When a top-level church delegation went to talk to government Ministers to present the case against gay-marriage legislation, one of the delegation said afterwards that the two sides did not even seem to inhabit the same moral universe. There was no meeting of minds. I fear the same thing may be happening over the proposed assisted-suicide legislation, which has sparked a campaign by the Catholic Church to oppose it. On this issue too, the two sides seem to be talking at cross-purposes. Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, when preaching against assisted suicide (or “assisted dying”, to use the protagonists preferred expression), said: “The right to die is somebody else’s duty to kill; and we don’t accept that.” In fact the draft of the proposed leg
06 August 2015, The Tablet
Plainly the drafters of the 1961 Suicide Act wanted to have their cake and eat it
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User Comments (1)
Either suicide ought to have been, and its assistance ought to be, decriminalised; or neither assistance of suicide, nor suicide itself, ought to be decriminalised. Equally, if suicide is ever a reasonable option, whenever it is so, not taking that option is unreasonable. Clifford Longley suggests that the compassion due to sufferers who do not opt for suicide, indicates that it is suicide that is unreasonable, but that is not enough on its own to prove that those who do opt for suicide, commit what ought to be a crime. Such a proof would be based on the reason why compassion is due to sufferers who do not choose suicide, namely, their very identity with their own lives, as being all that they are, whose worth is more than their freedom from suffering, in the light of which, suicide would be their irreversible self destruction, the worst kind of self harm, and even self hate, a futile final attempt to become nothing, in whose success no benefit can ever be enjoyed.