Suicide - Should it be a crime?

Answered by William Thomas

January 2, 2009 - Criminal penalties are not appropriate in the case of attempted suicide. The appropriate response is psychological screening of attempted suicides. The government's only role would be to make sure that minors who attempt suicide are cared for by responsible guardians.

As David Kelley explains in his seminal essay, “Choosing Life,” the choice to live is a pre-ethical choice in the Objectivist view. Suicide is the negation of all values, and death precludes all valuing, but since human values must be chosen, there can be no duty to continue to live. See Ayn Rand’s classic essay, “Causality versus Duty” for the Objectivist view of unchosen obligations: i.e., that there are none.

In the Objectivist view, all crimes boil down to cases of the initiation of force against others. It should never be against the law to take actions that directly harm only oneself. Suicide is a case in point: ordinary suicide attempts should not be criminalized.

Many people who attempt suicide, and fail, do not repeat the attempt. This is because many suicide attempts are not cases of people genuinely giving up on life. Many mentally unstable people, people under the influence of mind-altering drugs, or people caught in the depths of depression attempt suicide. Many attempted suicides are caught up in short-term emotional distress, or see themselves and their lives out of proper context.  Many young people attempt suicide in such states.

For this reason, it is a good idea to screen attempted suicides and people with strong suicidal impulses. The goal of such screening is to look for evidence of psychological illnesses, drug abuse, and inability to reason, and to offer such treatment or counseling as is needed. Suicide attempts should not be sufficient evidence, in themselves, for a diagnosis of psychological illness.

However, there may be no direct role government in any of this. The full liberty rights that Objectivism attributes to “man” are based on the ability of normal, adult humans to live by reason and thereby take responsibility for their own lives. In the case of adults who attempt suicide, the government should take no action unless the person has posed a threat to others. Adolescents are a different case: as long as they are minors, the government would have a role in seeing that they are under proper care (usually, the care of their parents). Because minors are children who have not reached their full adult capacities, rights principles apply differently in their case and recognize that they need supervision.