Yes, though I wouldn't want to have to adjudicate responsibility in a particular case.

Here's the philosophical principle I've got in mind: If a person A provides sufficient motivation for person B to commit an act, then A might be responsible for B's act. If A intended to provide sufficient motivation, intending that B commit the act, then I can't imagine A not being responsible. And if B would not have committed the act but for A's motivating actions -- in other words, if whatever A did was also necessary to B's committing the act -- and A knew this, then A would definitely be responsible.

The problem with applying this general principle to suicides is that what counted as sufficient and necessary motivational conditions for a particular suicide are almost never known for certain. Most suicide victims (as I understand it) are assumed not to be in full rational control of their actions; e.g., there is mental illness involved. If suicide is an irrational act, then assigning responsibility will be a formidably difficult, if not moot, task.

In the case you describe, if the person causing severe emotional distress intended to push the victim to suicide, and the victim would not have committed suicide but for the infliction of the severe emotional distress, then yes, s/he is responsible. If the person causing the distress never intended to push the victim to suicide, but knew (or should reasonably have known) that it might, and the victim would not have committed suicde but for the distress, then I'd say yes again. But if the victim would have committed suicide anyway, then the person causing the distress would not be responsible, even if s/he intended to do it (though some might disagree with me here). If the suicide has been successful, could we ever know what role the emotional distress actually played?

(This isn't a precise illustration, but I think it might be relevant to sorting out the issue: Depressed patients given anti-depressants show a significant rate of suicide, so there's been some concern that anti-depressants are responsible for patients commiting suicide. But one of the more notable symptoms of depression is extreme lethargy. So these patients may have been intending suicide all along, but they didn't have the energy to carry it out until the anti-depressant alleviated the lethargy. In logical terms, the anti-depressant didn't provide a sufficient condition for the suicide, but rather a necessary one. Normally providing a necessary condition doesn't assign responsibility unless it was done with the intent of providing a necessary condition. The doctors who prescribed anti-depressants for these patients never intended to provide the necessary energy for the patient to go through with a previously-planned suicide, so they wouldn't be responsible.)

I don't think you are wrong to have such a belief, and we can all think of situations in which people might come to the reasonable conclusion that death was preferable to life. There are of course religious, and not only religious, principles on which suicide is morally ruled out, but social stigma is not nowadays normally much attached to suicide, it seems to me. For example, relatives who assist in the death of someone are rarely now convicted by juries of anything illegal, and in a sense they are assisting in suicide, the suicide of someone who is no longer able to carry it out by themselves. Suicide itself is no longer a crime, in most jurisdictions, and there exists a long tradition in many cultures of respecting the decision to end a life when one no longer believes it is worth preserving.

I would not be overly concerned at feelings of guilt, because we often feel guilt for things over which we have no control at all. It is not as though in a fit of sudden despair when you were not available to be with him he carried out this act. He thought about it over some time, calmly considered the various options and likely eventualities, no doubt including your feelings in the matter and the effect his action would have on you, and came to a certain conclusion. I think we have to respect the decisions of our children, especially when they veer away from where we would like them to go, and not feel guilt as a result of them.

On the other hand, in the case of someone on medication and with mental health problems one is always worried about how far autonomy is at issue. Did he really have the ability to take a calm and measured decision, or was his thinking unbalanced by a particular combination of drugs, or indeed their absence? In that case one might be worried about whether prompt intervention of some kind might have brought about a different conclusion. Then guilt would be appropriate. From the account you provide, though, this is not the situation, and I am sure you would understand the nature of what was taking place much better than anyone else. There is no reason why suicide need not be a brave and defiant act, and you should have no compunction at so describing it.

Let me begin by saying that I'm sorry for your loss. This must be terribly hard. And your sense of guilt is understandable. It's hard to think the thought that one's child may have done the best thing in taking his own life. But as you point out, this thought doesn't come from lack of care or lack of grief, but from the very opposite: from deep caring and empathy born of intimate knowledge of your son's situation.

There are some well-known theological and philosophical arguments intended to show that suicide is always wrong. Immanuel Kant offered one that strikes many readers -- it certainly strikes me this way -- as bordering on sophistry; I won't try to reconstruct it here, and won't recommend it as anything you need consider. Theological arguments against suicide often rest on dubious claims about the divine will and the way in which taking one's own life supposedly usurps God's perogative to decide when we die -- arguments that might well make a believer in a loving and merciful God shudder. But the sense of many reflective people is that these abstract arguments are beside the point in evaluating the actions of someone whose life promises only continued misery.

Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that we should have a casual attitude toward suicide, nor that suicide is always rational or right. But blanket prohibitions that take no account of real people's pain and prospects can't be justified and have the side-effect -- as you note -- of making those left behind feel needlessly guilty for empathizing with the person who took his life.

