Suicide

SUICIDIO. — In the etymological sense, it denotes the act by which a person, on his own authority, voluntarily brings about his own death. In common usage, however, the term s. is defined in opposition to those acts of voluntary death which, because of the nobility of the motives that inspired them, are designated as the “sacrifice of one’s own life.” Moral theology, regarding any direct intention to procure one’s own death as absolutely illicit, limits the concept of “sacrifice of one’s own life” to death intended only indirectly for a proportionately serious reason—that is, as the inevitable effect of an act in itself good, directly aimed at procuring a good of such value as fully to justify the resulting loss of one’s own life. In this sense, s. is understood as: “the act by which a person, on his own authority, directly intends to bring about his own death.”

To bring this scholastic definition into line with common usage, M. Van Vyve (La mort volontaire, in Rev. phil. de Louvain, 41 [1951], pp. 78-107) contrasts the term s., understood as an act of death directly intended against one’s duty to remain alive, with the twofold term “active and passive sacrifice of one’s own life,” according as death was directly or indirectly brought about for the sake of higher goods and therefore in order to fulfill a duty. This terminology evidently leaves intact the entire moral question concerning the liceity of active sacrifice, with regard to which Catholic thinkers maintain a decidedly negative position, even though attempts have been made to find some justification for it (cf. E. Ranwez, Suicide permis?, in Miscell. Janssen, III, Lovanio 1949, pp. 449-58; M. Van Vyve, op. cit.). In order to exclude from the definition of s. any moral evaluation of it, E. Durkheim extends its meaning also to cases of foreseen death for which the subject bears no responsibility; he understands s. as “every case of death resulting, directly or indirectly, from a positive or negative act performed by the victim herself and which she knew would produce this result” (Le suicide, Parigi 1897, p. 5).

S. is studied by sociology and psychology, philosophy, and criminal law.

I. SUICIDE IN SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Sociology considers suicide as a social phenomenon, produced by social causes, and seeks to establish the laws governing the emergence, development, and transformation of the motives for its condemnation by the social conscience. For Durkheim, these causes and laws are wholly sociological and irreducible to psychology: there are suicidal currents in society (ibid., p. 312), and this law can be established: “suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the religious society, the domestic society, and the political society” (ibid., p. 222). Whereas he regards the total condemnation of suicide as a normal phenomenon of the collective conscience, and the temporary expansion of suicidal currents as a pathological phenomenon, A. Bayet (Le suicide et la morale, Paris 1924) sees in the uncompromising condemnation of suicide an expression of the “morale simple,” or servile morality, proper to a society in which the servant is regarded as the inviolable property of the master, against which the “morale nuancée,” proper to free spirits who regard suicide with indulgence, understanding, and even admiration, is continually opposed, with greater or lesser effectiveness (p. 23). Human civilization depends upon the definitive triumph of this morality, which official Christianity vainly resists, having adopted servile morality only after St. Augustine (p. 321). M. Halbwachs (Les causes du suicide, Paris 1930) deepens, on a strictly sociological level, the scientific investigation of the causes determining the phenomenon of suicide, in accordance with the statistical constancy it displays in the various social groups, depending on their religious, cultural, familial, political, and economic situation. Psychologists and psychiatrists have reacted against this wholly sociological position (cf. A. Delmas, Psychologie pathologique du suicide, Paris 1932; G. Deshaies, Psychologie du suicide, there 1947, Italian translation Rome 1951); Ch. Blondel (Le suicide, there 1933), meanwhile, seeks to reconcile individual psychological motivation with that arising from properly sociological elements. The relationship between individual persons and associated life is too intimate for their reciprocal influence not to be acknowledged in the phenomenological explanation of suicide. It is certain that the social environment can promote suicide only in subjects with a pathological predisposition; hence one can understand the concern of legislators to establish penal laws, sometimes extended symbolically even to the victims themselves, in order to reinforce the horror of this crime and thereby prevent pathological imitation among more impressionable individuals. It is equally certain that the social environment determines that evaluation of values which leads certain acts of voluntary death to be regarded as heroic sacrifices of life.

C. Schuwer (La signification métaphysique du suicide, Paris 1949) considers inadequate the interpretations of suicide offered by sociology and psychology on an empirical level, and by existentialism on a negative level, as it identifies being and nothingness; he therefore attempts to provide it with an axiological motivation which, by making suicide a supreme act of strictly personal choice, permits it to be understood in its intimate human meaning, without giving us the right to judge it on the basis of our own choice or of the objective principles of morality. Schuwer, however, does not rise above the relativistic level of a phenomenological interpretation of subjective consciousness.

