Assisted Dying: Well Argued, David.

 The sorry truth is that I don’t think the modern state actually has its heart in stopping you ending your life if you want to.

As far as I can see the last thing our modern rulers want to do is enforce Judeo-Christian morality. After all they can barely bring themselves to enforce prohibitions against murder or theft.

They see their job, rather, as a utilitarian not moral one: how to use the government to make people’s lives more convenient, more pleasant, less painful, less difficult. People who think like this won’t stand in the way of assisted dying if we ask for it.

Catholics urged to lobby their MPs to stop assisted dying law Bill risks changing medicine’s outlook from ‘a duty to care to a duty to kill’, Cardinal Vincent Nichols claims

No, it is we, the citizens, who should fear it. It is we, all of us, who actively need the state to be shaped by tradition and Judeo-Christian values, for the alternative is a government that is committed only to a utilitarian view of the world.

I am unnerved by the prospect of a state that is unmoored from morality in that way. In the long run such a government is a dangerous government, for there is no limit to what it will do, or allow, if it thinks it is in the wider collective interest. We got a glimpse of what that would be like during the pandemic.

That’s why keeping society anchored to Judeo-Christian values matters, whether you are a believer or not. They are the only sure basis for individual autonomy and the right to make moral claims on others, including the state itself.

Once we have abandoned them, anything goes, for what basis do you have to say that good is better than evil, or life better than death, other than by pointing back to those values? There is no real way around accepting, as most people have for most of history, that our morality reflects something fundamental about reality, and that there can be no free market in values.

Starmer will change the way we view life and death I have seen a painful death affect my own relatives first hand. But the solution need not be a lethal injection

But if so, then we must draw the inevitable conclusion, which is that we can’t ourselves change those moral fundamentals. However awkward it is, it isn’t right to kill people whose lives have become difficult or inconvenient. If we try to, it will change our society in ways we can’t foresee now, and not for the better. Let’s not cross that line. DT. David Frost.