Immanuel Kant On Suicide Analysis

When I was little the world was very new to me. I did not see the world as a complicated place. My parents took care of me by providing me with food, water, and shelter. All my life they paid for my catholic education so that I could become something good and valuable in life. But as I got older, I started viewing life in a different perspective. I began questioning a lot of things in my life with no real answer to come up with. One of those questions was, what is the meaning of life? It seems like a simple question, but thinking harder about it made me realize that I really did not know what the true meaning of life was. If there is no meaning in life why not kill oneself? This was an important question for philosophers like Albert Camus, and Immanuel Kant who both had intelligent and unique views on life, but with exceedingly opposite opinions. Camus believed that life is absurd, which means that the world does not make sense, and that life has no intrinsic …show more content…
Camus believes that suicide is a choice that we have to escape the absurd, however Kant believes that suicide is not morally legitimate because it violates our duty to ourselves. Human lives are unconditionally intrinsically valuable and this is the reason why we should preserve ourselves. Someone who commits suicide does not preserve their self. Kant wrote in Lectures on Ethics, “Man has, in his own person, a thing inviolable; it is something holy, that has been entrusted to us.”(p.147) Suicide is considered to be an unnatural action that violates our moral law. Someone who commits suicide is seen as something “below the beasts.”(p.146) Kant believes that not even “misery gives no man the right to take his life.”(p.147) No matter how much pain someone endures in their life, they have to face it with great will. Kant sees human beings as property of God. Any harm done against ourselves will violate God’s purpose of the preservation of our