The New Radical Collectivism: Identity Politics as the Heated Battleground for 21st Century Politics
One of the most persistent and contentious political fault lines in Western Politics has been in determining where the line should be drawn between collective rights and individual rights.
In the last couple of decades (and especially intensifying over the last few years) this has been flaring up over the attempt to apportion special ‘group rights’ to people based on so-called ‘protected characteristics’ in order to address disparities in life outcomes between groups.
The main combatants on the side of establishing group rights based on identity have been the political far left, who have largely been drawing upon the Postmodernist school of thought.
Postmodernist thought sees all of human life as a power struggle between different identity groups; resulting in power imbalances becoming entrenched within society between these groups. In recent years, the ongoing attempt to redress these perceived power imbalances has given rise to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) schemes throughout higher education and employment both within the public and the private sector.
This relentless focus on identity groups seems to have reached such a fervid intensity that it has ignited a maelstrom of virtue signalling regarding an individual, corporation, or public body’s credentials as being actively ‘anti-racist’. Merely proclaiming oneself to be “not racist” and adhering to a personal policy of refraining from consciously discriminating against people based on their race will no longer pass much muster. If you aren’t actively and urgently striving to fight against racism in everything that you think or do, then you are complicit in the oppression of the marginalised. Indeed, many academic institutions and employers now require that candidates submit a “DEI statement” to demonstrate either how they are affected by DEI issues (if they are part of a ‘marginalised group’ themselves), or if they belong to one of the oppressing groups in society, how they intend to ‘check their privilege’, ‘do the work’ and utilise their privilege to ‘centre’ and ‘amplify’ the downtrodden and suppressed voices of ‘minoritised/racialised communities’.
It has also proven to be a fecund breeding ground for numerous new academic disciplines, such as anti-racism studies, disability studies, queer studies, postcolonialism, and many more.
Although in theory, the focus on redressing inequality between groups marries up well with the political left’s historic goals of class equality; in practice, economic and class concerns have taken a backseat to the culture war in recent years. This shift in priorities is nowhere more emblematic than in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remark “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow…would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”
Strange Bedfellows: The New Unity between Religious Right and Postmodern Left
In recent years, the divide between the political left and right has been growing; and this division has been largely fuelled by ‘culture war’ issues such as abortion, race and transgender issues.
People who identify as politically conservative tend to base their stances on different fundamental values than those who see themselves as being on the left. One of the defining values of the religious right is that of sanctity, and the central importance of religion in defining the meaning of life.
To the mind of the religious conservative; all human life is inherently sacred from the time of conception until natural death. Thus, to deliberately terminate a human life at any point in their lifespan is the gravest of all sins. In the mind of a Catholic or Evangelical Christian; the prohibition against ending or helping to end a human life is a deontological rule that brooks no exceptions. It is considered murder even if one is to end one’s own life without external help; because the value of our life is not ours to destroy.
It therefore stands to reason that support for policies such as assisted suicide and the right to abortion has predominantly come from the generally less religious political left. Although many on the left may still adhere to ideas about the sanctity of life; they tend to be somewhat less intransigent in their commitment to it in the face of competing considerations such as bodily autonomy, suffering and mercy.
Critics of identity politics have pointed out that the value of sanctity is re-emerging in leftist thought, through the sacralisation of minority groups. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt posits that leftist identity politics centres round the protection of “sacred groups” within society, which include black people, native Americans, LGBTQ+ and the disabled.
Although the identitarian left are being motivated by the value of sanctity, much like their counterparts on the right; the clash between that which is being held sacred often brings these groups into bitter conflict.
The behaviour and attitudes of the identitarian left have been starting to parallel the activity of the religious right in a number of interesting ways. It has traditionally been the case that the left have championed the scientific method, whilst the right prioritised revealed religious knowledge. Because pioneers of the scientific method have been disproportionately white and male (and white males have always historically occupied the role of the oppressor of other groups); famous postmodernist thinkers have looked upon the scientific method as a means of ascertaining objective truth with great skepticism. Instead of reliance upon the scientific method to reveal objective truths about the world in which we live (which, according to postmodernism, are inevitably going to reflect the values of the oppressive and colonialist whites and entrench the power of this group); we should be elevating “other ways of knowing” to a status of parity with the scientific method. These “other ways of knowing” can include religious revelation and rituals, “lived experience”, and creation myths passed down from one generation to the next by tribal elders. Curiously, “other ways of knowing” only seem to be deserving of parity with the scientific method when the ‘knowers’ themselves are representing a historically marginalised, colonised or oppressed group, such as when the Royal Society of New Zealand decided to incorporate Maui creation myths into the science curriculum of New Zealand schools and those criticising the decision were denounced as “racist”. So far, efforts of Evangelical Christians in America to teach young earth creationism in the school curriculum alongside evolution have strangely not been met with the same levels of ardent zeal on the part of leftists.
