Notas históricas sobre el suicidio y la eutanasia

Resumen

In this article I will approach three different issues. Firstly, I will give account of the concept of suicide or voluntary death, closely linked to the concept of euthanasia; here, I introduce three different kinds of definitions, that, however, are problematic either due to vagueness or to ideological reasons. Secondly, I will present the legal regulation of suicide along history (since the primitive people to the Modern Ages, along with the situation on the period of classic Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages); I remark the fact that all those regulations depend on many different circumstances and then I point out that in the current days the tendency is, on the one hand, to punish only the aid to suicide and, on the other hand, to reduce the punishment or to decriminalize some cases of voluntary euthanasia. And, thirdly, the last issue is the morality or immorality of suicide according to philosophers such as Aristotle, the epicurean, Seneca, Saint Agustin, Saint Thomas, Hume and Kant. In this respect, I present the variety of answers given by the referred authors and I point out the fact that the arguments advanced by them are, mainly, the same to those appearing in the current debate.