When news broke that Baek Se-hee, author of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, had died at 35, much of the world reacted with the same stunned tenderness her book once inspired. Baek had given voice to depression in a way that felt both local and global—rooted in South Korea’s raw honesty about pain yet resonant far beyond. Her organ donation saved five lives, a final act that blurred the line between despair and selfless offering. Or so I heard, as I never read the book. However, I lived in Asia and this issue is an old one ever present.
Reading the BBC’s report on her death (BBC News, 2025), I was struck not only by the grief but by the quiet moral differences that ripple through cultures when confronting suicide. In the West, shaped by centuries of Christian theology and Stoic restraint, death by one’s own hand is still shadowed by taboo—a breach of moral law or natural duty. In parts of Asia, however, death on one’s own terms can signify something entirely different: the assertion of dignity, the reclamation of agency, or even an act of social grace.
This essay was inspired by that BBC article, which reignited a question I’ve long carried: When does death become a moral statement? How do cultures differ in reading the final gesture of a person’s life? And is it ever possible to die on one’s own terms without losing the dignity that the act itself claims?
Death on One’s Own Terms
In many Western societies, suicide has long been regarded as a moral violation—an act against God, nature, and the social order. But this condemnation didn’t begin with Christianity. Even among the Greeks and Romans, the idea that one might choose death was always fenced by moral philosophy.
Plato’s Phaedo argues that human beings are the property of the gods, and taking one’s own life is akin to a slave running away from his master. Socrates, though calm in the face of death, insists that one may not hasten it without divine sanction. Aristotle, meanwhile, framed suicide as a civic offense—a betrayal of one’s duty to the polis. It injured not only the individual, but the moral fabric of society.
The Stoics complicated this. For thinkers like Seneca and Epictetus, the question was not whether one should die, but when. A rational man might choose death when life no longer allows virtue—when continued existence means moral compromise. Yet even this permission was tightly rationalized. Stoic philosophy tolerated suicide only as a final act of integrity, never of despair.
When Christianity absorbed these ideas, it translated civic and rational duty into divine command. Augustine and Aquinas reinterpreted the prohibition: life is God’s to give and take. Suicide thus became a double sin—murder and blasphemy. Over time, this view merged with legal codes, shaping a deep cultural reflex that equates self-killing with moral weakness.
Yet by the Enlightenment, Western thought began to shift again. Hume argued that if life’s value depends on pleasure and pain, it cannot be inherently sacred. Kant countered with a new secular prohibition: suicide violates reason itself because it treats the self as an object rather than an autonomous moral lawgiver. Even stripped of theology, the West retained an ethical prohibition tree—rooted in duty, rationality, and universal law rather than divine order.
The Eastern Mirror
In contrast, much of East Asian moral philosophy has viewed death as part of a continuum of duty, shame, and transcendence. In Japan, seppuku was seen not as crime but purification. A samurai’s ritual suicide affirmed his honor by accepting responsibility. Confucianism, while not endorsing self-destruction, situates the individual within social harmony—sometimes making death preferable to disgrace.
In Buddhism, life and death form part of the same cycle. Suicide is discouraged because it binds one further to suffering, yet in some Mahāyāna traditions, self-sacrifice can be a form of compassion—giving one’s body to save others. The moral lens turns inward: intention, not doctrine, determines virtue.
Korea’s relationship to suicide occupies a tense middle ground between Confucian shame and modern mental health discourse. Baek Se-hee’s death—both tragic and sacrificial—captures that ambivalence. Her final gift of organ donation becomes a redemptive gesture, one that transforms a private act into communal life. It is at once modern and ancient, psychological and philosophical.
Beyond Condemnation
To the Western mind, suicide remains wrapped in the language of sin, pathology, or despair. To the Eastern mind, it may appear as a final performance of duty or integrity. Both perspectives, however, reveal an underlying question: who owns a life? Is life a possession, a trust, a role, or an art?
The non-Christian West—post-Stoic, post-Kantian—has developed an independent ethical branch that still resists suicide, not from theology but from moral logic. It argues that to destroy oneself is to abolish the very ground on which morality stands. Yet that logic, when seen from the East, can seem abstract, even cold. There, the self may dissolve willingly into the social or cosmic order, death becoming not negation but restoration.
In the end, perhaps both traditions circle the same paradox from different sides. To live is to accept suffering; to die is to accept responsibility for one’s limits. What separates them is not morality but metaphysics—the story each civilization tells about what life belongs to.
Reference
BBC News. (2025, October 17). Baek Se-hee, author of “I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki,” dies at 35. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpq1dy8w3jwo
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