Britain’s Looming Death Culture Is Not the End

From the governing Labour Party, 234 MPs voted in favour, and 147 against the bill to introduce ‘assisted dying’ to the UK last week. Unexpectedly, among the 73 Liberal Democrat MPs who voted, only 61 voted in favour, with their leader Ed Davey being among the 12 who voted against the bill. To my astonishment, the members of that liberal party that goes by the name of the Conservative Party voted overwhelmingly against the bill, with 92 against and only 23 in favour. Their leader, Kemi Badenoch, puzzlingly tweeted that, “Despite supporting the principle of assisted dying long before I became an MP, I can’t support today’s bill.” 

Perhaps most disappointingly—especially for someone like me who has unwisely supported them in the past—of the Reform Party’s five voting members, three voted in favour of the bill. Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, was not among those three. Reform’s deputy, Richard Tice, on the other hand, tweeted the following with notably poor syntax: “What gives you right to force terminally ill patient to suffer hideously painful death when they are near the end?”

Overall, with 330 to 275 parliamentarians in favour of the bill, this means that ‘assisted dying,’ having been pressed, can now undergo further parliamentary scrutiny. It does not mean that it is now law … yet.

The temptation for an old-fashioned conservative like me who has reservations about humans killing other innocent humans, is to argue something like the ‘social fabric breakdown’ account of the degeneration of public moral intuitions. Basically, we now see ill people as a ‘burden’ because we have lost our sense of social indebtedness to each other. People who request to be killed, it may be posited, might feel that they themselves will become a burden to others as they deteriorate, and they’re not convinced that we live in a social web in which people owe it to each other—especially family members—to look after one another as life’s end draws near. That’s the general argument, and indeed it has its merits due to its truths, even if it has nothing to say to cases that don’t fit its account. Of course, in all cases, it will be under the pretext of ‘mercy’ that such killings of ‘burdens’ will be executed.

Assisted dying is sought as a novel development of other ways by which we’ve negotiated the challenging moment of death. This development is not, however, only because there’s been a breakdown in social connectedness or a sense of interpersonal duty. Those may be secondary or even tertiary reasons, but not principal reasons. 

The problem with the bill and what it entails is also not to be found in the issue that the safeguards will be abused, or that there are unanticipated consequences to the bill of which no one is yet aware. Though, again, surely that’s a grave concern. 

Finally, the problem isn’t that it’s difficult to see how the concept of healthcare includes within it the killing of patients. In fact, perhaps that’s been an unspoken part of the profession for longer than many imagine. After all, it was long customary for a family doctor—when family doctors existed—to up the morphine to suppress the agony of a dying patient, with the unintended but utterly foreseeable result being the rapid demise of the individual. (Such, famously, marked the end of King George V.) One might argue that such acts once committed by family doctors are now just being formally recognised and institutionalised by the state in the pushing through of this bill.

The question, though, is why are we pressing this bill now, and why is there such an appetite for bills of this kind in parliaments and legislatures across the world? The problem, I submit, is a structural problem to do with the largely unexamined assumptions and prejudices of modernity. And on the assumptions and prejudices of modernity—what I’m content, for the sake of manners, to now call ‘premises’—it would be utterly irrational not to draft, press, and ultimately pass such a bill.

The decision to end the lives of weak or vulnerable people follows rationally from the premises of materialist reductionism, and materialist reductionism is the metaphysics—or anti-metaphysics—of modernity. Consider: if we are just meaningless and purposeless heaps of atoms who can only achieve the illusion of meaning either by entertaining ourselves with pleasures and titillations, or by making ourselves in some way useful, then if our suffering outweighs our pleasure, and the consequences of that suffering make us insufficiently useful or instrumentalisable, it simply makes no sense not to kill us. 

It would be deranged to build a society on such materialist and reductionist premises and not to kill the suffering or distressed weak and vulnerable among us. Thus, at least on the premises on which we’ve constructed the ethics and philosophical anthropology of the modern world, the bill is perfectly rational. And we all need to expect a lot more of this kind of thing—for really, this is just the beginning—until the curse of modernity is overcome by something like a robust traditionalism that offers a very different kind of anthropology and ethics, free from materialist reductionism.

The good news is that even materialist reductionists are no longer convinced by materialist reductionism (just read Thomas Nagel). A consequence of modernity for some people will be death at the hands of their fellow countrymen, with the approval of the state. The consequence of modernity for all of us is a world without meaning. 

But it’s precisely meaning that is currently being retrieved in the most creative and unexpected ways. The so-called ‘meaning crisis’ of modernity is the talk of every interesting public intellectual at present, which may very well mean that this bill is modernity’s last desperate attempt to grab hold of its human victims before it goes under. The question we should be asking ourselves—and this bill is a grand opportunity to do so—is, what on earth is going to replace modernity? You know my choice. In any case, let’s hope it’s replaced with something more desirable—something based on truth, for instance.