자살의 의미 －언어분석철학적 관점에서－

Every death is not always a suicide. But death of many people are suicides. Suicides appear in many forms. Suicides take forms of physician-assisted death or voluntary euthanasia besides stereo-typed suicides. Furthermore, somebody’s death is a indeterminate death that seems to be considered as suicide as well as murder. It is necessary to define the meaning of suicide in order to understand the physician-assisted death or the voluntary euthanasia. The result of the linguistic-analytical study on conceptual components of suicide can be summarized into five theses as follows: T.1 : A suicide requires the self-conflictedness of the suicidal. T.2 : A suicide requires the foreknowledge of the result of suicidal act. T.3 : A suicide requires the intention to die in the weak sense. T.4 : The motive of a suicide should not to be considered. T.5 : A suicide requires voluntariness of the suicidal. In sum, a suicide can be defined as a self-inflicted death resulted from the intentional act of a suicidal person having foreknowledge of the result of his own act regardless of the motive. It is very difficult to draw the boundary between suicide and euthanasia in the light of the above-mentioned definition of suicide. In reality, suicide and euthanasia can be overlapped in many cases. Furthermore, it is unnecessary to define a suicide as a exclusive concept in contrast with euthanasia.