II. SUICIDE IN PHILOSOPHY

The justification of suicide or the celebration of particular kinds of suicide is characteristic of many individualistic currents, which reduce moral life to hedonism and utilitarianism, or to the expression of the rational autonomy or vital force of the individual, or to the anguish of cosmic pessimism and existential nihilism. Suicide is thus regarded as the choice of a lesser evil that liberates one from the pains of life (Cyrenaics, Epicureans, nineteenth-century materialists), as the only rational or aesthetic solution to a life or an earthly existence that has lost its meaning or has given all that it could give (nineteenth-century Romantic sentimentalism),

as an affirmation of freedom and spiritual autonomy against insuperable injustices and social oppression (Stoicism and certain Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, such as D'Holbach and, in some respects, Voltaire), as the victory of liberating rationality over the vital cosmic will (Schopenhauer), as the supreme expression of the vital force of the free ego (Nietzsche), as an indifferent act toward an existence identified with nothingness (nihilism).

Against the justification of suicide, not only has the social conscience of all peoples and all times always reacted, but the greatest thinkers of every age have also taken a contrary position. Frequent uncertainties of evaluation are nevertheless apparent (even though they often remained uncertain, as did public opinion), when faced with suicides committed as the active sacrifice of life for noble motives of the public good.

Plato (Phaedo, VI; Laws, IX, 873) regards suicide as opposed to the absolute dominion of God. Aristotle (Eth. Nic., III, 8; V, 11) absolutely rejects every suicide as contrary to the social good and to the natural tendency toward the preservation of being. Cicero adopts the religious and social grounds for its condemnation (De finibus, II, 30; De republica, VI, 10). Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Enneads, I, 9; II, 9, 18; Porphyry, De abstinentia, II, 47; Apuleius, De dogmate Platonis, II, 622; Macrobius, Comment. ad somnium Scipionis, I, 13) adds to the religious and social arguments that of the individual duty to achieve in earthly life all possible progress, upon which the future life depends, whereas suicide prevents the soul’s complete liberation from bodily passions. But only with Christianity does the rationale for condemning suicide acquire a fully unified meaning, since the three fundamental motives—religious, social, and individual—come together in the vision of a communitarian, theocentric humanism, which regards life as a social mission to be fulfilled by expressing, through one’s laborious love for others, all our love for God. The solution to the problem of suffering, and the doctrines of humility and charity proper to Christian Revelation, destroy at their roots every apparent reason for justifying suicide. Lactantius first (Divinae Instit., III, 18), and then St. Augustine (De civit. Dei, I, 17 ff.), adopt the philosophical arguments, placing them within the Christian vision of life and reaching the most absolute condemnation of every form of direct suicide. Scholasticism develops the thought of the philosophers and the Fathers (cf. Abelard, Sic et non: PL 178, 1603–1606; Alexander of Hales, Summa Theol., q. 34, a. 2; St. Bonaventure, III Sent., dist. 28, dub. 2), and it is especially St. Thomas who gives it a complete and definitive formulation: suicide is a sin against the charity that each person must have toward himself: « per comparazionem autem ad communitatem et ad Deum, habet rationem peccati, etiam per oppositionem ad iustitiam » (Summa theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃᵇ, q. 64, a. 5; cf. ibid., q. 59, a. 3 ad 2; in Eth., V, 17). Among modern philosophers, besides all Catholic and Protestant writers, one may recall Descartes (Lettre de janvier, 1646), Gassendi (Ethica, Op. II, p. 672), Malebranche (Traité de morale, II, 27, 8–9), Diderot (Encycl., s. V. Suicide), and Rousseau (Nouvelle Elofse, III, letter 21), who asserts that it is enough to admit the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom to exclude suicide: let the person intending suicide perform a good deed, and he will understand the value of life. Kant (Metaphysik der Sitten in zwei Theilen, Leipzig 1867–69, VII, pp. 227–29), after showing that suicide is contrary to duties toward God and one’s neighbor, writes: « But here the question is only that of knowing whether suicide is a transgression of duty toward oneself... As long as man is subject to duty, and therefore as long as he lives, he cannot divest himself of his personality; and there is a contradiction in supposing that he can withdraw from every obligation, that is, remove his actions from every kind of right. To destroy in one’s own personality the subject of morality is, insofar as it depends upon oneself, to make morality itself disappear from the world insofar as it exists: morality, which is instead an end in itself. Consequently, to dispose of oneself for an arbitrary end is to degrade man in his own person ». This Kantian approach is developed in the contemporary philosophy of values (cf. R.

