne Stern-Gillet, "The Rhetoric of Suicide", in Philosophy and Rhetoric 20, no 3, 1987, pp 160-170.
[2] R. G. Frey, "Suicide and Self-Inflicted Death", in Philosophy 56, 1981, pp 193-202.
[3] William E. Tolhurst, "Suicide, Self-Sacrifice, and Coercion", In The Southern Journal of Philosophy 21, 1983, pp 109-121.
[4] John Donnelly (ed.) "Suicide, right or wrong", 1998. (Most of the articles, upon which these web pages are based, appear in this book, including [1],[2],[3]).
