What is suicide? Classifying self-killings
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SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION
What is suicide? Classifying self‑killings Suzanne E. Dowie1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Although the most common understanding of suicide is intentional self-killing, this conception either rules out someone who lacks mental capacity being classed as a suicide or, if acting intentionally is meant to include this sort of case, then what it means to act intentionally is so weak that intention is not a necessary condition of suicide. This has implications in health care, and has a further bearing on issues such as assisted suicide and health insurance. In this paper, I argue that intention is not a necessary condition of suicide at all. Rather, I develop a novel approach that deploys the structure of a homicide taxonomy to classify and characterise suicides to arrive at a conceptually robust understanding of suicide. According to my analysis of suicide, an agent is the proximate cause of his death. Suicide is ‘self-killing,’ rather than ‘intentional self-killing.’ Adopting this understanding of suicide performs several functions: (1) We acquire an external standard to assess diverging analyses on specific cases by appealing to homologous homicides. (2) Following such a taxonomy differentiates types of suicides. (3) This approach has application in addressing negative connotations about suicide. (4) As a robust view, adding intention is an unnecessary complication. (5) It is more consistent with psychological and sociological assessments of suicide than ‘intentional self-killing.’ (6) It has useful applications in informing public policy. This paper’s focus is on classifying types of suicides, rather than on the moral permissibility or on underlying causes of suicidal ideation and behaviour. Keywords Suicide · Self-killing · Intentional self-killing · Self-homicide
Introduction Many people think of suicide as intentional self-killing; an example is one that I call Bankruptcy Shooting: a businessman procures a pistol and intentionally shoots himself in the head because he lost his money in a stock market crash and he dies immediately as a direct result of the shot. However, a problem arises with this conception of suicide when we consider the following case, called Drunk Driver: someone drives drunk very fast on wet roads at night. He could reasonably foresee that engaging in such behaviour could kill someone. If the driver kills someone else, we would ascribe to him responsibility for that death and regard that death a type of manslaughter. The question arises, if the driver kills himself, is this a self-manslaughter, and therefore a type of suicide? Let us assume that this drunk driver had a history of reckless behaviour motivated by a sublimated death wish; his * Suzanne E. Dowie [email protected] 1
Dunblane, Scotland
death is sub-intended since he does not intentionally set out to kill himself. This raises the additional question: is his death suicide only if he intends to kill himself? If we think of such recklessness as suicidal behaviour, then perhaps we ought to
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