‘But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any future use of it, beyond that single act.’ So wrote John Stuart Mill – the pre-eminent liberal thinker, in the seminal essay which laid the foundations for political liberalism, ‘On Liberty’. In 1859, when ‘On Liberty’ was published, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was still four years away and ‘On Liberty’ was Mill’s opportunity to present his case against slavery. However, were Mill writing today, he might be tempted to deploy his argument not just against slavery: he would also oppose assisted dying.
When writing ‘On Liberty’, Mill went further than some of his contemporaries, in that he did not just want it to be illegal to force people into slavery – he also wanted to stop people voluntarily selling themselves into slavery. ‘The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free.’ The very purpose of liberal law – to render persons free – is defeated by giving them that particular freedom. ‘It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate [one’s] freedom.’
But the same could be said for assisted dying. The freedom to die, Mill would also argue, is not a real freedom, since death, just like voluntarily selling oneself into slavery, is an abdication of one’s liberties. The freedom to die, just as the freedom to become a slave, ‘foregoes any future use of [freedom], beyond that single act.’
Despite this, a bill to legalise physician-assisted dying is to be introduced to Parliament today. Attempts to change the law on this were made before – first in 1936, but then again in 1969, 1976 and 1997; four times between 2003 and 2006; and in 2015, 2016, 2020 and, finally, in 2021. Every single one of those attempts either stalled or failed – this one should too.
Mill was conscious that his argument against slavery was pertinent to many other topics. ‘These reasons,’ he wrote, ‘are evidently of far wider application.’ He goes on to discuss how they apply to marriage and divorce: a married person forgoes some of their liberty to become more fully committed to another person, so one may be tempted to think that, applying Mill’s principle, marriage should also be illegal. But there is no need for that, as marriage can be withdrawn from. Indeed, Mill concludes that divorce, when both parties consent, should always be legal, though it may nonetheless be the morally wrong thing to do. The difference with assisted dying is that it is not a decision one can withdraw from. You cannot change your mind once you are dead.
Mill’s argument, even if unconsciously, seems to still exert an influence on liberals today. Although assisted dying is sometimes framed as a debate where the liberal view is to support legalisation – while supporting a ban conveys a more authoritarian leaning – the opposite is true when we look at polling data. It is instead the people who are generally more liberal who are the most likely to oppose assisted dying.
The pollster More in Common divides the public into seven roughly equal segments, one of which is ‘established liberals: the people who ‘think compromise is important, feel that diversity enriches society and think Britain should be more globally-oriented’. This is also the segment that is most opposed to the legalisation of assisted dying. Only 31% of them strongly support the idea.
On the other hand, it is those more authoritarian respondents who are the most supportive. For ‘loyal nationals’ – people who ‘get their news from The Daily Mail, The Sun, and ITV’ – assisted dying is a no-brainer. A remarkable 58% of them strongly support it; almost twice as many as for the ‘established liberals.’
Indeed, assisted dying looks to be victorious in the court of public opinion. In general, 75% of the public would favour legalisation. But this has not stopped similar bills from failing in the past. In 2015, the last time a bill to legalise assisted dying was introduced to the House of Commons, MPs rejected it overwhelmingly, by a vote of 330 to 118. This was at a time when assisted dying was even more popular than it is today: 82% of the public were in favour of legalising it then.
Of course, there are also many arguments other than the one Mill deploys against slavery to be made against assisted dying today: whether that be worries about a change in law effecting a change in moral views; or the concern that persons who would not have otherwise chosen to die will feel pressured to do so, no matter how strict the legibility criteria might be. However, Mill’s argument may go a long way to explain the particular distaste for assisted dying that liberals hold today. The French existentialist – though he himself rejected the label – Albert Camus wrote of ‘a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death’. But once we are dead, we forgo all freedom. We are not set free from weariness any more than we are set free from pleasure, because, in death, we have no choice regarding either. We become servile to death and its whims and – depending on your views on the afterlife – this may not even come with an end to weariness.
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