Suicide: a Fundamental Human Right? (IN: Suicide: the Philosophical Issues, ed. by M P Battin & D J Mayo)

Battin rejects traditional notions that insist that either everyone or no one has a right to suicide & attempts to distinguish those individuals who do have a right to suicide from those who do not. She holds that one’s right to suicide depends on the capacity of suicide to promote human dignity. Where the choice of death represents self-protection or protection of some important value, it may well be constitutive of human dignity, & so a matter of fundamental human right. (29 refs.)