Abstract

"Suicide" is defined as an act of self-killing which is intentional and not coerced. To say that a suicide is a self-killing is to attribute causal responsibility to an agent for her own death. Suicides must be intentional self-killings, because if intention to die is lacking, then the agent cannot be said to be responsible for her death. Therefore, death by accident or disease is excluded from the class of suicides. Finally, since suicides are intentional self-killings for which the agent is responsible, coerced self-killings are not suicides. ;Political oppression restricts the liberty of members of oppressed classes. Some of this restriction is coercive in nature. Therefore, questions of moral responsibility may have to be answered differently depending upon whether an action is performed under conditions of political equality or conditions of political oppression. For this reason, a self-killing which would be regarded as a suicide if performed under conditions of political equality might be a coerced self-killing and so not a suicide if performed by a member of an oppressed group. This is true only if the suicide is performed because of the political oppression under which the agent lives. ;Even in cases where the self-killing of an oppressed person is considered a suicide, the agent's oppressors may bear some responsibility for her decision to kill herself. Again, this is true only if she killed herself because of the condition of political oppression under which she lives. ;This conclusion about a shift in moral responsibility for suicide performed because of political oppression under which the person who kills herself lives has wider implications for moral theory. If this shift in moral responsibility occurs in the case of suicide, we can suppose that the same is true of other actions performed under conditions of political oppression