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Suicide and Self-inflicted Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

R. G. Frey
R. G. Frey
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

The most common view of suicide today is that it is intentional self-killing.1 Because of the self-killing component, suicide is often described as self-inflicted death or as dying by one's own hand, and the victim is in turn often described as having done himself to death or as having taken his own life. But must one's death be self-inflicted in order to be suicide? The answer, I want to suggest, is arguably no.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 56 , Issue 216 , April 1981, pp. 193 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981

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References

1 See my ‘Did Socrates Commit Suicide?’, Philosophy 53 (1978), 106–108, reprinted in Suicide: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, M. Pabst Battin and David Mayo (eds) (New York: St Martin's Press, 1980).

2 For a very helpful discussion of this broad sense, to which I am indebted, see Beauchamp, T. L., ‘What is Suicide?’, in Ethical Issues in Death and Dying Beauchamp, T. L. and Perlin, S. (eds) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 97–102.Google Scholar

3 See Beauchamp, op. cit., 99–101, for his discussion of such cases and the case of Captain Oates.

4 ‘Suicide’, in Moral Problems, Rachels, J. (ed.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 352–354.Google Scholar

5 I am grateful to Margaret Battin for assistance on this point, though in another context.

6 For a discussion of one such view of the good man, see my ‘What a Good Man Can Bring Himself to Do’, Journal of Value Inquiry XII (1978), 134–141.

7 My point here is a theoretical one. I do not deny that there may be good reasons in practice for using some distinction between self-inflicted and other-inflicted death as a rough and ready difference between suicide and murder.