Suicide

Essay by Animal5000College, UndergraduateB+, April 2007

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Suicide can be justified. Throughout the course of philosophy many of the great minds will tell that suicide is not the way of the good nor could it ever be. Suicide is frowned upon, considered wrong is all views, considered one of the greater sins, and is told to be unjustifiable. I disagree. Suicide can not only be justified, it can be the way towards a greater good that no other death can compare. I believe that suicide needs to be looked at from more than the view of this or that. Just as there are shades of black and white, there are degrees of right and wrong. So with this I will explain the justification suicide.

First, what is suicide? Suicide is the act of killing one's self under any premeditated circumstance where death is eminent. Assisted suicide is the killing oneself with the help of one or others.

Now while this inherently sounds like a bad thing, there are many ways and reasons to kill ones self. To say that there are no exceptions or flexibility to the justification of suicide is like saying ethics are absolute. There is no absolute measure of ethics. There are always exceptions and special cases. While some things may seems inherently wrong it does not be that they are always wrong. Killing is one of the best examples of some thing that is wrong at face value. Yet, there are times when killing is justified; nah, necessary for a greater good beyond the life of a single individual.

Plato would argue that our bodies are the property of god and there for have no right to destroy ourselves. Aristotle's opinion is a little more practical in that he believes that suicide is a crime against society and cowardly. Augustine would have you...