a Ten years ago, I would have proudly and smugly worn my “I’m a liberal” badge. What’s not to like about liberalism, the idea that people are free to live their lives as they wish, as long as they don’t harm others, and that the state promotes equality of opportunity through a decent welfare state? Is it? It is the politics of liberalism that paved the way for legal reforms on racial discrimination and same-sex marriage, which go hand in hand with lower levels of social prejudice.
I still consider these important indicators of progress. But now I’m ashamed of how naive my worldview was. Liberalism has many attractions, but there are dangers in accepting it as an all-encompassing political philosophy without some degree of humility about its shortcomings. It is an empty silence about how society navigates thorny ethical issues that require some kind of common understanding. This discomfort with morality means that liberals sometimes turn a blind eye when others smuggle in controversial ethical assumptions under the guise of choice and autonomy.
Never have I had to confront these shortcomings more than when creating my new radio series, The Body Politic. In this, I focus on three issues at different levels of political awareness and explore what unfolds when complex issues of bioethics, bodily autonomy, and life and death collide with political institutions. I’ll explore. Assisted dying will likely dominate politics in the coming months. Regarding surrogacy, the government has to make an important decision on whether to proceed with the legal reforms proposed by the Legal Affairs Commission. Fetal screening and its impact on genetic diversity is low on the political radar, but it poses an urgent question for politicians.
The left’s primary framework for understanding these issues is liberalism. People’s choices, such as having a woman carry their baby or seeking medical assistance to end their own life in the case of a terminal illness, should not be restricted unless they cause serious harm to others. . Leftists skeptical of legislative reform in both of these areas, myself included, embrace this framework. So the discussion is about the risks of coercion and exploitation, as if these phenomena are just bugs in the system that need to be weeded out before we can get back to what really matters: personal autonomy and control. .
How to prevent coercion and exploitation is paramount. But it is too reductive to focus on that question abstracted from a deeper understanding of the relational nature of what it means to be human. The result was a narrow debate over whether sufficient safeguards were possible. Kim Leadbeater, the lawmaker behind the assisted dying bill, argues that we should trust judges and doctors to determine who is voluntarily choosing to die and who is not. I don’t share that belief at all. We are talking about safeguards related to evidence. How rational, liberal, and damn good are we?
For me, there is a bond between the mother and her unborn baby in the third trimester, and I don’t know if it’s right to break that relationship so easily.
But the most difficult moment in this series was when the people I was interviewing turned their tables and asked me about my own beliefs rather than where I stood based on the evidence. It was when An old friend, David Reed, who is training to be a priest, wondered where my insistence on the value of life comes from, given my atheistic skepticism about assisted dying. Cue me oohing and aahing as I try to explain why my objections have nothing to do with anything as unpleasant as the sanctity of life. By the time Nicholas Mostyn, a former high court judge who is a strong supporter of assisted dying, looked me in the eye and said to non-believers, I was reflecting on my reaction. I am deeply conscious of the sanctity of human life. ”Oh, maybe I…maybe? This does not mean that I think assisted dying is inherently immoral if it truly is someone’s free will, but the belief that we can never be sure of this is that the consequences are too is also scary and makes it wrong.
When it comes to surrogacy, I have long had concerns about the exploitation of women who carry and give birth to babies for others. More recently, however, I have been forced to confront other concerns that are not so compatible with my liberal beliefs. It is the fact that we believe that the fetus acquires moral status late in pregnancy. View pregnancy as a physical process. For me, there is a relationship between the mother and her unborn baby in the third trimester, and I don’t know if it’s right to break that relationship lightly. Or I don’t think mothers and fathers are really interchangeable in society at large. Of course, some people have toxic relationships with their mothers, but there is probably something valuable about the mother-child bond that should not be lost in any discussion of the mother-child bond. How to make it possible for children without a mother to conceive because they were born to a single father or two fathers. The show will also explore different views on these questions.
When it comes to prenatal screening, more information about the fetal genome may become available to future parents, so what kind of information will form the basis of legal and illegitimate reproductive choices? You need to think about where you draw the line in terms of (parental abilities). For example, knowing the sex of a fetus early in pregnancy through private testing paves the way for sex-selective abortions). We also consider how the illusion of choice and control over who our children become affects our shared sense of what it means to be a parent. There is a need.
On the liberal left, there is shame associated with recognizing moral instincts that cannot be fully explained by rationale or reason. The feeling that things without evidence should be thrown away. But some things are beyond evidence, and it’s good to remember that we all have our own code of ethics, liberal or not. I think it’s healthier to be open about them than to pretend they don’t exist and look down on people who refuse to do the same.
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Body Politics starts on Monday 13th January at 11am on Radio 4
Sonia Soda is a columnist for the Observer.
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