Dear Cecil,
Apart from other considerations, there’s a perfectly good reason why some jurisdictions continue to classify suicide a felony. The felony-murder rule provides an analogy. If someone jumps off the Sears Tower in order to kill himself, and ends up crushing a pedestrian to death, though not killing himself, he shouldn’t be able to simply limp away from it without penalty.
Link to column: Is suicide against the law? – CKDH
FYI,
You’ve just posted your full name and addy to several thousand people! This is NOT Cecil’s email!
That said, welcome to the Board!
Your logic is bad Jonathan. There are many ways that one can commit suicide without endangering anyone. Thus, laws against suicide on your reasoning make no sense. If someone jumping off a building did kill a pedestrian, yet himself survived, then if charged with a crime it shouldn’t be attempted suicide, but instead involuntary manslaughter.
I read (in Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror”, I believe) that the Church rules against suicide were a medieval innovation-- the hereafter was presented as being so rosy, and life was so sucky, that suicide seemed a logical choice.
That does strike me as sounding a bit urban-legend-ish, though (how urban could 14th-century Europe be?).
In that case, they would be guilty of manslaughter. At any rate, I’d guess a fairly small percentage of suicide attempters leap off tall buildings. Most probably take pills, shoot themselves, or cut themselves.
I also doubt that someone leaping from the Sears Tower would ever reach the ground. I remember hearing something about how pennies thrown from the tower generally end up being blown against the building and landing on ledges below. If that’s true, the same might hold for bodies.
Incidentally, I had always thought suicide was illegal because it makes it gives the police grounds to intervene to prevent a suicide attempt. But I guess it’s not illegal after all. (Which seems strange, since I know suicidal people can be put into some sort of temporary protective custody, even against their will. If they aren’t committing any crime, how is that legal?)
Because the criminal law isn’t the only type of law around. There can be civil mental health statutes which allow state intervention when someone is potentially a threat to themselves or to others, even if they’ve not yet committed any crime.
That makes sense. Thanks.
One does appreciate the double-meaning of the word “civil” in that context, eh, Piper?
Definitely not true. Very soon after Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, Augustine took up the case of women who committed suicide to avoid rape. His final opinion is that it was wrong of them, but, since one can’t expect mere women to be experts in ethical philosophy, God wouldn’t hold it against them.
I doubt very much that Tuchman assigned it to the 14th century. A medievalist who forgets the Wood of the Suicides in Dante is, to put it kindly, not very well informed.
(Note, by the way, that Dante treats suicide as a sin for Christians, not for others. Pagans who commited suicide are either not found in Hell at all, or are found in some other department.)
Yep. It didn’t take church leaders until the middle ages to notice that since the Bible depicted the afterlife as pure bliss, that Christians would think that suicide would be a way to exchange their misery of Earth for eternity in paradise. They weren’t trying to create a suicide cult.
As for Dante having pagan suicides not in hell, Dante had a deep respect for the ancient Greek philosophers. For those unfamiliar with Plato’s Apology, in that Socrates is lauded for committing suicide after being sentenced to death on bogus charges, even though the friends of Socrates had arranged to get him out of Athens to safety. Also, it makes no logical sense that pagans unaware of Christ should be sent to hell for committing suicide which is contrary to Christian doctrine. Socrates committed suicide long before Jesus was born.
The fault is mine, no doubt; I did a quick scan of the book (sorry, not re-reading it tonight <g>) and didn’t find anything. Must have been somewhere else that I read it.
Pagans are either “Virtuous Pagans” in Aisle 1, or “Heretics” in Aisle 6.
I suppose they could fit in many of the others. But these would be the first places to look if you get down there and you’re looking for old poker buddies.
No, no, no, no, no. A heretic is, by definition, a misbelieving Christian; there are no pagans in the flaming tombs. Dante has plenty of pagans in all the customary sinful categories – lust, greed, treachery, and so on. The Inferno, in fact, is organized by Aristotle’s taxonomy of sin, to which Dante adds the Vestibule of the Trimmers (those who were too spineless for either Heaven or Hell to take them), Limbo of the virtuous pagans (physically part of Hell, but the only “punishment” there is knowing that you missed the boat), and the Wood of the Heretics. (Suicide is treated as a subdivision of Aristotle’s category of Violence, and the Suicides share their neighborhood in Hell with the Wasters, those – mostly spoiled rich kids – who blew their lives away without actually dying of it.)