Human Beings As Units

Giles Fraser writes:

Of all people, you might expect humanists to have protecting human life at the core of their ideological DNA. Instead, they are queuing up to plunge in the needle of death. This week, as Parliament prepares to debate the assisted dying bill, they are cheerleading a change in the law that will encourage the most vulnerable in our society to agree to kill themselves if they are persuaded to believe some greater good can result from their death.

The humanists talk blithely about “safeguards”, as if any legal system on earth can protect an elderly and highly suggestible person from the subtle forms of micro-manipulations with which someone can be persuaded that it is in everybody’s best interest for their death to be quick and painless. You can say “think of the children” with the tiniest inflection of the voice, make the subtlest of reference to money worries. We communicate with each other, often most powerfully, through almost imperceptible gestures of body language and facial expression. No legal safeguard on earth can detect such subliminal messaging.

And then to dress all this up as love for your mother — “We just don’t want you to suffer” — is the vilest of betrayals. Assisted dying legislation doesn’t just change the relationship between the dying and their doctors, and the dying and the state. It fundamentally alters the dynamics within families, and at the most emotionally complex period of someone’s life.

As the debate has unfolded over the past weeks, I have become less and less convinced of the noble declarations behind it. For some at least, the matter seems to be entirely ideological; namely, that the idea of choice has to be driven into every aspect of our lives. The attraction of this reasoning to our political decision makers is obvious: it exonerates them from their responsibility to keep people safe — their primary responsibility as law makers.

Consider capital punishment. Like assisted dying — or state-sponsored suicide — capital punishment is popular with the public. But whereas the opponents of capital punishment (as I am) point out that these terminations can be botched and cruel, few will make the same point with respect to assisted dying. Fundamentally, the state should not be in the death business. And making it easier and cheaper for the state to be allowed to kill people, rather than sort out the basic infrastructure of social and palliative care, and to keep people alive with dignity, is to push all the incentives in exactly the wrong direction.

The proposed legislation does not even mention the word suffering, though it is the desire to avoid suffering that is at the heart of the case for assisted dying. But suffering is so intrinsic to our existence that there is no legal or medical scalpel that is precise enough to excise it without also damaging the very things that give life its fundamental value. A radical project to rid the world of suffering, if carried to extremes, would also rid the world of love and hope, of courage and compassion. Of love, because love — love lost, love denied, love betrayed — is perhaps the greatest cause of emotional suffering; of hope, because hope walks a tightrope between success and failure, triumph and misery; of courage, because courage is so often a preparedness to suffer, risk suffering, for some greater good, and compassion, because definitionally means to suffer alongside. There is a vastly significant difference between wanting to alleviate the suffering of another through comfort and kindness and palliative care, and by seeking to alter the very terms of reference of what it means to be human. This assisted dying legislation is like introducing a zero hours contract with life.

Yes, there is a religious point to be made — though not all opponents of assisted dying are religious. I believe human life is sacred, that we are all made in the image and likeness of God. This basic point has been a bedrock of the Western attitude towards how we are called to treat each other. It has been the fundamental starting point for our ethics for well over a thousand years. This week, though, a former personal trainer with a degree in fitness and health-related exercise from Leeds Beckett University is proposing a private members motion that will overturn perhaps the most basic of our moral and philosophical presuppositions — and Parliament will have only a few hours to debate it.

With what will we replace this ultimate theological grounding for human value? Perhaps the answer is economics. I am grateful to Matthew Parris for saying this out loud in The Times a few months back. Clarifying a utilitarian approach to human value, Parris is clear: “Social and cultural pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths so as ‘not to be a burden’ on others or themselves. I believe this will indeed come to pass. And I would welcome it.” He continues: “It may sound brutal, but I don’t apologise for the reductivist time with which this column treats human beings as units — in deficit or surplus to the collective.”

We are on the cusp of a fundamental redefinition of what it is to be human. This is one of those areas where the idea of God has served us well, a corner stone of treating human beings as of ultimate value. Opponents of assisted dying are trying to downplay this point, and I understand why. Strategically, religion isn’t a great debate winner, especially at the moment. But make no mistake, what is at stake here is a profound shift in the way we understand ourselves. Western culture has been founded on the idea that God is the ultimate guarantor of the value of human life, that human beings are metaphysically special.

We are about to trade all this in for “human beings as units — in deficit or surplus to the collective”. Human value will now be plotted on an Excel spreadsheet. Theology gives way to economics. This is the brave new world the humanists have been arguing for. And, sure, there will be a few lucky ones who get to end their last few days by slipping away quietly on a barbiturate cloud. But it will be the poor and the vulnerable who will suffer most.