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Articles

Kant On Suicide

Paul Edwards disagrees with Kant in this recently-discovered paper.

All Enlightenment thinkers who wrote on the subject – Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau among others – agreed that the religious condemnation of suicide was not only preposterous but also entirely lacking in charity. Kant, on the other hand, denounced suicide in the most unqualified and indeed quite furious terms. According to him “suicide is in no circumstances permissible.” The man who commits suicide “sinks lower than the beasts.” We “shrink from him in horror.

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