Listening to Thoughts of Death: David Hume and the Deconstruction of Prejudice about Suicide

In the middle of the eighteenth century, David Hume wrote a short, disquieting, and controversial essay, On Suicide (Do Suicídio). Written amid the heated Enlightenment debates about reason, providence, and human freedom, it was withheld from Hume’s first edition and circulated openly only after his death. That publication history already gives some indication of the text’s unsettling force. With his characteristic incisive clarity, Hume sets out to dismantle the grounds on which voluntary death was historically made the object of an indisputable moral indictment. His aim is neither a miniature portrait of the soul nor an impassioned defence of the act itself. He deconstructs the religious and social justifications that constrain human judgment about voluntary death. The reader will agree, I think, that this brief essay has philosophical, historical, and psychological reach precisely because it is so well grounded in all three fields of inquiry. Nearly three hundred years later, On Suicide shows twenty-first-century readers both Hume’s place in the genealogy of modern secular thought and the urgency of his challenges for a public, critical ethics capable of listening to thoughts of death without reflexively condemning them. I believe this text can still move and affect us, even if our own times, seen from a distance and in broad outline, appear more open than the eighteenth century.

The context in which this admirable philosopher lived, thought, and wrote suggests a historical crossroads. Hume was formed in the tradition of modern British philosophy, steeped in the ancient authors and imbued with an experimental spirit and methodical scepticism. It is no accident that he expressly invokes “Tully” (the Latin Tullius, that is, Cicero) in the essay, or that he constantly engages with the legacy of ancient Roman and Greek philosophy. This points in two directions. Hume claims the authority of intellectual history, since the ancients discussed the subject and did more than prohibit it. He also shows that his conclusions grow out of a philosophical practice that proceeds by analogy and by the examination of customs and experience, without appeals to revealed truths. His intellectual formation also bears the imprint of Montaigne, the sceptical tradition, and the new natural science. Hume thinks with the learned cosmopolitanism of someone who has read the classics, knows the theological controversies, and was educated in the image of natural providence that Newtonian physics made familiar, a framework of general laws, regularity, and natural relations of cause and effect.

The essay’s argument, as I understand its essential outlines, is simple and radical at once. Hume assembles the traditional objections. Suicide supposedly wrongs God, offends society, and constitutes an injustice to oneself, a view with a long lineage from Aristotle through Augustine to the authority of Thomas Aquinas. He shows one by one that none of the objections survives sustained scrutiny. What characterizes the movement of his reasoning is a combination of naturalism and empiricist habits of inquiry. Hume begins by recalling how things actually happen, and what human passions and practices are, before calling supposedly absolute norms into question. He brings into view the way human moral practice is always embedded in feelings, conventions, and purposes, instead of trying to rationalize the act by appeal to abstract principles. Practical reason, accompanied by common sense, must ultimately be the highest judge of moral norms.

Against the first objection, the alleged sacrilege of suicide, Hume shifts the terms of the debate. He puts the role of providence in perspective. If everything in the material world follows general and immutable laws, and divine providence governs through those same principles, human actions that alter the course of events, such as building houses, cultivating fields, and administering remedies, cannot logically be distinguished from an act that hastens death. The analogy is strategic. A collapsing house or the administration of a poison kills just as a disease does. On this reasoning, denying people the ability to end their own lives would rest on an inconsistent hierarchy of human actions. Hume retains providence and reconceives it as a background that makes room for practical human freedom. If everything is part of an ordered universe, human actions belong to that order too. In Hume’s view, what is commonly presented as usurping divine sovereignty rests on a superstitious reading of providence that confuses respect with servitude.

In the second strand of the argument, on duty to society, Hume is more unsettling still. He argues that social obligation is ultimately instrumental and bound up with utility. Life imposes duties on us while we are useful participants in a shared undertaking. Once existence has become a permanent burden, prolonging it solely to satisfy an abstract norm impoverishes both the individual and the community. Hume relies here on a moral economy. If human action can be judged by its consequences for the general happiness, giving up on life in extreme cases of misery and unbearable pain need not constitute a public harm. Indeed, Hume provocatively suggests that a courageous and considered example of liberation could increase the chances of happiness for many if it were followed with prudence. This last claim, which disconcerted his first readers, interrogates the coherence of our moral norms. Its concern is far removed from an invitation to a contagious romanticism about suicide. Why do we glorify a soldier who takes a risk on the battlefield, yet vilify someone who ends their life for comparable reasons?

