The ethics of public suicide

Morbid topic for a Friday, but perhaps a relevant one considering the potential causality related to more dismal news about unemployment. The Washington Post ran a thought-provoking article on the front page today about operators whose trains have been the vehicle for others’ suicide.

In DC, eight people have killed themselves this year by jumping in front of Metro trains – more than normal, which is why this is getting attention. Of course suicide-by-train is nothing new, nor is the method unique to the District. I’ve actually been on an Amtrak train when it killed somebody and in a Metro station when the same thing happened. The passenger mentality is equally one of sympathy and inconvenience. The latter is a vain, perhaps even embarrassing, reaction to such a tragedy, but it does open the door to a conversation about ethics of suicide.

There are three degrees of public suicide-relation, in my estimation. The third is a tangential relationship like the one I just described. A suicide acts as a disruption but doesn’t necessarily make an emotional connection. The second is that of a witness to the event – an otherwise uninvolved bystander made instantly, painfully, and permanently aware of the gruesome possibilities of death.

The first is that of the unwilling participant – in this case the train driver. The Post articulates the point:

[I]nches from each of those horrific scenes, barely mentioned in the news, sits a traumatized driver who will be forever entangled with a stranger’s demise. It is an intimacy none of them sought.

It is hard to discuss the ethics of suicide without sounding either crass or cold-hearted, and it is difficult to expect a reasoned approach from a human being who has chosen to throw away his or her own life. But the consequences of public suicide represent a dangerous breach of morality. In the first degree, using another human being as a means to an end is akin to spiritual rape.

The problem, of course, is that the guilty party (if successful) doesn’t survive to bear responsibility and we are thus stuck with a Catch-22 scenario. Suicide might be the ultimate expression of unregulated freedom. A terrifying thought.