Physician assisted suicide and martyrdom

1. If physician assisted suicide is permissible, then it would have been permissible for early Christians facing being tortured to death by the Romans to kill themselves less painfully.

2. It would not have been permissible for early Christians facing being tortured to death by the Romans to kill themselves less painfully.

3. So, physician assisted suicide is not permissible.

The parity premise (1) is hard to deny. The best case for physician assisted suicide is where the patient strives to escape severe and otherwise unescapable pain while facing imminent death. That’s precisely the case of an early Christian being rounded up by Romans to be tortured to death.

Premise (2) is meant to be based on Christian tradition. The idea of suicide to escape pain could not have failed to occur to early Christians, given the cultural acceptance of suicide “to escape the shame of defeat and surrender” (Griffin 1986). It would have been culturally unsurprising, then, if a Christian were to fall on a sword with the Roman authorities at the door. But as far as I can tell, this did not happen. The best explanation is that the Christian tradition was strongly opposed to such “escape”.

There were, admittedly, cases of suicide to avoid rape (eventually rejected by St. Augustine, with great sensitivity to the tragedy), as well as cases where the martyr cooperated with the executioners (as Socrates is depicted having done).