| |
Altruistic suicide is suicide committed for the benefit of others. Falling on a grenade is one such example.[1] Émile Durkheim notes that tribal people sometimes see it as their duty to commit suicide, as when a wife kills herself after her husband dies, or a man kills himself in old age; but Durkheim also observes that altruistic suicide is unlikely to occur much in modern western society where “individual personality is increasingly freed from the collective personality.”[2] Altruistic suicide has been described as an evolutionarily stable strategy.[3] Altruistic suicide has a long history in India, even being noted in the Dharmashastras.[4]
References
Edit
- ↑ JA Blake (1978), Death by hand grenade: altruistic suicide in combat., Suicide & life-threatening behavior, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/675772
- ↑ Deniz Yükseker, Lecture on Emile Durkheim, http://home.ku.edu.tr/~dyukseker/lecture-durkheim2-05.doc
- ↑ S Mascaro, K Korb, A Nicholson, Suicide as an evolutionarily stable strategy, Advances in Artificial Life, http://www.springerlink.com/index/dq0nchqjf0n2n2q7.pdf
- ↑ L Vijayakumar (2004), Altruistic suicide in India, Archives of Suicide Research, http://www.informaworld.com/index/714860330.pdf
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA
unless otherwise noted.