In recent years, religious conservatives have begun to notice that their counterparts on the far left are being motivated by many of the same values, albeit working from a different starting point. They have shrewdly identified an opportunity to appeal to the values of ‘woke’ leftists and enlist them as allies in the crusade against abortion and the right to die, by identifying that these policies may have disparate impacts on different identity groups within society.
Emulating the reasoning of the likes of Ibram X Kendi on economic issues, opponents of abortion have identified that black women are more likely to obtain an abortion than white women and pointed to this disparity of outcome between identity groups as proof that abortion itself is systemically racist and allowing abortion to remain legal amounts, to all intents and purposes, to a genocide of black people in the USA. In the terms of the American Life League; abortion is “the racist’s most devastating weapon“. Using the tactics of the leftists against them; opponents of abortion on the right have increasingly started to bring “marginalised” voices to the fore, as part of their campaign against abortion. An example of this can be seen in the platforming of Karen Gaffney; an anti-abortion activist with Down’s Syndrome who decries the high rates of elective abortion of foetuses in countries such as Iceland (where Downs Syndrome is thought to be on the verge of being eradicated due to pre-natal screening).
This approach has so far attained a degree of success. In 2019, the US state of Indiana passed a bill banning abortion on the basis of “race, colour, national origin, ancestry, sex or…disability”. Emma Green, writing in the Atlantic, observes how this concern marks a radical departure from Indiana’s recent deplorable track record on anti-discrimination law.
The tactics of the religious right have also won support from some quarters of the nominal political left, with groups such as Democrats for Life being established, who perceive the foetus as a weak and defenceless victim who needs to be protected from aggression. This group is also staunchly opposed to the right to die, on the grounds of “protecting the vulnerable”.
Although the religious right’s efforts to build a bipartisan coalition against abortion has achieved only limited success so far (abortion remains, for the most part, a divisive wedge issue in which left is pitted against right); the recent sensationalism surrounding Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) policy has seen both the religious far right and identitarian left singing harmoniously from the same authoritarian hymn sheet.
Religious Right and Postmodern Left in Alliance Against MAiD
The prohibition on assisted suicide finally came to an end in Canada in 2016; after the nation’s Supreme Court determined that the prohibition was deemed to be contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Consequently, legalised assisted suicide came into effect in June 2016; albeit in a very tentative, cautious and conservative form; applying at the time only to those with a “reasonably foreseeable death”. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was reluctant to expand it beyond this very strict criteria, but eventually lost a further case in the Supreme Court, which resulted in the scope of assisted suicide being expanded to include people with grievous and irremediable suffering from a physical ailment, but whose death may not be reasonably foreseeable.
MAiD was intended to be expanded further to include those diagnosed with so-called mental illnesses. However, attempts to do so has been stalled by the Liberal government, who have delayed the expansion twice; cowering in the face of an outbreak of media-driven public hysteria that has yet to settle down. The expansion has now been delayed until 2027 at the earliest, after Canada’s next election (an election that all polls indicate is virtually certain to be won by the Conservative Party, who have vowed to cancel the expansion if elected).
Capitalising on DEI mania, and taking pointers from the playbook of conservative anti-abortion lobbyists in the US; identity politics have been brought to the fore by opponents of MAiD within Canadian media and internationally. Here in the UK, where we have yet to even establish a law enabling assisted dying in cases of terminal illness; people will often allude darkly to “what’s happening in Canada” when explaining that, whilst they think that not forcibly prolonging the lives of terminally ill people might be a good thing in principle, it is simply too dangerous to be deployed in practice.
The attempt to leverage identity politics to oppose liberalisation of the laws on suicide/assisted suicide is not a gambit which originated with resistance to Canada’s MAiD program. This has always been at the core of the strategy being deployed by faith based groups. For example, Peter Saunders, the campaign director of the UK’s Care Not Killing admitted to having an objection to assisted suicide based on religion but: “To win the debate on assisted dying we need to be using arguments that will make sense to those who do not share our Christian beliefs.”
