This paper examines the ethical dimensions of suicide and its legal prohibition in the United States. It argues that while the state has legitimate interests in preventing harm to others, the blanket criminalization of suicide — particularly for those facing terminal illness or intractable pain — lacks clear moral justification. Drawing on deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and the four core bioethical principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice), the paper evaluates when legal constraints on suicide or assisted suicide may or may not be warranted. The paper also raises constitutional concerns about religiously derived laws conflicting with First Amendment principles, concluding that mentally competent individuals possess a defensible moral right to end their own lives under certain circumstances.
Suicide is illegal in the United States, and in that sense it is a problem because thousands of people commit suicide every year. However, it is not clear why suicide is necessarily immoral or why it should be a crime, especially in cases involving those who are suffering from terminal disease, intractable pain, or for whom life has lost all quality or meaning. On the other hand, there may be good reasons why certain legal constraints should apply, such as in connection with soliciting assistance from others or assisting others. Understanding these distinctions requires careful engagement with bioethics and its core principles.
The principal ethical problem presented is that, to justify legal prohibition, the state should be able to articulate some objective rationale for interfering with the autonomous choices of mentally competent people. Naturally, the state has an interest in preventing people from committing suicide in ways that could cause harm to others. The state also has a rationale for prohibiting assisting others in committing suicide, although, arguably, not in all types of cases and circumstances.
In the United States, the fact that the prohibition of suicide has roots in religious beliefs is an important issue, because, in principle, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits any religious basis for secular law (Dershowitz, 2002; Humphry, 2010).
Deontological ethics would support permitting suicide because it can be framed as a moral rule — specifically, that nobody has justification for interfering with the private decision of another competent person to determine whether or not his life is worth continuing, from his own point of view. According to deontological ethics, an appropriate moral rule might be that no person should be required to live longer than he wants to, as long as he is mentally competent to make that decision and as long as he does not harm or put anybody else at risk in the process (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009).
Virtue ethics would support the legality of providing assistance to anybody who was competent to make the decision to end his life and who required such assistance, as long as the genuine motivation of the person assisting was to help that person and not to harm him or profit personally (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009).
"Autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice"
"Author's normative stance on suicide rights"
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