Locke on suicide

Political Theory

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 1980, Pages 169-182

  Windstrup, George ^a  

^a Belmont Abbey College   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; DEATH; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; UNITED KINGDOM;

DEATH; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, EARLY MODERN; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, MODERN;

EID: 0019099205     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/009059178000800203     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), II §6.
2. Locke's proof of God's existence, for example, is to be found in chapter 10 of Book IV of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Although the present point is that Two Treatises does not itself demonstrate the validity of the prohibition against suicide according to natural reason, there is also reason to doubt the presence of such evidence in the Essay. Consider particularly Locke's tacit acceptance of the possibility of the eternity of the world, including presumably the human race. Compare Essay IV § 10, 18 and the remarks contained in Molyneux's letter to Locke of April 18, 1693, in Works of John Locke (London, 1823), IX, p. 316.
3. But compare David Hume, “On Suicide,” in Essays Moral. Political and Literary (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 595, n. 1. Locke never explicitly concludes that revealed law prohibits suicide.
4. Treatises, I §86.
5. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, trans. and ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 159.
6. Treatises, I §56 (emphasis added).
7. Treatises, I §56 (emphasis added).
8. Treatises, I §56.
9. Essays on the Law of Nature, p. 173. Strauss, in “Locke's Doctrine of Natural Law,” reprinted in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 197-220, 215, suggests that Hobbes himself grants the power of custom to overrule even men's proneness to self-preservation. (Compare the discussion of the character of natural right in Leviathan, chapter 14, with the discussion “Of Those Things That Weaken or Tend to the Dissolution of a Commonwealth,” Leviathan, chapter 29.) The qualifications of I §56 might be read to suggest that for Locke, only human beings are capable of committing suicide. At the very least, if animals without capacity for imagination ever neglect the “general Rule” of self-preservation, it is only for the sake of the preservation of their young. In Essays, p. 173, Locke points to at least three classes of human suicides where the preservation of offspring is not in question—subjects of monarchy, slaves, and Indian women.
10. Peter King, Life and Letters of John Locke (London: Bohn's 1858), p. 123.
11. Treatises, II §60.
12. King, 123. Compare Hume “On Suicide,” p. 588: “If general laws be ever broke by particular volitions of the Deity, it is after a manner which entirely escapes human observation.
13. Essay, II §7, 4.
14. Essay, II §21, 54. Compare II §21, 59. Essay, II §28, 5 defines moral good or evil as the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to the will of a powerful lawmaker.
15. Essay, II §21, 66.
16. Essay, II §21, 62.
17. Locke recognized the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead as articles of Christian faith, matters above reason. Essay, IV §4, 14, and 15; IV § 17, 14; King, pp. 96-98, 128-130, 199; Essay IV §3, 6; Essay IV §8, 9, and 10. Strauss (“Locke's Doctrine,” p. 210) notes that the Essays are also silent as to these demonstrations.
18. Even more bold is speculation in the Reasonableness of Christianity and Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the effect that though we can imagine God's granting eternal life to the just at the time of the resurrection, we cannot imagine any parallel imposition of eternal misery on the unjust. Consider Works (1823), VII, pp. 9 and 10; VIII, pp. 173-174. Compare King, pp. 318-323.
19. Treatises, II §23.
20. See John Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 108, n. 5.
21. Treatises, II § 57-59. It is impossible to speak of civil justice between master and slave, inasmuch as slavery is but the state of war continued (II § 24). Legal rights can arise only in the compact which ends the state of war and with it, slavery. But the Treatise as a whole explicates a teaching concerning “natural” justice, whether Locke employs the term or not. Good law (civil justice) is not simply the product of random convention. The prudent Lockean legislator will be guided by the Treatises' analysis of the human condition.
22. Treatises, II § 23. Such is Professor Dunn's understanding in The Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 108-110.
23. King, p. 310.
24. Treatises, II § 16.
25. King, p. 310.
26. Treatises, I § 86. Lines 18 and 19 of section 6 suggest the self-evidence of the proposition that the “inferior ranks of Creatures” are made for the use of human beings.