As we saw in the case of abortion in the US; Godwin’s law has once again proven to be the order of the day. This attempt to depict MAiD as a sinister Nazi conspiracy to purge Canada of all its “undesirables” has united the nation’s religious right with its identitarian left. Whilst abortion was presented at a covert attempt to purify the racial bloodlines of the US through targeted racial eugenics; media outlets throughout Canada and the rest of the world (across the political spectrum) have been frantically sounding the alarm regarding what they perceive as being the nascent recurrence of the Nazis’ Aktion T4 or a eugenics program; being described by Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”
The exchange below provides a typical example. Health columnist Andre Picard shares a link to an article written by his colleague Noah Richler in the Globe and Mail, with a rare favourable case report of an elderly woman’s death by MAID. This is met by a typically hysterical reaction from a University of Toronto ‘academic’:
Looking further into the background of Mr’s Picard’s interlocutor on her University of Toronto biography page, we can see an interesting fusion between the study of traditional forms of religion (her primary areas of study include ‘Global Christianities’ and Philosophy of Religion, and she has spent a lot of time studying Pentecostalism in Nigeria) and the 21st century religion of identity politics (her work is interdisciplinary and draws on influences including ‘critical theory’ and ‘postcolonial studies’).
As has become the norm, even opponents of MAiD with devout religious beliefs have gotten used to couching their opposition to the program in the new ‘woke’ lexicon of Social Justice. Another prominent user on ‘disability Twitter/X’, Terry-Lee Marttinen uses exclusively ‘woke’ arguments in her online crusade against the right to die. However, a quick look at her profile reveals that she is wearing a necklace with a crucifix, and the banner at the top of her profile page reveals a photograph of Church murals.
The most prominent opponents of MAiD expansion, including Trudo Lemmens and Dr Sonu Gaind, have leant heavily on identity politics to propel forward their illiberal and reactionary opposition. Reminiscent of Kendi et al’s conclusions regarding economic disparities between black and white; Dr Gaind adduces the fact that women are more likely to seek Track 2 MAiD as evidence of the MAiD being systematically sexist. Speaking to the right-wing National Post: “A stark gender gap…emerges: when MAID is provided to the imminently dying, it’s a 50-50 gender split. As many men as women seek and get it. Experience in the Netherlands and other countries shows that twice as many women seek and receive MAID for mental illness.”
On the subject of disability, the bioethicist Trudo Lemmens paints a picture of disabled individuals being effectively driven towards MAiD without being able to exercise any resistance or autonomy, and often speaks in terms of individuals being passively “at risk” of MAiD; as opposed to autonomously and volitionally requesting assistance to die. For Lemmens, the mere act of legally allowing a person with a disability to exercise autonomy over their own body is to implicitly tell the person that their life has no value and that they are disposable. Writing in The Conversation about the Truchon decision to eliminate the “reasonable foreseeable death” requirement for MAiD; Lemmens tells us that allowing a disabled person to end their life, without that choice being overruled by the state, society risks entrenching “ableist stigma” and ignores the “negative perceptions of the quality of life” pertaining to those who are elderly or disabled.
In Gaind and Lemmens’ version of identity politics; individuals who can be considered ‘marginalised’ are so at the mercy of the forces of oppression, that their stated desire to end their life must be assumed to be inauthentic, and steps must be taken for that person’s own protection to ensure that their decision is overruled. In decrying the influence of ‘ableist’ assumptions; Lemmens has reinforced the most insidious ableist stigma of all – that disabled people are incapable of fending for themselves, and must perforce rely upon able bodied moral guardians to tell them what their own interests and needs are.
This preoccupation with statistical equality between identity groups is also prevalent here in the UK, and exemplified in a Reddit exchange that I had with user chilli_con_camera on the UK subreddit, who said that they would support a universal right to suicide, but only if it could be guaranteed that the suicide rates would be equal across all demographics; regardless of how one might statistically slice and dice identity group membership. Until this can be guaranteed, the user felt that the paternalistic policies in place to prevent suicide must remain in place. Although, because abortion is firmly entrenched within the leftist orthodoxy as a permissible form of bodily autonomy; when I questioned the user about why he didn’t support restrictions on abortion based on the same arguments (made by the religious right on the grounds of disproportionate impact to black and disabled people); I was accused of a perpetuating “false equivalency”.
The concern for the impact that MAiD may have on disabled Canadians pervades the coverage of the subject on right-wing media, despite conservative political parties’ ideological opposition to progressive means of alleviating the cause of what they claim to be driving disabled Canadians towards MAiD – extreme poverty and low quality of life.