In the third strand, concerning duty to oneself, Hume’s criticism takes on a psychological cast. Judging a suicide calls for attention to the entirely concrete quality of a person’s life, beyond any abstract formula of divine ownership. For Hume, claiming that life must be preserved “at any cost” is hypocritical because it ignores the fact that protecting life is itself a human practice full of interventions that alter the natural sequence of events. He uses everyday and sometimes striking images, such as diverting a falling stone or channelling a river to drive machinery, to show that people relate to their own lives practically. If we already allow the manipulation of natural causes to preserve life, it is inconsistent to prohibit such manipulation to shorten it when life has become an unavoidable evil. Here the sentimentalist core of Hume’s moral philosophy re-emerges. Judgments of blame or approval ultimately arise from feeling. Claiming an absolute duty that people owe against their own interests is to fall into the abstraction he opposes.

Hume’s rhetoric is therefore quite distinct from either a utilitarian pamphlet or a hedonistic defence of an early death. It proceeds in two directions. It denounces superstition and, with it, an institutional hypocrisy that confuses fear with morality. It also restores a space for practical judgment in which the particularity of human life and suffering can be taken into account. That is why we should read Hume today as an invitation to listen and examine. His relevance goes beyond serving as a precedent for permissive legislation. He reminds us that the language of sin and crime surrounding voluntary death is a historical construction open to question, rather than a logical foundation.

This, I believe and argue, is why the essay remains relevant to the construction of a new ethics of listening. In societies where thoughts of death are still stigmatized, Hume’s essay offers at least two major lessons. The first is to set aside automatic judgment as a first response, replacing the closed stance of moral condemnation with an attitude open to questions. The second is to combine that openness with a practice of care. Listening to a thought of death involves understanding the history of pain that sustains it, recognizing the social contingencies, poverty, withdrawal, and physical and psychological suffering involved, and offering responses that combine emotional support, clinical treatment, and, where appropriate, serious and respectful discussion of autonomy and the end of life. It requires neither agreement nor encouragement. Hume gives the modern reader a conceptual map. Shaking the pillar of religious prejudice is only a first step. We need institutions that listen without condemning, offer assistance without paternalism, and recognize agency without overlooking vulnerability.

All of this, however, calls for caution. Hume’s critics have pointed out, rightly in my view, that the essay can be appropriated carelessly to legitimize social abandonment or trivialize pain that calls for a response. With his emphasis on individual freedom, Hume does not dwell extensively on the sociology of suffering, a discipline that did not yet exist, or on the material circumstances that make the “choice” to die a deeply coerced one. A responsible contemporary reading should therefore combine the essay’s radically anti-punitive stance with a robust theory of care, of attending to others. Such a theory should recognize contributing factors, the importance of mental health interventions informed by the critique of asylum-based psychiatry, and the structural dimension of suffering. I am willing to think about this ethics of listening and contribute to its development. From Hume, it can learn to guide and sustain networks of care beyond a libertarian permissiveness that operates outside them. These networks should welcome people without stigmatizing them and weigh protection against respect for autonomy with clinical rigour and moral sensitivity.

Ultimately, Hume’s On Suicide remains an invitation. It asks thought to resist superstition, politics to distinguish prohibition from care, clinical practice to listen without rushing to condemn, and philosophy to take part in the moral work of attending to extreme suffering. To read Hume is to remember that the great human questions, about the value of life, pain, and obligation, resist ready-made formulas, especially those repeated during Yellow September and handed down by an uncritical psychiatry. His essay pushes us toward an uncomfortable but fertile place where reason joins with compassion and moral judgment earns legitimacy only by bearing the weight of the facts and lives that put it to the test. That is precisely where the urgency of the text for our own age lies.

Alexandre H. Reis

Pelotas, 30 September–1 October 2025.

(Hume’s text is available on our website under Next Meeting.)