Dying for the cause: The rationality of martyrs, suicide bombers and self-immolators

Andrew Greenland, Damon Proulx and David Savage

Rationality and Society, 2020, vol. 32, issue 1, 93-115

Abstract: This article explores the impact that belief in an infinite afterlife has on end-of-life decisions, specifically on those viewed at the extreme, such as martyrs, suicide bombers and self-immolators. We extend a simplified expected utility-based model to include variations of infinitely rewarding afterlife’s and explore how this may impact the expected utility and rationality of earthly actions and decisions of individuals when the expected utility payoff is infinite. We show that the decision process for suicide and euthanasia is closely linked to martyrs, suicide bombers and self-immolators, such that all these individuals make rational decisions to regards to the end of their own life.

Keywords: Economics; martyrs; rationality; religion; self-immolation; suicide bombers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463119900327 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:32:y:2020:i:1:p:93-115

DOI: 10.1177/1043463119900327

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().