John Locke

John Locke is presented as one of several philosophers who argued that human beings have no rightful authority to end their own lives: life is God’s property, and people are here on God’s business. In Raymond Moody’s discussion, Locke’s position gives a historical and theological frame for comparing near-death experience reports of people who regretted suicide attempts with older arguments against suicide.

Identity and Context

Moody identifies Locke as a seventeenth-century British philosopher and notes that some ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are owed to him. Locke appears not in a biographical account but within a sequence of arguments about the moral status of suicide. Moody groups him with Plato and Thomas Aquinas, whose distinct arguments likewise present life as a trust or assignment that a person should not abandon at will.

The Argument Against Suicide

Locke’s reasoning rests on the claim that human beings belong to God and have been placed in the world to carry out God’s business. On that premise, a person cannot simply choose to leave the post entrusted to them. The argument makes the authority to determine when life ends belong to God rather than to the individual.

Relation to Near-Death Experience Reports

Moody introduces this tradition because it closely corresponds, in his account, with the reactions of people who survived suicide attempts. Those interviewees said they would not attempt suicide again and regarded their attempts as mistakes; one described earthly life as brief, with much still to be done, and death as eternity. Moody treats this convergence as a resemblance between reported experience and an older theological argument, not as proof that the experiences establish doctrine. Locke’s function in the discussion is to make that comparison explicit: the life-as-entrusted-duty idea predates the interviews and gives their reported regret a long-standing religious and philosophical context.