The Great escape? A liberal perspective on assisted suicide for prisoners

Abstract

Summary Do prisoners evade punishment should they voluntarily end their lives while serving a prison sentence? In order to provide a meaningful answer to this question, one must first carefully unpack what is meant by sentence evasion, why it is wrong, and what its philosophical underpinnings are. To this purpose, I draw insights from liberal political philosophy and turn to the ideas of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. I argue that the philosophical origins of the contemporary argument that prisoners evade their sentences through suicide can be found in Mill's argument against the abolition of capital punishment. Mill's argument rests on the assumption that death is preferable to life-long incarceration. I argue that this assumption is incompatible with a political conception of justice because it cannot be held in accordance with the tenets of public reason, an idea put forward by Rawls but also tacitly endorsed by Mill. To do so, I argue that the argument of sentence evasion concerns what Rawls calls a constitutional essential; a fundamental element that orders political institutions and their subsequent distribution of rights and liberties. In virtue of their fundamental character, constitutional essentials are to be decided through the use of public reasons; reasons that lie outside of citizens’ particular comprehensive worldviews. I show that the assumption that death is preferable to incarceration cannot be sustained outside of a particularistic doctrine regarding the nature of death. The argument must therefore be rejected and cannot constitute a basis for denying suicide assistance to inmates.