In opposition to MAiD, many disabled Canadians have been outspoken in sharing their experiences of having insufficient benefits or access to care to be able to sustain a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. They share their concern that many disabled or ‘mentally ill’ people may find that they will turn to MAiD in desperation due to a lack of resources.
Opponents of MAiD, both in the media and in the public, tend to focus relentlessly on a small selection of 4 cases where individuals appear to have had MAiD suggested to them as a treatment option. The most famous of which being the case of Christine Gauthier (who is likely to be dining out on this particular anecdote for many years to come, considering the frequency that this case has been discussed in the media, both in Canada and internationally) who was waiting upon the provision of a stairlift and was pro-actively offered MAID by an employee at Veterans Affairs Canada. This case, and 3 other cases of people being proactively offered MAiD, can all be traced back to the same single employee at Veterans Affairs Canada. An employee who was then fired from his job as a result of this investigation; with a further investigation having been carried out by the RCMP. Despite the fact that these cases can all be traced back to the actions of a single employee, and despite the robust action that was taken in the wake of these findings; these isolated cases are being presented by opponents of MAiD as representative of the program in general.
Whilst those who are struggling to survive are worthy of concern; it is still quite unclear as to how they expect that blocking access to MAiD is going to provide them with the resources that they need.
You cannot add by subtraction. If you take away an option from people, all you do is take away an option. You can’t add any more options that way; or improve the options that are available. And if all you’ve done is take away MAiD without offering an alternative that is acceptable to the ‘victims’ whom you are ‘protecting’ from MAiD; then the only thing to be accomplished by opposing MAiD/a legally guaranteed right to suicide is to keep people trapped in that unbearable suffering. Thus, the act of ‘protection’ becomes an act of torture. In stating that societal conditions for disabled people are so unbearable that death becomes the only option; opponents of MAiD inadvertently concede that they would rather trap people in suffering so intense that death is the only viable means of escape, without any guarantee looming on the horizon that things are going to change for the better.
If opponents of MAiD assert that the government has been failing its most ‘vulnerable’ citizens; it seems curious that the proposed solution to this problem lies in apportioning more power to that same government to interfere into the personal lives of individuals.
Talk about ‘perverse incentives’! This is akin to saying that if you are held captive against your will; then the best thing to do is to vote for your captor to have more power to keep you trapped and prevent your escape. If they have unlimited power to prevent your egress from the prison, then they will have an obligation to ensure that your stay is so comfortable that you’d never wish to leave at all.
The Right to Assert Autonomy Vs Moral Dependency
At the same time as the Canadian government was wrangling with opponents of MAiD over the planned expansion of the program, a man called Kenneth Law; also from Canada; found himself in court facing charges of first degree murder.
Law had been supplying a substance called Sodium Nitrite to customers who had been researching plans to commit suicide (without help from the government) and had happened upon Law’s online shop as a source for the substance; which was known to be one of the more reliable and less painful suicide methods available.
Many of the customers who found Law’s online shop discovered it through another site called Sanctioned Suicide, which provides information on the most effective suicide methods, and where to obtain them.
Once Kenneth Law’s online activities had been exposed in the media, a predictable furore ensued. The anglosphere was united in moral indignation due to the government’s failure to adequately supervise the online activity of the vulnerable, and to the fact that some had managed to fall through the cracks of the paternalistic suicide prevention apparatus. The unforgiveable negligence of governments throughout the western world had resulted in these fragile, weak and helpless creatures managing to find themselves alone in a room, unable to control their own actions, with anything more deadly than a butter knife.
The charge of first degree murder is significant; because it carries with it the implication that none of Law’s clients had any agency of their own. Merely allowing them access to information and facilitating the purchase of the means of suicide is equated to the act of directly administering poison to them without their knowledge, by surreptitiously dissolving a cyanide pill in a cup of tea intended for their consumption.
This is representative of a new culture of what psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, refer to as “safetyism”. Safetyism occurs when individuals come to be morally dependent upon some form of authority to protect them from emotional injury. This is particularly evident in the hate speech laws which have sprung up in many nations in Europe and across the English speaking world, outside of the United States. There is also an increasing trend for students in particular to deem certain opinions to be “unsafe” to be exposed to; and this has resulted in many speakers being deplatformed in US and UK universities, and modern day witch-hunts against academics found guilty of “wrong-think”. For example, Erika Christakis and her husband who were hounded out of their jobs at Yale, after the former dared to suggest that students should be allowed the freedom of expression to wear Halloween costumes that might offend other students.