Philosophers are by temperament people who tend not to care too much about what "society" thinks if society's views seem ill-founded. "Society" is in no position to pass judgment on the very personal details of your son's life and death. Your words are the words of a loving parent; whatever some people may think, you aren't wrong for feeling as you do.

I would add this, however. While it certainly can be rational to commit suicide, people who are considering suicide aren't always in a good position to think about it rationally. That's for the obvious reason that many (perhaps most) people who are seriously thinking about killing themselves are depressed, and part of what depression does is make it hard to think clearly. A depressed person might believe that there's no hope, and that the pain will never end, but that's often not true. So yes: suicide can be rational. But if you know someone who's thinking about it, helping them get help may serve what they would understand as their own rational ends if only they were in a better position to see them.

Yes: when the ends that matter to one are better served by suicide than by staying alive. Jan Palach killed himself to make a powerful point against the Soviet invasion of his country -- plausibly believing that nothing else he could have done would have had as great an effect (see question 1518). Victims of the Gestapo have killed (or tried to kill) themselves in order to avoid betraying their comrades. Admiral Chester Nimitz and his wife Joan killed themselves in old age, seeking to end their lives on their own terms rather than incapacitated in some medical facility. Each of these people had an end to which they gave more weight than to their own survival -- the end of ending Soviet domination, the end of defeating the Nazis, the end of dying on one's own terms. There is nothing irrational in ranking these ends above an additional period of life for oneself.

Your question assumes that every life is worth living, and that the only point to ending one's earthly life would be to "trade up" to a presumably better afterlife. But if one's life is so bad that it is not worth living, there is no paradox in preferring oblivion. Your example of a life dominated by excruciating case might be an example where some would find life not worth living; I could imagine that slavery could so degrade those who are enslaved that their lives seem not worth living. My sense is that the prospect of avoiding future degradation or suffering gives suicide salience in cases like these, not just the prospect of enjoying a better afterlife.

Socrates' discussion of the afterlife in Plato's Apology is a fascinting philosophical discussion of possible attitudes towards the afterlife.

Suicide and highly risky acts of defiance can be, but rarely are, highly effective forms of political resistance. So one needs to analyze the conditions under which they are effective. The political suicide I remember most vividly is that of Jan Palach, a Czech student who burned himself to death with gasoline (in early 1969) to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion of his country. His suicide contributed greatly, I believe, to a deep and enduring change in attitude toward the Soviet Union on the part of young people esp. in Western Europe who, horrified by the brutality of the US war in Vietnam, had tended to view the Soviet Union as the more humane, less aggressive superpower. Many young people then did not really trust the established news media and vaguely suspected that the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia may indeed have preempted some sort of counterrevolutionary plot supported by the West. Jan Palach's suicide destroyed such excuses by focusing attention on the sentiments of young people in Czechoslovakia itself: on their passionate support of the Prague spring and on their desperation over its violent end. Jan Palach's suicide highlighted the moral character of the Soviet bloc and contributed substantially, I think, to its loss of moral credibility and eventual demise. Though Palach died long before the internet, his name scores more than 100,000 hits on google, more than Indira Ghandhi's, who died in a dramatic assassination 15 years after Palach and had been the Prime Minister of a vastly larger country for the preceding 19 years.

It is hard to think of other examples. Two Korean farmers come to mind who killed themselves in protest of increasing agricultural imports into Korea -- one in 2003 at a WTO meeting in Cancun, the other in 2005 at an APEC meeting in Busan. Certainly Lee Kyung-hae's death in Cancun was widely reported, but I do not think that it made much difference to WTO policies or even to those of the Korean government. Perhaps more successful were a number of suicides in China (end of 2003) in protest of forced expropriations that were often effected by corrupt local government agencies paying minimal compensation or none. These suicides and the anger they triggered caused the Chinese government drastically to limit the agencies authorized to order expropriations as well as the purposes by appeal to which such expropriations can be justified.

Can suicide be effective political resistance in the West Bank? I assume you have in mind an act of suicide in protest of the continued Israeli occupation and settlement policy. My sense is that, in the present context, such a suicide by a Palestinian would be drowned out in the media by all the other violence going on there. Such a suicide by an Israeli, by contrast, could have much greater impact by showing to the outside world and especially the many supporters of Israel that such support need not, and should not, condone continuation of the Israeli occupation and settlement policies. Small numbers of young Israelis have had much impact by refusing to serve in the Israeli army or by refusing to serve in the occupied territories.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me add that violent resistance to the occupation (bombings, suicide bombings, Qassam rockets) seems to me no less ineffective. Such resistance undermines Israeli opposition to the occupation and makes it easier for the Israeli government to avoid a negotiated settlement. Creative, well-organized and strictly non-violent resistance might have a chance to furnish an effective appeal to fair-minded Israelis and Western populations. But it's hard to see how such a resistance movement could evolve in the situation as it is now.

