Culpability and moral responsibility

The recent spate of suicides caused by online bullying and also some cases of domestic violence in which the woman was apparently driven to suicide have raised again the question of culpability as opposed to  moral responsibility.

Photographer: Jan Murphy
The law is very clear about this. Suicide is a voluntary act, a decision taken by someone of their own free will and unless it is a case of assisted suicide, no one can be held legally responsible for it. Or can they? More and more questions are being raised on this.  Someone can of course be regarded as morally responsible for another's suicide, especially if the person who commits suicide can be proven to be depressed - but then most suicides are committed by people who are depressed and see no other solution before them in order to end their sufferings. However, moral responsibility remains something personal and many individuals do not even ask themselves questions about the ethical  implications of their own actions. The idea therefore that someone may be culpable for another's suicide is quite novel.
Let's look at a few hypothetical cases. For these I will be using various material drawn from real life stories  but variously combined. For convenience I will refer to myself as a would be suicide but please do not take this to the letter, I am not thinking of taking my own life nor has anything mentioned here ever happened to me.

Photographer: Martin Robinson
Suppose I had decided to kill myself and told someone about it. That person would be expected, from a moral standpoint,  to do something, like alerting the police or a doctor. If he/she does not act and I do go ahead with my plan, that person would not be legally responsible for my death but questions would be raised as to why he did not act to prevent it, knowing my intention. So far so good.
Now suppose I was feeling very depressed and was trying to reach someone to resolve a conflict. Suppose that person was too busy or plainly irritated by my wanting to speak with them and systematically refused, claiming to be harassed. Suppose that person also flippantly commented to another that I was a pain and someone should take action and deprive me of my liberties and sedate me to keep me quiet and this was relayed to me, causing me further distress. Suppose that person also wrote messages on social networking sites saying he was being stalked by a madwoman, that the only way he could get rid of me would be if I was dead, that I should be locked up, that the world would be a better place without me. Suppose he also got his friends to support him, ganging up with him and stopping me from coming  near them in social situations. Feeling quite distraught I decide to throw myself under a train. That person again would not be legally responsible but questions would be raised on whether his behaviour has led to my decision of taking my own life. Still the responsibility for the act of suicide would be mine. If I also wrote a suicide note saying that the only reason why I have decided to take my life is that this person has made my life hell and I see no end to my suffering, that I find his aggressive and intimidatory behaviour too hard to bear, then it might be possible to try this person for manslaughter, especially if there is medical evidence as to my being very depressed, which would make me vulnerable,  whereas earlier the only thing one could do, if at all, was talk about his moral responsibility, a matter for his own conscience alone.
This significant change has been brought about by an important case tried in 2006 which established a precedent. A woman after being beaten for the nth time by her bullish husband took her own life. She had left a detailed journal recounting how over the past six months she had been leading a life of pain and torture, emotional and physical. The man was acquitted from the manslaughter charge but the case  established the principle that, with the appropriate medical evidence, it would be possible to prosecute someone for driving another person to suicide.
Photographer: Michael Culhane
 "Driving someone to suicide through psychological harm should be on the statute books" says Sandra Horley, Chief Executive of the charity Refuge which deals with domestic violence.  
There is a difference between a suicide that is approached as a rational choice and a suicide that is committed out of sheer desperation, under severe distress. Most of the laws dealing with suicide are archaic and in some countries suicide is even illegal - though there is little by way of punishment that can be doled out once someone is dead. 
I am not sure whether I really welcome the idea of culpability in the case of someone else's suicide. It does make sense in cases of domestic violence and bullying but it could be misused. On the other hand, OJ Simpson would not have so easily walked away had the question of culpability been raised in the case of his wife's suicide. If you remember, it was initially alleged he had killed her but it was then accepted she had killed herself. Had culpability for her suicide been taken into account the verdict may have been different. 


(All photos modelled by Alex B.) 

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