Daniel Finkelstein: opponents of assisted dying are ‘radicals’
by Archbishop Cranmer:
In his Times article today, Daniel Finkelstein insists that to legalise assisted dying (/suicide) would be “a small change”; a very modest development; a necessary and popular incremental reform. As Parliament gets yet another chance to consider this matter (the fourth in 15 years), “eventually success will come,” he tells us. “Political minds change slowly but the change is all in one direction.”
His is a teleological belief with a curious argument:
There are three remaining political obstacles to a new law. And the first is the idea that assisted dying represents a radical change, a break with hundreds of years of law-making, philosophical principle and medical practice. It is in an attempt to emphasise the strangeness of the idea of assisted dying, the abandonment of common morality, that opponents try to brand the idea “assisted suicide”.
And it is an entirely hypocritical thing for them to do.
Giving a dying person choice is, of course, quite different from what most people understand as suicide but that is not my objection to it. My objection is that “assisted suicide” isn’t the language of a frank person calling out the euphemism of “assisted dying”. Instead it is itself a euphemism. For the people who use the term suicide to describe assisted dying don’t really believe assisted dying is any kind of suicide. They believe it is murder.
In other words, the opponents of assisted dying are themselves using a carefully selected word to disguise what they really think — to disguise the fact that it is they who are the radicals.
A conversation ensued on Twitter:
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