Suicide

SUICIDE. - In the etymological sense, it indicates the act by which a man, on his own authority, voluntarily gives himself death. However, in common usage 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 "sacrifice of one's life." Moral theology, considering as absolutely unlawful any direct will to procure death, limits the concept of "sacrifice of one's life" to death willed only indirectly for a proportionately grave cause, that is, as the inevitable effect of an act good in itself directed per se to procuring a good of such value as to fully justify the resulting loss of one's life. In this sense s. is understood as: "the act by which a man, on his own authority, gives himself death with direct will."

To bring this scholastic definition back to common usage, M. Van Vyve (La mort volontaire, in Rev. phil. de Louvain, 41 [1951], pp. 78-107) opposes the term s., understood as an act of death directly willed against one's duty to remain alive, to the twofold term of active and passive sacrifice of one's life, according to whether death has been directly or indirectly procured for motives of superior goods and therefore in order to fulfill a duty. With this terminology there evidently remains the whole moral problem concerning the lawfulness of active sacrifice, toward which Catholic thinkers maintain a decidedly negative position, even though attempts to find some justification for it are not lacking (cf. E. Ranwez, Suicide permis?, in Miscell. Janssen, III, Louvain 1949, pp. 449-58; M. Van Vyve, op. cit.). E. Durkheim, in order to exclude from the definition of s. any moral evaluation of it, extends its meaning also to cases of foreseen death for which the subject bears no responsibility; he indeed understands by s. "every case of death that results, directly or indirectly, from an act, positive or negative, performed by the victim himself and which he knew must produce this result" (Le suicide, Paris 1897, p. 5).

S. is the object of study on the part of sociology and psychology, of philosophy and of criminal law.

I. SUICIDE IN SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Sociology regards suicide as a social phenomenon, produced by social causes, and seeks to establish the laws governing the rise, development and change of the motives for its condemnation by the social conscience. For Durkheim these causes and these laws are totally sociological, and irreducible to psychology: there are suicide-generating currents in society (ibid., p. 312), and one can establish this law that "suicide varies in inverse ratio to the degree of integration of religious society, of domestic society, of political society" (ibid., p. 222). While he regards the integral condemnation of suicide as a normal phenomenon of the collective conscience and the temporary widening of suicide-generating currents as a pathological phenomenon, A. Bayet (Le suicide et la morale, Paris 1924) sees in the intransigent condemnation of suicide an expression of the "morale simple" or servile, proper to a society in which the slave is considered the inviolable property of the master, against which there continually sets itself, in a more or less effective form, the "morale nuancée," proper to free spirits, who regard suicide with indulgence, understanding and even admiration (p. 23). Human civilization depends on the definitive triumph of this morality, which official Christianity resists in vain, since only after St. Augustine would it have made the servile morality its own (p. 321). M. Halbwachs (Les causes du suicide, Paris 1930) deepens, on the strictly sociological plane, the scientific investigation of the causes determining the phenomenon of suicide, according to the statistical constancy that it presents in the various social groups, according to their religious, cultural, familial, political and economic situation. Psychologists and psychiatrists react against this integrally sociological position (cf. A. Delmas, Psychologie pathologique du suicide, Paris 1932; G. Deshaies, Psychologie du suicide, ibid. 1947, Italian version Rome 1951); while Ch. Blondel (Le suicide, ibid. 1933) seeks to reconcile individual psychological motivation with that deriving from properly sociological elements. Too intimate is the relationship between individual persons and associated life for one not to have to admit their mutual influence for the phenomenological explanation of suicide. It is certain that only in pathologically predisposed subjects can the social environment exert an influence in favoring suicide, whereby one understands the concern of legislators to establish penal laws, sometimes extended symbolically to the victims themselves, in order to reinforce the horror of this crime and thus prevent pathological imitation in the most influenceable subjects. As it is also certain that on the social environment depends that evaluation of values which leads to considering certain acts of voluntary death as a heroic sacrifice of life.

C. Schuwer (La signification métaphysique du suicide, Paris 1949) considers inadequate the interpretations of suicide given on an empirical plane by sociology and psychology and on a negative plane by existentialism identifying being and nothingness; and he attempts to give it an axiological motivation which, by making suicide a supreme act of strictly personal choice, allows one to understand it 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 go beyond the relativistic plane of a phenomenological interpretation of the subjective conscience.

II. SUICIDE IN PHILOSOPHY

The justification of suicide, or the celebration of certain kinds of suicide, is characteristic of many individualistic currents, which resolve moral life into hedonism and utilitarianism, or into the expression of rational autonomy or of the vital force of the individual, or into the anguish of a cosmic pessimism and an existential nihilism. Suicide is thus considered as the choice of a lesser evil that frees one from the sorrows of life (Cyrenaics, Epicureans, nineteenth-century materialists), as the only rational or aesthetic solution of a life to a terrestrial existence that has lost its meaning or that has given all it could give (nineteenth-century romantic sentimentalism), as an affirmation of freedom and spiritual autonomy against insuperable injustices and social oppressions (Stoicism and some eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, 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 act indifferent toward an existence identifying itself with nothingness (nihilism).

Against the justification of suicide not only has social consciousness always reacted among all peoples and in all times, but the greatest thinkers of every age have also taken a contrary position. Nevertheless, frequent uncertainties of evaluation are noted (even if they have often remained uncertain, as indeed has public consciousness), in the face of suicides committed as an active sacrifice of life for noble motives of public good.

