any further involvement in decisions about your life and not having any further life to make decisions about. Suicide essentially removes the condition of being alive, not the condition of making choices about your life. Mill believes the individual to be the best guardian of their own interests. He uses the example of a man about to cross a broken bridge: we can forcibly stop that person and warn him of the danger, but ultimately should not prevent him from crossing the bridge—for only he knows the worth of his life balanced against the danger of crossing the bridge. Too much should not be read into "disposing of his own lot in life" in the passage as this is not necessarily talking about anything other than slavery. Indeed, it would be odd if Mill had intended it to be about suicide but not explored the issue fully. Deontology From a deontological perspective, Immanuel Kant argues against suicide in Fundamental Principles of The Metaphysic of Morals. In accordance with the second formulation of his categorical imperative, Kant argues that, "He who contemplates suicide should ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself." Kant's theory looks at the act only, and not at its outcomes and consequences, and claims that one is ethically required to consider whether one would be willing to universalise the act: to claim everyone should behave that way. Kant argues that choosing to commit suicide entails considering oneself as a means to an end, which he rejects: a person, he says, must not be used "merely as means, but must in all actions always be considered as an end in himself." Furthermore Kant argues that, since objective morality is grounded in one's own ability to reason, suicide is wrong because it involves removing that ability through ending one's life, thereby creating a kind of practical contradiction. Social contract The social contract, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is such that every man has "a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it." Hobbes and Locke reject the right of individuals to take their own life. Hobbes claims in his Leviathan that natural law forbids every man "to do, that which is destructive of his life, or take away the means of preserving the same." Breaking this natural law is irrational and immoral. Hobbes also states that it