Why do we react so badly to young suicide? The young suicide is particularly unacceptable: he or she appears to engage in the reverse of Pritchard’s ultimate rejection ”” it is not we who are rejecting the individual suicide so much as the young suicide cohorts who are rejecting us ”” our love, family, faith, imagination, creativity, culture, civilisation. We are, in many senses, as much affronted as confronted by each such event. But this is essentially because we view the individual as belonging to us, to our society. For some religions, life and death belong only to God.
We need to reflect that even the most rejected, lonely, desperate, hopeless and helpless individual still has one little domain of sovereignty: his or her physical being. Continuation or cessation of that physicality is the only decision they can make ”” and who are we to deny them that exercise?
In the land of the self -choice is to be worshipped.
I guess I’d be more impressed with sovereignty if I could control my own conception.