Ping-cheung Lo Confucian Views on Suicide and Their Implications for Euthanasia

On June 2, 1927, a famous professor of Qing Hua University, Wang Guowei, drowned himself in a lake of the former imperial garden in Beijing. His suicide proved extremely controversial and evoked much discussion.1 His colleague and famous intellectual, Liang Qichao, wrote several eulogies in his honor. In one of these eulogies Liang reminded his colleagues and students, who lived in a culture which had just entered the modern age and was under heavy western influence, not to use western perspectives to evaluate Wang’s suicide. Europeans, Liang asserted, used to regard suicide as an act of cowardice, and Christianity made it a sin. In ancient China, however, notwithstanding some petty suicides committed by common people, many eminent figures used suicide to express their counter-cultural aspirations. These were praiseworthy suicides, Liang concluded, and should by no means be rashly reproached by alien European values (Liang, 1927, p.75). I think the main idea of Liang’s observation is largely correct. Traditional Chinese ethical perspectives on suicide differ significantly from their western counterparts, with the possible exception of Stoic Rome. Just as western views on suicide have been strongly influenced by the ancient Greek philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle) and Augustinian Christianity, the Chinese views, especially among the educated people, have been largely influenced by classical Confucianism. Hence, in this paper I shall try to provide a comprehensive, analytical survey of the Confucian ethics of suicide. Some distinction among suicides is necessary for an in-depth ethical analysis because not all suicides are morally equivalent. Emile Durkheim’ s three-fold typology of egoistic, altruistic, and anomic suicide is well known (Durkheim, 1951, Book Two, esp. pp.209, 221, 258). This paper, however, is not a study on the social causes of suicide, and hence cannot adopt his classification. For my purpose in this paper, I shall classify suicide into two types, viz., suicides committed for self-regarding reasons (to be abbreviated as self-regarding suicides below) and suicides