Foreknowledge of Death

Obviously, those who do not know that their actions will result in their own deaths, cannot be said to have committed suicide. Some definitions of suicide use foreknowledge as a sufficient condition for suicide, for example:

Durkheim's definition [1]: the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself which he knows will produce this result.

Brandt's definition [2]: "Suicide" is conveniently defined, for our purposes, as doing something which results in one's death, either from the intention of ending one's life or the intention to bring about some other state of affairs (such as relief from pain) which one thinks it certain or highly probable can be achieved only by means of death or will produce death.

In [3], an example is given which is a self-caused death, yet is not what we would normally classify as a suicide. Consider a doctor who has a heart disease. He will die without a transplant. A patient of the doctor has a heart which would be suitable for the doctor. Not killing the patient will result in the doctor's death, and the doctor knows this. According to the two definitions above, not killing the patient is suicide, however, this classification seems in error.

To summarize, foreknowledge is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for classifying a self-killing as a suicide. Additional distinctions are required to classify suicides with greater accuracy.

REFERENCES

[1] Emile Durkheim, "Suicide".

[2] Richard B. Brandt, "The Morality and Rationality of Suicide", in Handbook for the Study of Suicide, edited by Seymour Perlin, pp 61-76, 1975.

[3] William E. Tolhurst, "Suicide, Self-Sacrifice, and Coercion", In The Southern Journal of Philosophy 21, 1983, pp 109-121.