Safetyism manifests itself in the opposition to the right to die, when individuals become indoctrinated into seeing themselves as being in need of protection from their suicidal urges. It is not uncommon for people who claim to be suffering from mental distress to complain bitterly about the proposed expansion of MAiD, for fears that they themselves may in the past have been, or may in the future be, tempted to avail themselves of that service, whilst mired in a bout of despair. Orlando Da Silva is a lawyer and anti-MAiD activist who expressed gratitude that during his own historic bouts of deep despair, he was not able to avail himself of a humane method of ending his life, as discussed in the below Twitter thread:
Suicide prevention campaigns across the western world, combined with laws restricting freedom to express offensive ideas have been instrumental in fostering a sense of moral dependency on the state. It has plunged our societies into a state of crisis, where grown adults no longer feel as though they have the agency to resolve problems in their life themselves; and must instead turn to the state, or an alternative authority figure (such as their manager, the HR department where they work, or university administrators if they are a student), as protector.
Paternalistic policies have inculcated in members of our society such a profound state of learned helplessness, that the NHS in the UK is finding itself having to turn away people who show up to A&E departments across the country asking to be admitted as an inpatient to protect them from suicidal thoughts. I was even astounded recently, upon perusing ‘mad Twitter’, to find a group of psychiatric inpatients complaining bitterly about 1:1 psychiatric observations in hospital. To my utter astonishment, they weren’t complaining about the fact that they were imprisoned in a psychiatric ward with a nurse staring at them 24/7. They were complaining that the concentration of the person employed to stare at them was too lax. They were concerned that in the moment it took a nurse to nip to the toilet, glance at their phone, or if their eyes simply glazed over momentarily; then this negligence might result in the patient being in grave danger…from themselves.
It’s unclear as to whether the efforts of our governments to make us utterly weak and dependent on the government have backfired by creating a population that is too high maintenance (especially once you consider the numbers now inactive due to being off work on sickness benefits on the grounds of mental ill health), or whether they now have us exactly where they want us.
Opponents of MAiD in Canada, and suicide prevention advocates in the UK bemoan the long waits for accessing mental healthcare in both countries. Lack of access to mental healthcare services is frequently cited as one of the major reasons to resist expansion of MAiD to include mental health ‘conditions’ as the sole qualifying reason. However, they may have failed to consider the possibility that, by casting everyday woes as mental illnesses, our societies have created populations that has become too dependent on authority figures such as psychiatrists to fix the problems in their lives. As a result, this produces unmanageable waiting lists for access to ‘care’, and unsatisfactory outcomes for those who finally make it to the front of the waiting list. As Simon Wessely, the former president of the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists once wryly quipped “Every time we have a mental health awareness week my spirits sink, We don’t need people to be more aware. We can’t deal with the ones who already are aware.”
In societies where religion and spirituality has lost its influence over the mental lives of many; people naturally tend to look for something to fill the void. Some have observed that the new doctrine of ‘woke’ social justice is filling that void, thus giving its most zealous adherents a renewed sense of purpose in life. But human beings need not only a driving purpose to get them through difficult times in their lives; they also need someone to fill the role that has recently been vacated by religious authorities. They need the wise elder of the tribe. Into the breach, step the psychiatrists: a new clerisy for the technological age. Psychiatrists now find themselves taking up the role of the ‘wise sage’ (their credentials backed up by a real medical degree), able to offer a ‘scientific’ guarantee that life is worth living, and thereby putting our existential doubts to rest. How could it not be, when persistent doubts about whether life is worth living are, by definition, a red flag confirming the presence of a mental disorder? This circular logic is seductive for many, who reject outright the idea that suicide can be a rational solution to life’s futile struggle. But for those of us who want secular societies where we are free to experiment with new ideas; this is simply replacing one religion based on belief in the supernatural with a different one based on unwarranted faith in psychiatry, science and paternalistic governments.
It is becoming clear that, for those of us who want a free society with respect for individual liberties; we must approach authority from a position of skepticism, and resist becoming dependent on others to resolve conflicts of competing ideas, as well as our own internal existential conflicts with which some may struggle on a day to day basis.
An Alternative to MAiD – How to Respect Individual Autonomy and Bypass Objections
As we have seen so far, the recent controversy has centred around the provision of medically assisted suicide and how the state can be trusted to determine who should be allowed to die, without undermining anyone’s sense of self-worth or entrenching disparities between different identity groups.
