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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Suicide is a crime which seems not to allow of being punished strictly speaking, since such a thing can only be visited either on the innocent or on a cold and insensible corpse. In the latter case, punishment would make no more impression on the living than whipping a statue. In the former case, it is unjust and tyrannical because man's political freedom presupposes that punishment be directed only at the actual culprit of a crime. Men love life too much and everything around them confirms them in this love. The enticing image of pleasure and hope, that sweetest snare of mortals, for which they will gulp down great draughts of evil if it is mixed with a few drops of delight, is too alluring for there to be any need to fear that the necessary impossibility of punishing such a crime will have any influence on men. He who fears pain obeys the law; but death extinguishes all the bodily sources of pain. What motive, then, can stay the desperate man's hand from suicide?
One who kills himself does less harm to society than one who leaves its borders forever; for the former leaves all his belongings, whilst the latter takes with him some part of what he owns. Indeed, if the strength of a nation consists in the number of its citizens, one who leaves a society to join a neighbouring nation does twice the harm of one who simply removes himself by death.
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