A Right to Liveability? Mental Health, Suicide and Social Justice
A BSA Sociology, Psychoanalysis and the Psychosocial Study Group Event
2 June 2025 (15:00-16:00 BST)
Online
About the Event
Speaker: Dr Guy Aitchison
Speaker bio:
Dr Guy Aitchison is a political theorist working within the normative analytical tradition with interests in human rights, political resistance and (in recent work) justice-based issues surrounding the collective management of suicide. He is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University where he convenes the Ethics in Public Life research group and recently led the British Academy/Leverhulme project, ’Starving for Dignity: Re-framing the Ethics of Human Strikes’. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Politics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics and Perspectives on Politics.
Abstract:
This paper offers an original normative defence of a ‘right to liveability’, which is a moral right derived from the right to life that provides protection against social conditions conducive to mental distress and suicide. I consider what the ethical justification is for government efforts at suicide prevention and how in turn this justification shapes the types of measures that ought to be taken. I first reject two libertarian arguments which state, firstly, that suicide prevention entails inappropriate interference by government in individual autonomy and, secondly, that it violates the liberal commitment to state neutrality. I then identify the limits of prevailing justifications for suicide prevention in terms of the right to health. An exclusively health-based approach misses how many people who die by suicide are not mentally unwell and misconstrues the relevant duties. I offer an alternative justification grounded in the right to liveability which focuses on how those who die by suicide can be victims of a certain kind of structural violence that the government bears responsibility for. The core idea is that when the government produces and maintains degrading psychosocial conditions that predictably and avoidably lead people to take their own lives this can be understood as the violation of a negative duty correlative to a right to liveability. There are certain conditions that fall below the threshold of a decent life, generating mental distress and robbing people of self-respect. The right to liveability entails the right to be free from social conditions conducive to suicide, supporting egalitarian efforts to combat social disadvantage at a structural level.
Registration
This event is free to attend but registration is required.