Though advances in medicine have generated new problems demanding new techniques of moral reasoning, some problems of life and death were already subject to elaborate examination of this kind in the distant past. Thus a sophisticated type of argumentation was developed in classical antiquity to help with making moral decisions and moral assessments in the difficult area of suicide. Interest in such reasoning largely ceased, however, after AD 400 when, largely through the efforts of St Augustine, Christian doctrine became fixed in its total condemnation of suicide.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, suicide started to become an important object of study to psychologists and sociologists, but their thinking has had little in common with the Greek and Roman approach, because both groups have regarded the act as something not fully understood or controlled by the victim. Lawyers, of course, had to worry about the precise determination of intention as long as suicide remained a criminal offence, but their concern with the avoidance of legal penalties led them to apply the formula ‘when the balance of the mind was disturbed’ so widely as to generate the belief that suicide could not be a rational act: in ancient thought, however, that situation was held to be the exception. In any case, the concern of the legal profession with such questions of motive has sharply diminished in England since 1961 when the law ceased to regard suicide or attempted suicide as an offence.