No, suicide is not just a lifestyle choice

Only in Britain could the operator of an underground public transport system be regarded as a suitable moral arbiter, while religious beliefs with thousands of years of ethical teaching behind them are regarded as a nuisance and dangerous.

In the same month that Lord Falconer criticized religious people for daring to have an opinion on assisted dying, Transport for London gave the green light for a takeover of the Westminster Tube advertising space, turning it into a kind of suicidal ‘Winter Wonderland’.

In one of these ads, sponsored by Dignity in Dying, a young woman happily dances around her kitchen in silk pajamas. It looks like an ad for Ann Summers, not because she took a massive overdose of barbiturates.

This isn’t presented as the bleak decision that it is; which irrevocably changes the relationship between the state and the individual. It’s a bachelor party, a bottomless brunch, Carrie Bradshaw and the girls are having a cosmo. This could be less offensive if TfL were equally critical elsewhere. Not so. Earlier this year, a comedian was forced to remove an image of a hot dog from his show advertisements, otherwise it would violate TfL’s healthy eating rules.

It’s not just the absurdity of the idea that encouraging someone to eat a hot dog is dangerous while promoting actual suicide is fine, but also the way the idea is justified – by using the ubiquitous power of emotional manipulation in our public lives; two.

I’ve written before about the patronizing and infantilizing tone of much modern advertising. But the co-optation of two by the dying people’s lobby has shown that it can also be deeply manipulative and sinister.

In debates, advocates (à la Esther Rantzen) often appeal to the idea that “We wouldn’t treat pets like that”. As veterinarians will personally admit, pet euthanasia doesn’t always work perfectly.

But the argument is revealing in other ways. “Remember old Rover, you wouldn’t have made him suffer” provides a comforting and easy way for the brain to trick itself into believing that your grandparents are somehow similar to a dog you had when you were six . Rationally and ethically it makes no sense, but – and this is where two plays its treacherous role – emotionally it can tug at people’s hearts.

During lockdown, the two-register was used to suppress dissent through a kind of forced gaiety. The government’s messaging oscillated between sentimentality and apocalyptic fear; by Captain Tom Clapathon until 1984.

The Prime Minister still sometimes refers to the lockdown as a time of heroic sacrifice, when the only real problem was the hypocrisy of those in charge. Such views helpfully leave out the unfair fines, state overreach, and general misery. I now detect a hint of this in the weaponization of concepts such as ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ (as if these belong exclusively to one side).

As is often the case when it is invoked in public debate, #BeKind has feelings behind it and actions before it that are anything but that. Here, among other things, it masks several unusually well-funded lobby groups promoting the campaign.

Kim Leadbeater, the bill’s sponsor, recently called on MPs to “step back” from the debateironically, in favor of “people with lived experience”. This is both a devastating misunderstanding of how parliamentary democracy works and a depressingly simplistic bilge. No matter how carefully the argument is constructed or how philosophical it sounds, everything can be erased by the sprinkling of a dash of “lived experience.”

Jess Phillips recently made an equally astonishing concession. “The NHS is not fit enough,” she admitted, “but you can’t stop progress.” This is modernity, proclaimed in a sect-like manner, as Mr Gradgrind shouts ‘facts!’ would shout.

Former Justice Secretary David Gauke (who, for all his pronouncements, some still regard as a truly old-fashioned Tory) used a piece of logic so drippingly Whiggish that it might as well have been copied and pasted straight from Gibbon.

Gauke placed his current support in the context of the great march of history, as if all changes in the social fabric were one and the same. “I look back on my personal choice about same-sex marriage… with a certain pride in being part of something important, just as I regard my abstinence from assisted dying with regret.”

Yet gay marriage passed in part thanks to obvious Tory arguments for expanding a centuries-old institution. Assisted dying, on the other hand, can only be presented as somewhat ‘conservative’ in the sense that it takes us back to the practices of our prehistoric ancestorsi.e. those who used to push someone off a cliff as soon as they turned 45, for fear that they would hinder the process of gathering hunters.

Although opponents of assisted dying come from a wide range of political, ethical, and religious circles, most of the arguments in favor of it seem to boil down to precisely this point. That’s why two-washing is both brutal and dangerous. Fundamentally, its proponents know that they lack coherent ethical or practical arguments to meet the complex challenges posed by opponents. But they also know that in Parliament we have an emotional debate and a group of well-meaning but immature MPs, who may not have the time or inclination to delve deeply into the opinions of legal scholars and palliative care experts, but who really want that. sending something mildly reassuring to a constituent who has written to them about a suffering family member.

Two becomes our circuit override because we have to think about things that are complicated, nuanced, or painful. “Don’t worry about the big bad world, here’s Paddington.”

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