Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Abstract

1. Kant argued that suicide is immoral when committed for the purpose of escaping from unhappiness. I have tried on one or two occasions to reconstruct Kant's argument, by offering a particular interpretation of the Formula of Humanity, which says that a person has a value that makes him an end in himself.
2. The statement that a person is an end, I interpret as expressing the fact that we ought to care about some things for the person's sake, by caring about them out of concern for him. A person is an end in the sense that he is that for the sake of which — out of concern for which — some things are worth caring about.
3. This conception of how a person can be an end yields an argument against escapist suicide, I argued, when it is combined with a particular conception of a person's good, which is what the escapist attempts to serve by his own death.