Over the weekend of the most sacred of Christian festivals two broadsheets, whether out of a misplaced sense of mischievous irony or theological confusion, separately decided to publish opinion pieces on the matter of assisted suicide. Addressing the key argument of sceptics of the "assisted dying" lobby, namely that its legal permit will be the so-called "thin-end-of-the-wedge", Lord Sumption in the Telegraph and Matthew Parris in the Times came to conclusions which were respectively surprising on the one hand and completely extraordinary on the other.
Jonathan Sumption, as befits a former member of the UK Supreme Court, brought a formidable precision to his argument. The debate involved a clash between "two of the most fundamental values of humanity". In the matter of assisted dying, he opined, neither the reverence for human life nor respect for the autonomy of the individual can be reconciled. "The real question" he averred, "is how much risk to vulnerable people are we prepared to accept to facilitate suicide by those fully informed, mentally competent and determined to end their lives". But while he acknowledged the legalisation and normalisation of assisted dying risked aggravating the low self esteem of old, sick and dependent people and solidify negative public attitudes to old age, he concluded that a change in the law was morally justified for terminally ill patients. In short, it was a risk worth taking
Yet while his Lordship favoured legal precision to limit the thin edge's ability to thicken, for Parris the "thick end" couldn't swell fast enough. If the old, the infirm, the immobile and the demented were not permitted and even encouraged to abbreviate their lives, "how were economies going to pay for the ruinously expensive overhang" of their condition? Making no apologies for his "reductivist tone which...treats human beings as units", Parris looked forward to a time when the "taboo" around assisted death was lifted so that society, "shedding a harsh beam on to the balance between input and output" could preserve its future as a "healthy" one.
Nowadays, the casual invocation of Nazi-ism or Fascism to denigrate the political or ethical views of opponents has become so widespread as to constitute almost a form of inverse blasphemy. In the case of Parris however, the comparison would seem to be exact. Indeed it would be no exaggeration to say that leading exponents of the perverted philosophy of Nazi-sim, such as Rosenberg in his 1930 book "The Myth of the Twentieth Century", might even have blushed at the columnist's world view. Of course it is entirely possible that Parris's intention was as much to outrage as it was to inform. Certainly his choice of language and the triumphal way in which it was expressed seemed designed to elicit that response, as Sumption's contribution to the debate did not. Yet Parris inhabits a milieu in which the ruthless enjoyment of its comforts, status and privileges rather precludes empathy for those not fortunate enough to be among its members. In that sense, his views should be taken at face value. They are certainly consistent with his somewhat idiosyncratic and quasi-aesthetic aversion to Roma, gypsies and other "travellers" and his widely broadcast disparagement of the mental capacities of those who were beguiled by "populism" and who voted for BREXIT. In Parris's world, the gap between the voluntary nature of assisted suicide and the involuntary nature of euthanasia would eventually be closed.
For what was perhaps the most striking thing about the contribution of Parris was the almost complete absence of consideration of the moral dimensions of the issue or even of how it related to the spiritual features of our humanity. In the course of a short 1000 word column in the Times or Telegraph, several fences will necessarily have to be jumped all at once. But Parris's dismissal of the "religious objections" to assisted suicide as "irrelevant" was perhaps just a little too glib. You do not have to believe in "a divinity who has sanctified all human life" to know that the centuries old Judean-Christian-Aristotelian tradition has profoundly informed and shaped the way we live socially and politically, infused our laws and provided the philosophical foundation of many if not most of the liberties which are today taken for granted. Above all, it forms the bedrock of our conception of what are widely understood to be fundamental human rights, such as the right to life and the absolute prescription of torture. By the by, it is also worth pointing out that all the mature democracies of the world are united by their rootedness in this tradition.
Without putting words in his mouth, it may be inferred from Sumption's remarks that such considerations are entirely mutable so that what today is considered moral might, by some intangible shrug of the zeitgeist, be taken as intolerable tomorrow. Morals can be adapted and superseded by the societies which hold them. Laws, by contrast, have meanings which have to be exact and words which are very, very precise. They are immutable until such time as they are amended or revoked. It is in such legal reasoning that Sumption places his faith that the nightmarish dystopia advocated by Parris will never be reached.
Whether such faith will withstand the practical effects of a change in the law in favour of voluntary assisted suicide remains to be seen. At the risk of caricature, Sumption's conception is how it relates to those prosperous, intelligent, well informed and still sentient members of society whose lives have been highly fulfilled but whose tolerance to pain and indignity is low. What then could be more reasonable than one last glug of an important wine in the company of loved ones and admiring friends at a time of one's own choosing? However, anyone with even a passing acquaintance of how the state works will know this to be entirely wishful thinking. Once the practice of (voluntary) assisted suicide becomes more prevalent and "normalised", in a resource-constrained world the state will find it very easy to use its powers to incentivise assisted suicide in ways that make it more compulsive. Far fetched? What about tapering pensions to a point where a consideration of assisted suicide is unavoidable? What about helping the overstretched NHS by including young people with seemingly irredeemable depression within the scope of such a law? The boundaries of what constitutes a terminal illness will be easily flexed. The pressures will be persistent, insidious and overseen by a vast new bureaucratic class which will be narrowly motivated entirely by Parris's cost/benefit attitude to the continuance of our mortal existence. The rational and moral conception of the value of human life will be lost.
Is there perhaps not a middle way? Maybe we could draft individual laws for the voluntary assisted suicide of patriarchal commentators in the same way the full might of Parliament was mobilised to exempt Sir Keir Starmer from the punitive "lifetime allowance" provisions of the Pensions Act? We could even call such a bill the Parricide Act, an irony which the ubiquitous and over-exposed Times and Spectator columnist would surely appreciate.
