Home
Search
Login
RegisterPosted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: March 03, 2026, 07:16:44 am »Quote
Even in democratic societies, the right to die is denied.
Why say "even"? I do not think it is coincidental that many democracy-compatible philosophers opposed suicide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_suicide
Quote
Common philosophical opinion of suicide since modernization reflected a spread in cultural beliefs of western societies that suicide is immoral and unethical.[2]
...
For Camus, suicide was the rejection of freedom. He thought that fleeing from the absurdity of reality into illusions, religion, or death is not the way out. Instead of fleeing the absurd meaninglessness of life, we should embrace life passionately.
...
G. K. Chesterton calls suicide "the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence". He argues that a person who kills themself, as far as he is concerned, destroys the entire world (apparently exactly repeating Maimonides' view).
...
John Stuart Mill argued, in his influential essay "On Liberty," that since the sine qua non of liberty is the power of the individual to make choices, any choice that one might make that would deprive one of the ability to make further choices should be prevented.
...
Kant argues that, since objective morality is grounded in one's own ability to reason, suicide is wrong because it involves removing that ability through ending one's life, thereby creating a kind of practical contradiction.
...
Hobbes and Locke reject the right of individuals to take their own life. Hobbes claims in his Leviathan that natural law forbids every man "to do, that which is destructive of his life, or take away the means of preserving the same."
...
Aristotle in his 'discussion of courage, maintains that committing suicide to avoid pain or other undesirable circumstances is a cowardly act. In a later chapter [of Nicomachean Ethics], he further argues that suicide is unlawful and is an act committed against the interests of the state.'[6]