Le Senne, Traité de morale générale, 2nd ed., Paris 1947, p. 484 ff.). Christian thought on suicide has in our time been profoundly developed not only by innumerable writers on moral theology, but also by scholars of natural law; cf. V. CATHREIN, VIKTOR, Moralphils., II, 6th ed., Freiburg in Br. 1924, p. 61 ff.; Hans Rost, Bibliogr. des Selbstmords., Augsburg 1927; J. Leclercq, Les droits et devoirs individuels, I, 2nd ed., Louvain 1946, p. 12 ff.; O. Vannini, Delitti contro la vita, Milan 1946.

Tullio Piacentini

III. SUICIDE IN ECCLESIASTICAL AND ITALIAN PENAL LEGISLATION

Suicide is punished by the Church as an extremely serious offense, especially when consummated; but even a mere attempt or frustrated attempt is subject to severe sanctions.

Indeed, can. 1240 § 1, n. 3 prohibits ecclesiastical burial and every anniversary rite of public suffrage for suicides who gave no sign of repentance before the end; it further excommunicates anyone who should impose such rites and places under personal interdict from entering a church anyone who should perform them spontaneously (can. 2339). If death should not ensue, the sin and the offense nevertheless remain: can. 985, n. 5 imposes irregularity, which perpetually prohibits the subject’s ordination, and, if he has been ordained, can. 2350 § 2 imposes temporary suspension from every office or benefice involving the care of souls. For lay persons, perpetual deprivation of the legal acts specified by can. 2256 n. 2 remains established.

Italian criminal law punishes incitement to or cooperation in s., even if the s. does not take effect, provided that the attempt results in serious or very serious injury, with increased penalties in particular cases (Italian Penal Code, arts. 579–80) and in all circumstances considered aggravating factors for homicide (ibid., arts. 580 and 575–77). But moral and remote cooperators ordinarily escape punishment, such as the authors of crime reports, demoralizing performances, etc., who nevertheless are morally true responsible parties.

There is therefore no hunger strike when abstention from food is temporary, when it is undertaken for any reason other than protest, such as, for example, lack of appetite, the desire to leave one’s food available to other indigent persons, etc., and when the intention of reaching death by this means is absent, should the aim not be achieved.

Without going too far back to cases occurring in remote antiquity or to the practice of the Cynics, for whom the hunger strike was the most rational way of withdrawing from the passions and unhappiness of existence, the most famous cases of hunger strikes, some of which ended fatally, occurred in the last century and have been repeated in our own. These include the cases of the English feminist E. Pankhurst (v. FEMMINISMO), Gandhi (v.); and the recent cases of Italian emigrants in Australia who found themselves without work because of breaches of contract by the Australian government. But the most sensational case, which greatly inflamed theological controversy, was that of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Mac Swiney, who died, in protest against the English, oppressors of Ireland, after 73 days of hunger strike. It was one of the rare fatal cases that occurred during the Irish Revolution of 1920.

Leaving aside Mac Swiney’s undoubted good faith—he died fortified by the Sacraments—it was then asked more insistently whether such a manner of acting was licit. It is known that direct killing is never licit, since man does not possess full and absolute control over his own life. But it was, and still is, worth asking whether, in conduct such as a conditional hunger strike, one was dealing with direct or indirect killing. There is no doubt about its liceity if the hunger strike were merely simulated and there were no scandal; that is, if the subject abstained from food up to the limit of endurance in order to obtain something that was owed to him and that he could not obtain by any other licit means. The question, however, becomes difficult to resolve when the intention is to carry on a hunger strike indefinitely. Regarding Mac Swiney, the theologians divided into two schools of thought. Some maintained that the killing was indirect, arguing that in the specific case killing as such was not intended, but another end—namely, the liberation of a people from the oppression of its civil and political rights; nor, in any case, was death used as a means to attain the end, since it was not intended but merely permitted. Others, however, observing that in the case in question death followed from the abstention from food, prolonged indefinitely, as its immediate effect, however extended in time, concluded that death was not an accidental effect of the hunger strike but a direct one; the hunger strike was therefore a weapon like any other for committing suicide and was consequently illicit. These positions have not changed since then and therefore, given the controversy, the hunger strike cannot simply be condemned as suicide when reasonable motives exist and it is undertaken as a last ratio for obtaining a great good of public interest. On the other hand, given that the controversy still persists, the physician does not appear to be prohibited from providing nourishment to the hunger striker by resorting to forced feeding (by tube, nutritive enema, and the like), all the more so because in doing this the physician does not deprive the hunger striker’s conduct of its demonstrative effect, which is useful for achieving his possible just cause.