England’s Assisted Suicide Bill And The Disordered Western Soul

Thirty-five years ago, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor published Sources of the Self—a dense but stunning portrait of modern Western people and the moral narratives that shape our lives. In the subsequent years, many Western cultures have kept on following lines elegantly charted in his careful work. This is most markedly so on the issue of assisted suicide, which may provide the clearest window into the disordered Western soul.

Following Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and some U.S. states, England and Wales are on the verge of relativizing the most foundational of social values: that every life is sacred and unconditionally valuable, that human dignity is indelible (even in the face of illness, poverty, or disability), and that doctors sustain (rather than end) lives. The same issue is currently under debate in Scotland, as well as in other parts of Europe.

For Christians, it’s disorienting as we try to understand how some of our neighbors and politicians undermine these values with a sense of joy while others feel terror and devastation. In London, as wheelchair users wept with grief outside the Houses of Parliament, one member of Parliament reported that pro-assisted-suicide colleagues celebrated with champagne in the members’ dining room. Within shouting distance of bewildered, fearful disability activists, powerful celebrity campaigners were congratulated on live TV by journalists. How do we begin to make sense of that scene?

Price of Individualism

Taylor argues modern Western people have a particular sense of self. Compared to their ancestors (and many non-Western people today), they feel morally obligated to express their inner sense of self, to assert their ideals of freedom and individuality. Not to do so is its own kind of moral failure.

Those moral obligations are hard to live out, of course, because no individual is the only individual. Pushing your individual sense of self necessarily impinges on someone else’s different expression of individuality. Knowing how far to push it is a constant source of tension. After all, what if I conclude that for me to be me—for my highest expression of individuality to be expressed—another individual must pay a high price? That calculus goes on deep in the Western psyche, although (as Taylor also identifies) we greatly struggle to describe the ethics involved.

Modern Western people are plagued by what Taylor calls the “ethics of inarticulacy.” The recent parliamentary debates in England and Wales serve as a perfect example: to address (literal) life-and-death-defining issues for an entire society, only five hours of debate were held, with each speaker granted only minutes to respond to a bill published mere weeks before. Critics have pointed out that many of our parliamentarians seemed not to understand basic features of the bill they supported. Why, that critique goes, did they legislate for such grave matters on the basis of vibes? Unfortunately, if Taylor is right, that’s how modern Western culture at large deals with ethics.

Revaluation of Dignity

Taylor also pointed out that compared to many other periods in history, modern Western people have taken on an unusual notion of “dignity”—one of the buzzwords in our inarticulate discussions of assisted suicide. We talk a great deal about dignity, although we treat it in ways that would make little sense to our ancestors.

In the distant pre-Christian past, dignity was an accomplishment achieved more so than an innate quality. It was something attained by overcoming adversity or suffering. Christianity changed this notion, teaching people to see dignity as both something inherent (and God-given), and a goal to strive toward.

Nowadays, that understanding has been hollowed out. In the modern secular sense, dignity has become a self-declaration (“As a free individual, I’m dignified because I say so”). Stare at it for long enough, though, and you realize a free individual also has the power to make a terrible proclamation: “I’m no longer dignified because I say so.” (Critics of assisted suicide have often pointed out that vulnerable individuals are highly susceptible to coercion on that front: what if that individual’s proclamation is actually the fruit of a society’s implicit assumption that her life is not worth living?)

Alongside this modern declaration, Taylor also saw that modern Western people had become unusually fearful of suffering and death. Unlike our ancestors, we mostly have little experience of caring for the sick in our homes and communities. Death usually happens in private, sterile places, far from our ordinary experience. And in our world without God, we have no shared narratives that help us make sense of death existentially. (In the United Kingdom, incidentally, healthcare professionals who serve the dying are generally much less supportive of assisted suicide than irreligious politicians.)

All this taken together, it’s no surprise that assisted suicide is a creation of secularized Western culture and that many people produced by those cultures would celebrate its advance as a positive good. However, even within secular Western culture, assisted suicide will never be celebrated as a universal good. Again, how do we make sense of champagne flutes in the members’ dining room while wheelchair users weep outside?

How We Got Here: Two Secular Approaches

Taylor is useful here as well. For some of us, secularization might do away with God, but it still requires us—as free individuals—to live for something, or for some things. We might deem many things good (freedom, self-mastery, fame, career, authenticity, self-acceptance, and so on). However, our lives are only functionally livable insofar as some of those things strike us as more important than others. To be a total relativist, and live without any sense of particular things being more important than others, simply does not work.

Instead, Taylor argues, secularized people follow two paths. In the first, of all the possible “good” things, you choose one and elevate it far above all others. In effect, it becomes your idol, the only good—not only for you but also for others. In an inarticulate way, you become ready to impose your highest good on others.

Consider the Just Stop Oil protester who throws soup over a priceless Van Gogh, just as others in the room enjoy a wonderful experience in looking at it. In that scenario, the protestor has taken one “good” (care for the planet) and elevated it dramatically. In her mind, it’s now the only real good. The enjoyment or artistic ideals of other onlookers no longer matter. Or consider the deeply secularized politician who treats autonomy as the only real good, votes for assisted suicide and feels unmoved by the tears of nearby disability activists. Although the highest good is different—individual autonomy rather than climate change—the same sense of self is at work.

Elevating one good to that incomparable status, however, isn’t the only option. Taylor also points out that some secularized people prioritize a few different “goods,” elevating them together more modestly and trying to find an impossible balance between them.

Think of the person who wouldn’t dream of destroying a Van Gogh but buys a bamboo toothbrush, eats meat only a couple of times a week, and pays to offset the carbon footprint of a flight (which she justifies because it serves another good, caring for family who live far away, and is her only flight that year), always anxious about whether she has done enough in those efforts at balancing her conflicted “goods”. Or consider the kind of secularized politician who “supports assisted suicide in principle” but struggles with how the principle of autonomy might be worked out in relation to other things he deems good (such as the idea that every life is of equal value). That kind of deliberation can go either way and is fraught with anxiety in every outcome. In England, one high profile supporter openly admits that the real cost of autonomy will be borne by the disabled and the poor. While this makes him “queasy,” he supports it nonetheless. By contrast, other MPs have given only conditional support to assisted suicide, while they ponder how the cost of autonomy will be divvied up across society.

Bear Witness to a Gospel of Life

On this point, secularization is a human tragedy and a mess. Why respond to it with philosophical analysis from Charles Taylor? We have good reason to do so.

The earliest Christians lived in a brutal and violent world. Remarkably, their presence transformed it for the better. Much of that transformation took place in practical ways. By adopting abandoned infants, refusing to go to gladiatorial games, ministering to those dying of plague, and so on, Christians challenged and changed their world and won many converts to Christ and his church. In our day, we must be no less practical. Our churches need to be places where those vulnerable to a secular message of human dignity hear that God views them with infinite value. That message must also be tangible in the church’s practical care for those least valued by the wider society.

However, this wasn’t all the early church did. Figures like Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and above all Augustine assumed the Roman world struggled with something like Taylor’s “ethics of inarticulacy.” Their pagan neighbors lived and died by intuitions and narratives that they took for granted, but often inhabited passively and uncritically. So they set about the task of narration, explaining pagan culture to pagans and how the gospel ultimately subverted and fulfilled that culture’s highest goods. In this, they also won converts and saved many lives. In our day, we must do the same—and we need all the resources we can get.