Plato (Phaedo, VI; Laws, IX, 873) considers 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 self-preservation. Cicero adopts the religious and social motives of 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 accomplish in earthly life all the possible progress on which the future life depends, whereas suicide impedes the full liberation of the soul from bodily passions. But only with Christianity does the motivation for condemning suicide acquire a fully unitary meaning, since the three fundamental motives — religious, social and individual — come together in the vision of a communitarian theocentric humanism, which considers life as a social mission to be accomplished in order to express, through one's own laborious love toward others, all our love toward God. The solution of the problem of suffering, the doctrine of humility and charity proper to Christian Revelation, come to destroy at the root every apparent motive for justifying suicide. Lactantius first (Divinae Instit., III, 18) and St. Augustine afterward (De civit. Dei, I, 17 ff.) adopt the philosophical arguments, setting them within the Christian vision of life, and concluding with 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 a full and definitive formulation of it: suicide is a sin against the charity that each one owes to 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), Rousseau (Nouvelle Elofse, III, letter 21), who affirms that it is enough to admit the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and freedom in order to exclude suicide: let one who has the intention of suicide perform a good work and he will understand the value of life. Kant (Metaphysik der Sitten in zwei Theilen, Leipzig 1867-69, VII, pp. 227-29), after having shown that suicide is against the duties toward God and neighbor, writes « But here the question is only whether suicide is a transgression of duty toward oneself... Man, so long as he is subject to duty, and therefore so long as he lives, cannot rid himself of his personality; and there is a contradiction in supposing that he can withdraw himself from every obligation, that is, withdraw his acts from every kind of right. To destroy in his own personality the subject of morality is, as far as in him lies, to make morality itself disappear from the world, as regards its existence: morality which is instead an end in itself. Consequently, to dispose of oneself for an arbitrary end is to debase man in his own person ». This Kantian formulation 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 times been profoundly developed not only by innumerable writers on moral theology, but also by students of natural law, cf. V. Cathrein, Moralphils., II, 6th ed., Freiburg im 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 CRIMINAL LEGISLATION

Suicide is punished by the Church as a most grave crime, especially when it is consummated; but even the mere attempt or frustrated attempt is visited with severe sanctions.

In fact, can. 1240 § 1, no. 3 forbids ecclesiastical burial and any anniversary rite of public suffrage for suicides who gave no sign of repentance before the end; it then visits with excommunication anyone who imposes such rites and with personal interdict from entry into a church anyone who spontaneously carries them out (can. 2339). If by chance death does not follow, the sin as well as the crime remain: can. 985, no. 5 imposes the irregularity, which perpetually prohibits the ordination of the subject, and, if he is ordained, can. 2350 § 2 imposes temporary suspension from every office or benefice that entails the care of souls. For the laity there remains the perpetual privation from the legitimate acts specified by can. 2256 no. 2.

Italian criminal law punishes the instigation of or cooperation in suicide, even if the suicide does not take effect, provided that a grave or most grave injury results from the attempt, with an increase of penalties in particular cases (Italian Penal Code, arts. 579-80) and in all the circumstances that are considered aggravating for a homicide (ibid., arts. 580 and 575-77). But ordinarily the moral and remote cooperators escape, such as the authors of crime reports, of demoralizing performances, etc., who are nonetheless morally truly responsible.

IV. HUNGER STRIKE

It is the voluntary abstinence from food undertaken with the deliberate purpose of arriving by this means all the way to death, in order to draw the attention of the public or of the competent authorities, by way of passive protest, to a question that is held to be unjustly neglected, or to take revenge for a treatment that is judged unjust.

There is therefore no hunger strike when the abstinence from food is temporary, when it is done for any other motive than a protest, as, for example, loss of appetite, the wish to leave one's own food at the disposal of other needy persons, etc., and when the purpose of arriving by this means at death, if the aim is not achieved, is absent.

Without going too far back, to cases that occurred 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 the unhappiness of existence, the most famous cases of hunger strike, some of which ended fatally, occurred in the last century and are repeated in our own. These are the cases of the English feminist E. Pankhurst (v. FEMMINISMO), of the Indian nationalist Gandhi (v.); the recent cases of Italian emigrants in Australia, who found themselves without work because of contractual failures by the Australian government. But the most sensational case, which keenly stirred the polemics of theologians, 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 in the Irish Revolution of 1920.

Setting aside the undoubted good faith of Mac Swiney, who died with the comfort of the Sacraments, the question was then asked, with greater insistence, whether such a way of acting was lawful. It is well known that direct killing is never lawful, since man does not have the full and absolute disposal of his own life. But the question was asked, and must be asked, whether in a course of conduct such as that of the conditional hunger strike, one was faced with a direct or an indirect killing. There is no doubt about its lawfulness if the hunger strike were only 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 lawful means. The question, however, presents a difficult solution when the purpose of a hunger strike to the bitter end is involved. Regarding Mac Swiney the theologians split into two currents. Some maintained it was an indirect killing, arguing that in the specific case what was intended was not the killing in itself, but another end, namely the liberation of a people from the oppression of civil and political rights; nor, in that case, was death used as a means to reach the end, since it was not intended, but merely permitted. Others, on the other hand, having noted that in the case in question death followed from the abstinence from food, prolonged to the bitter end, as an immediate effect, however prolonged 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 hence unlawful. The positions have not changed since then and therefore, given the controversy, the hunger strike cannot simply be condemned as s[uicide], when there exist reasonable motives and it is employed as a last ratio to obtain a great good of public interest. On the other hand, given the controversy still, it does not seem forbidden to the doctor to work for the sustenance of the striker, resorting to forced feeding (by tube, nutrient enema and the like), all the more so since, in doing so, the doctor does not take away from the striker's conduct its publicity effect, useful for the attainment of his possibly good cause.

Pietro Palazzini