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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] Some perceive self-immolation as an altruistic or "worthy" suicide.^[5]

Cultural references

In the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the character Spock commits an altruistic suicide when he takes a lethal dose of radiation poisoning in order to make repairs so that the starship USS Enterprise can escape destruction.^[6]

References