However, the government is only in a position to be making these judgements due to the fact that they insist on positioning themselves as the gatekeepers of death. This is done by denying individuals access to effective and humane suicide methods through the private market or through charities, in the interests of “safety”. By blocking off access to effective suicide methods, the government is in a position where they are having to actively respond to demands for greater autonomy through the provision of a positive right to receive assistance to die.
Instead of accepting the paternalistic paradigm where the government is appointed the protector of fully grown adults, we should be moving towards the embrace of individual choice in this matter. Our personal choice should not be required to be ratified by a government agency or a healthcare professional, so long as we are not infringing on the rights of others through the exercise of this choice.
Opposition of the right to die assumes that there are certain obligations to which we owe fellow members of our species and our society; that we are born into these obligations, and they cannot be dispensed with.
I do appreciate that no man is an island, and that in order to have functioning and cohesive societies, we need to strike a balance between individual liberty and obligations towards the collective.
I agree with the premise that if one chooses to continue living, then one has to accept that one’s personal liberty to make free decisions can have detrimental impact on the welfare of others, and that sometimes curtailments upon individual rights are necessary in order to protect the interests of the collective. This includes forfeiting some of our personal income through taxation to ensure that those who genuinely cannot fend for themselves are reasonably well supported and secure.
However, the opposition to the right to die takes this collectivism to a radical extreme. By denying us the legally codified right to opt out of existence (either with the assistance of a doctor, or without), we are born into a de facto state of slavery. No amount of pleading on behalf of the ‘vulnerable’ can redeem the concept of slavery. It doesn’t matter whether we are told that we need to persist through pain, hardship and misery for the sake of upholding the prerogatives of a deity, for the sake of protecting the profits of a robber baron, or even to ensure that disabled people never feel under pressure to end their lives. To compel us to live by actively withholding the means of death is an act of ongoing violence and oppression, and it must be ended. You cannot justify an act of violence and enforced suffering against a peaceful group of individuals on the basis that it is necessary to inflict this violence in order to avoid inadvertently sending a message to a completely different group that their lives are not valued, or that they are a burden. Since the overwhelming those of us wanting to die are not doing so to spite the disabled, or to spite certain ethnic groups in society; there is no direct or intentional act of provocation on our part that would warrant the enforcement of an obligation to live and to continue suffering. We must not accept that we are to each individually be held responsible for ensuring that all policies are ‘impacting’ every identity group within society in a statistically precisely equal measure. It is beyond our gift as individuals to equalise the disparities between groups. It should not be our de facto legal responsibility to ensure that people belonging to ‘marginalised’ groups and those with a disability feel as though they are valued members of society; even when this must come at the cost of sovereignty over our own bodies and minds.
Whilst balances between individual liberties and collective obligations must be struck; they must be struck on the basis of voluntary participation in society. This means that those of us who want to live have a duty to others, but those of us who don’t want to live are not to be considered the property of those who do wish to live. To infringe upon this negative liberty right by enforcing an obligation to live is an intolerable injustice that must be protested at every turn.
If the right to die is simply a negative liberty right not to be interfered with through the application of laws restricting access to effective and humane suicide methods, or laws which empower the authorities to intervene in an ongoing suicide attempt; then by simply refraining from interfering with a person’s choice to commit suicide, the government is neither explicitly nor tacitly expressing any opinion on the value of anyone’s life. The government cannot be said to be actively trying to expunge any specific group from society on the grounds of being a burden, if it is relegated to a passive role of refraining from infringing on the negative liberty rights of a peaceful individual.
It is beyond the scope of this blog post to go into further detail about how this negative liberty right can be upheld and respected; but one of my previous blog posts – When Safety Becomes Slavery : Negative Rights and the Cruelty of Suicide Prevention – delves into this in more detail.
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existentialgoof – 4th March 2024
2 responses to “A Culture War MAiD in Canada: The Religious Right and Postmodern Left Unite to Push Back Against The Frontiers of Bodily Autonomy”
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The only way I see it happening is if the government is forced to go back to the Supreme Court, like they were after MAiD was initially limited to people with a ‘reasonably foreseeable death’. The Conservative Party are virtually certain to win the next election and, as would be expected, have stated that they will cancel the MAiD expansion. If they have any legal grounds whereby they can challenge the court ruling allowing it to be expanded to people with a non terminal illness, I would expect them to do that as well.
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