What is it about?
This article offers the outlines of a political approach to suicide as a matter of social justice. A political approach to the analysis and prevention of suicide seeks (1) to understand suicide in the context of unequal concentrations of "primary goods" within an overall scheme of social and political power, and (2) confronts suicide as an issue of equal justice and human dignity,
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Why is it important?
In contrast to dominant psychological and psychiatric approaches to the study and prevention of suicide, this article advances the thesis that suicide is a solitary "answer" to a set of collective and institutional questions about the conditions of a dignified human existence that we (i.e., most political societies) have not confronted in a meaningful or sustained way. A political account of suicide will point us in the direction of a new right to life movement for the already born.
Perspectives
This article is motivated by the belief that there is a compelling collective obligation, grounded in the moral equality and dignity of persons, to ameliorate the social, economic, and material conditions that are correlated with higher rates of suicide in certain populations. This sense of presumptive political responsibility for the conditions and unequal patterns of suicide (and suicidality) are largely missing today. This article therefore aims to supplement dominant psychological approaches to suicide with greater overall attention to the socio-cultural dynamics that are part of the enduring conditions of possibility for suicide.
Professor Mark E. Button
University of Utah
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Suicide and Social Justice, Political Research Quarterly, June 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1065912916636689.
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