As parliament prepares to vote on assisted dying, Nick Spencer defines how religious beliefs about our humanity can meaningfully inform the debate. 4/10/2024

It is unlikely to have escaped your attention that parliament is going to have another chance to vote on assisted suicide. Although it’s not government policy, the Prime Minister is known to be sympathetic, and the Labour MP, Kim Leadbeater, having come first in the ballot, is putting forward a private members bill to legalise it.  

Theos will be contributing resources on this over the next few weeks and months to help MPs and others to think about the issues, but let’s start with a platitude. 

Assisted suicide is a highly sensitive issue and should be treated as such. Few people involved are genuinely bad actors. Most (all?) want the best for their fellow human beings. The problem is that we disagree, sometimes profoundly, on what that actually means. This is an issue of “deep diversity”.  

What, if anything, does “religion” – I’ll put the word in scare quotes because it does seem to scare some people – have to contribute to all this? After all, secular campaigners like to frame the whole debate negatively and antagonistically as “other people’s religious beliefs” limiting the choice of those who are suffering. Is this fair? 

Well, let’s state two obvious points here. First, assisted suicide cannot be settled by proof texting. A few religious folk may believe it can but I’ve not come across very many of them. A serious religious contribution to an agonistic issue like this will always be more than “Bible Says No”. 

Second, the debate needs and will draw on a great deal of careful reasoning and empirical evidence. What is the balance of public opinion? How does it vary according to the question asked? What are the fears of people facing death? What are the medical options available for palliative care? What are the mechanisms for assisted suicide? What do physicians think about this? What has happened in other countries in which assisted suicide has been introduced? All this is relevant and important. 

The problem is that such reasoning and such data points cannot decide the issue for us because ultimately it must draw on our deep, basic and unprovable convictions about the human creature and the human good. Assisted suicide necessarily touches on our profoundest sense of the meaning and purpose of human life, a sense that it is ultimately a matter of perspective, conviction or – dare I say it –faith, there being no evidence or experiment or algorithm to give a comprehensive answer. 

The issue is more than just “ethical”, in the sense of “what we should do about this”. It is existential, closer to “who are we?”, “how do humans fit into the rest of reality?”, and “wherein lies our basic, fundamental good as persons”? 

These are the kind of questions with which we have long wrestled at Theos. Christian thought and practice has rather a lot to say on the topic, and we brought some of it to bear in our earlier report on the topic, published six years ago now and shortly to be revised and reissued. In that, the author Andrew Grey interrogated the idea of human “dignity”, a concept that underlies so much of the debate, and showed how it can be understood in two subtly different ways. Our answer to the question, “what does human dignity mean?” necessarily informs what we think about assisted dying. 

It will surprise no–one that we are broadly speaking against assisted suicide (though the topic has been the subject of much internal discussion). We can’t pretend that we are a disinterested and objective observer in all this. No one is. There is no view from nowhere, particularly when you are surveying the human landscape. But the reasons for such opposition cannot, or should not, be simply sneered and dismissed as being “religious”. At no point did or do we argue that legalised assisted dying is a bad idea “because God says so” or “because the Bible says so” or even “because my conscience can’t permit it.” Such reasons may exist in some quarters, but they are too opaque to merit any purchase in public debate.  

Rather, we ground our attitude to assisted suicide in our conception of the purpose, significance and dignity of the human, and in the fact that these qualities aren’t exhausted simply by the exercise of autonomy. To be clear, agency is an important part of human nature, and recognising it is an important part of honouring human dignity. But it’s not the whole picture.

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