People who commit suicide can surely do so with the intention of provoking political change, including resisting tyranny or injustice. Likewise, those affected by the suicide of others can surely be provoked to political action by that act, including action that serves to fight tyranny or injustice.

However, this seems to me a perilous strategy of political resistance, and not just because it involves death. I suspect that individual acts of suicide are difficult to structure effectively as political acts: because suicide often baffles those affected the most by them, the odds of any particular suicide having the intended effect look to be rather low. The consequences of acts of mass suicide also seem difficult to predict, in part because media and governments will surely subject those acts to interpretive "spin" that will inevitably serve coroporate or governmental interests rather than those of the reistance group.

In sum, death in general and suicide in particular strike me as such culturally complex and anxiety-provoking events that the very cultural significance that makes suicide seem like an ultimate political act also makes it extremely hard to predict or shape the political reaction to that act. This seems all the more true for in extremely complicated and "messy" social and political environments like the West Bank.

I'll be interested to learn whether any other panelists have a more optimistic spin on the use of suicide as a means to resist injustice.

Suicide is outlawed in different societies and epochs for all sorts of different reasons. These fall broadly into three categories: to enforce religious commands, to protect persons from themselves, and to protect persons other than the would-be suicide. Are these good reasons to outlaw suicide?

Reasons in the first category are not acceptable in modern democratic societies (and, in the US, violate the First-Amendment separation of church and state). Those in the majority must not impose their religion on their fellow citizens.

Reasons in the second category -- so-called paternalistic (or parentalistic) reasons -- can be plausible. It is a good thing that the police can stop the attempted suicide of a young man who is in despair after his lover broke up with him. Chances are he'll get over it and fall in love again, even if this now seems inconceivable to him. But what if, a year or two later, the man still judges his life not worth living and wants to die? Who are we to overrule his judgment in this matter? We may perhaps legally require would-be suicides to receive competent information from relevant experts (doctors, psychologists, etc.) and from others who have gone through a crisis similar to theirs. But when someone has done this, and still wants to die, we should not force him to stay alive "for his own sake." (Note that, in practice, modern democratic societies do not apply such coercion even though they do make suicide illegal. And criminal punishments for attempted suicide are exceedingly rare.)

Reasons in the third category invoke the interests of those who depend on the would-be suicide. This does not include the interests of society or other larger groups. A person is free to withdraw from these groups (to quit her job, to leave her religious group, to emigrate), and this shows that they have no right to her continued contributions. The same point would seem to hold, to a lesser extent, for a spouse: The fact that a person is free to have a divorce shows that her spouse has not right to her continued partnership. The interests of a dependent child, however, support a much stronger claim. To be sure, society must find a way to meet the needs of the child if its parent dies. But the loss of a parent, especially through suicide, is often a devastating loss for a child even if society meets its obligation well (something that, in the real world, is often not the case).

In conclusion, I think there are sufficiently strong reasons in the second and third categories for outlawing -- not all suicides, but some, in a way designed to discourage and to express disapproval. These reasons are strongest with respect to persons with dependent children who experience a kind of crisis that tends to be temporary. These reasons may justify restraining competent people for brief periods. And they may justify forcing competent persons to receive balanced information and counseling relating to their crisis and to the potential impact of their decision on their dependent children.

It is fair to point to the harms that would befall others, because such harms are surely not morally irrelevant. They are relevant, for example, when the potential suicide has caused others to be dependent on him or her, e.g. his or her children whose lives are likely to be blighted by the suicide of a parent. And even if the harm that would befall others is not due to earlier decisions by the agent (getting married, having children), he or she has moral reason at least to do what can be done to ease the pain of parents, siblings, friends, etc., left behind. In these ways, perhaps suicide is not all that different from other actions people take: They may have a right to take these actions, in the sense that it would be wrong to prevent them from so acting. But this does not mean that such actions are beyond moral criticism: Their execution may be morally flawed in diverse ways, and sometimes these actions may be morally wrong altogether. Thus consider divorce. People have a moral right to walk out on a marriage in the sense that it would be wrong to prevent them from doing so. Nonetheless, people often walk out in ways that cause much avoidable pain and hardship to the spouse and children. And sometimes even the most considerate way of walking out would cause so much pain and hardship for the sake of a relatively small gain that the agent would do wrong to give precedence to his or her own happiness over that of his or her family. The important, general point here is this: Even if one has a moral right to do X (= it would be morally wrong for others to prevent one from doing X) one's doing X may still be morally wrong.