27. Treatises, II § 56.
28. Treatises, II § 60.
29. Treatises, II § 6 suggests that each species is furnished with like faculties by God. But which faculties distinguish the human species? The Treatises itself recognizes the tremendous variation in men's ability to reason. In any case, Lockean reason remains grounded in nothing higher than the guidance of the passions. At best, it can be said to distinguish man from other animals not in itself, but rather in the superior power it potentially places at the disposal of human beings for the satisfaction of their desires. If reason is “the common bond whereby humane kind is united into one fellowship and societie” (II § 172), it is less so in consequence of God's equal gift of reason to each man than because calculation teaches each the advantage of peace and society from the point of view of his private pleasure. If men are essentially different than the beasts, it must either be because their reason is directed by unique instincts or because of their peculiar capacity for imagination which corrupts or depraves reason by liberating it from the restraint of our God-given inclinations (I § 58).
30. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, finds Locke's acceptance of the suicide taboo “the first term in individual religious duty,” to be taken “categorically as a divine command without legitimate limitations” (p. 125). C. B. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), finds in Locke's views on suicide evidence that he “fell short of Hobbes in his acceptance of bourgeois values (pp. 219-220). Compare Leviathan, chapter 10: “The Value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price.” Macpherson grants that it is this supposed confusion of Locke's, i.e., his failure to make life as potentially alienable as estate (which Macpherson understands as the dictate of bourgeois consistency), that “makes his theory more agreeable to the modern reader than the uncompromising doctrine of Hobbes” (p. 220).
31. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Writings of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), p. 285. See Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 70, n. 2, for the extent to which this was a common argument among authoritarian political thinkers. Note that Locke does not offer the most direct defense against this argument, i.e., that revelation does not prohibit suicide.
32. Treatises. II § 11; II § 16; II § 172; II § 181; II § 182.
33. Locke never doubted that the preservation of the commonwealth makes “justly death” even disobedience to the “most dangerous or unreasonable” orders of its officers. Treatises, II § 139.
34. Consider, e.g., Treatises. II § 25.
35. Reasonableness of Christianity, Works (1823), VII, p. 146. Locke explicitly mentions three classes of suicides (Essays, pp. 172-173)—subjects who “worship” their king, slaves who “attend their masters beyond the grave and desire to discharge their duty of obedience in a place where all are equal,” and the wives of Indians who “make light of dying and … hasten to rejoin departed husbands by passing through the flames.” It is probably no accident that each of these groups can be said to be influenced by theological opinions of one sort or another. In such cases, the Treatises seems to provide an alternative theological rationale designed to promote behavior in tune with nature.
36. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 221, n. 82.
37. The situation is analogous to that in which individuals in the state of nature find themselves subject to the power of a thief (Treatises, II § 18; II § 19; II § 207; II § 228).
38. Treatises, II § 135. See also II § 149, II § 168, and II § 172. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, notes that the “attempt to invoke the taboo against suicide as a basic axiom of the theory of political obligation was precisely reversed by Locke” (p. 70).
39. Treatises, II § 224.
40. Essay, II § 21, 41; II § 21, 68, and 69.
41. Treatises, II § 168 (emphasis added).
42. Treatises, I § 56.
43. Compare Hobbes's teaching regarding suicide. Where Locke makes the suicide taboo into a linchpin of his theological politics, Hobbes rests content with the observation in A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, Joseph Cropsey, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 116-117: “I conceive not how any Man can bear Animum felleum, or so much Malice towards himself, as to hurt himself voluntarily, much less to kill himself; for naturally, and necessarily the Intention of every Man aimeth at somewhat, which is good to himself, and tendeth to his preservation: And therefore, methinks, if he kill himself, it is to be presumed that he is not compos mentis, but by some inward Torment or Apprehension of somewhat worse than Death, Distracted.