Abstract
Contemporary approaches to the study of suicide tend to examine suicide as a medical or public health problem rather than a moral problem, avoiding the kinds of judgements that have historically characterised discussions of the phenomenon. But morality entails more than judgement about action or behaviour, and our understanding of suicide can be enhanced by attending to its cultural, social, and linguistic connotations. In this work, I offer a theoretical reconstruction of suicide as a form of moral experience that delineates five distinct, yet interrelated domains of understanding: the temporal, the relational, the existential, the ontological, and the linguistic. Attention to each of these domains, I argue, not only enriches our understanding of the moral realm but also provides a heuristic for examining the moral traditions and practices that constitute contemporary understandings of suicide.
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Notes
Because classical works of poetry and drama typically drew from tradition, an author’s skill and inventiveness was in large part measured by his ability to vary that which had already been told through stylistic expression or by emphasising and elaborating certain details (Javitch 2005).
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Acknowledgments
I am particularly indebted to Ian Kerridge, Jill Gordon, and Claire Hooker for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
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Fitzpatrick, S.J. Re-Moralizing the Suicide Debate. Bioethical Inquiry 11, 223–232 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-014-9510-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-014-9510-y