Suicide as self-determination of citizenship within the state

Abstract

This article begins with an overview of the phenomenon of suicide as a means of approaching the issue, more specifically, from the point of view of ethical and political obedience to the state, in which the question of the legitimacy of the self-determination of citizenship of people who chose not to continue to live is inscribed. To achieve this, the article follows the approach of Michael Walzer who argues that the criminalization of suicide is based, throughout the history of the Western tradition, on a triple paradigmatic of context of social ties: the
Athenian city-state; the medieval monarchy and the revolutionary socialist movement. Citizenship, as a moral impossibility of suicide, has two antithetical positions in the thought of Aristotle and Hume. Demonstrating the importance of maintaining open the creation of new social ties, this shows the possibility of the regulation of assisted suicide may be a frontier issue for the current discussion on human rights.