In ethics and other branches of philosophy, suicide poses difficult questions, answered differently by various philosophers.
Religious philosophy almost universally condemns suicide, while nonreligious stances tend towards toleration, with some seeing it as laudatory, depending on circumstance.
[2] One popular argument is that many of the reasons for committing suicide—such as depression, emotional pain, or economic hardship—are transitory and can be ameliorated by therapy and through making changes to some aspects of one's life.
Existentialist Sartre describes the position of Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger who is condemned to death, in the following way: The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions ... and without resignation either.
He argues that a person who kills himself, as far as he is concerned, destroys the entire world (apparently exactly repeating Maimonides' view).
Thus, for Mill, selling oneself into slavery should be prevented in order to avoid precluding the ability to make further choices.
In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by opinion.
His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it.
From a deontological perspective, Immanuel Kant argues against suicide in Fundamental Principles of The Metaphysic of Morals.
In accordance with the second formulation of his categorical imperative, Kant argues that, "He who contemplates suicide should ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself."
The social contract, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is such that every man has "a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it."
Hobbes claims in his Leviathan that natural law forbids every man "to do, that which is destructive of his life, or take away the means of preserving the same."
Aristotle in his 'discussion of courage, maintains that committing suicide to avoid pain or other undesirable circumstances is a cowardly act.
Plotinus also deals in this treatise with the temptation, for the platonist philosopher (cf Phaedo), to join the intelligible absolute, and to liberate his soul from his body through the medium of suicide.
[7] Japan has a form of suicide called seppuku, which is considered an honorable way to redeem oneself for transgressions or personal defeats.
In an allegory, he compared ending one's life, when subject to great suffering, to waking up from sleep when experiencing a terrible nightmare.
[citation needed] Philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz goes further, arguing that suicide is the most basic right of all.
He argues forcefully and almost romantically that suicide represents the ultimate freedom of humanity, justifying the act with phrases such as "we only arrive at ourselves in a freely chosen death" and lamenting "ridiculously everyday life and its alienation".
[citation needed] Although George Lyman Kittredge states that "the Stoics held that suicide is cowardly and wrong," the most famous stoics—Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—maintain that death by one's own hand is always an option and frequently more honorable than a life of protracted misery.
[13] The Stoics accepted that suicide was permissible for the wise person in circumstances that might prevent them from living a virtuous life.
[14] Plutarch held that accepting life under tyranny would have compromised Cato's self-consistency (Latin: constantia) as a Stoic and impaired his freedom to make the honorable moral choices.
Hume argues that suicide is no more a rebellion against God than is saving the life of someone who would otherwise die, or changing the position of anything in one's surroundings.
Leo Tolstoy wrote in his short work A Confession that after an existential crisis, he considered various options and determined that suicide would be the most logically consistent response in a world where God does not exist.
[22] Leonard Peikoff states in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:[further explanation needed] Suicide is justified when man's life, owing to circumstances outside of a person's control, is no longer possible; an example might be a person with a painful terminal illness, or a prisoner in a concentration camp who sees no chance of escape.