The ancients recognised something that in many ways we may have lost sight of. Namely the importance of what they termed ‘virtue’. Simply put this is a life seen to be well lived. Or as one definition has it, ‘We study ethics in order to improve our lives, and therefore its principal concern is the nature of human well-being’.
I recently engaged in some correspondence with the EAUK following the ruling on assisted suicide campaigned for by MS sufferer Debbie Purdy. This high profile campaign generated much discussion on the challenging issue of what nineteenth century sociologists Enrico Morselli and Emile Durkheim named suicide. They were attempting to rehabilitate the practice so that greater understanding could be extended across humanity.
In short EAUK asked me to seek to formulate a brief statement that captured a sensitised approach to this troubling ethical dilemma. Sadly I responded that I could not - because it was a very complex issue.
Both government and church are compromised on this issue. One side of the argument is the commitment to legally protect the integrity of someone’s physical life - the element Ms Purdy challenges. Everyone would want to secure a high view of life. However, life is more than physical survival. On the other hand we have the recent reports that patients with dementia deteriorate in hospital with their basic needs for food and liquids failing to be met. If this was elsewhere it would be raised by western politicians as a human rights abuse - oh if there was time between submitting spurious expense claims!
The extent we have extended our ability to sustain physical life has far outpaced our understanding and appreciation of other descriptives of life such as emotional, intellectual, working, spiritual - the list runs on! We then reduce the ethical issue to something to do with the physical functionality of the human body - however, this is not what I think Jesus had in mind when he talked of life in all its fullness.
It is exploring around the nature of fullness that the conversation needs to take its time - and of course media has no patience with such subtleties. Yet it is in these very subtleties that most of life is experienced; the anguish of heartbreak, the despondency of disappointment, the frustration of failure, the loneliness of loss etc.
Maybe we should allow individuals to argue for what they see best in their circumstances rather than assume we know better. Journeying with Katey through her/our long pilgrimage with sickness it was painful to have the Lord show me that my sincere, platformed proclamations over the years were vacuous because I had failed to cross the road to care for the wounded samaritan, just as we experienced the evangelical/charismatic church that gave us our Christian birth, abandon us to our fate in dealing with wild animals and robbers who sought to steal our very lives from us as we lay wounded by the roadside.
We should engage the wounded into the conversation at the same table as everyone else and then maybe the church will have a voice that engages real people living what are in many cases pretty shit lives. In fact you don't realise just how shit until you emerge and find that everyone else lives life to a different tune because their daily routine is not constructed by 'the other', well outside their control. Not a complaint at any level, nor blaming anyone, just observing that we have to capture the breadth of realities and not just the 'victory' reports.
Then we discover this week that one of the BBC's main leads is the neglect that people with dementia experience in hospital. I well remember Katey's first stay in hospital once her short term memory had begun to fail and the relatives of others on her ward informing me I needed to visit each meal time to feed her. When I asked why they simply said because they watched as food was delivered to her bed, she was disabled and unable to feed herself, and later the food, untouched, was removed. No-one, meal service or nurse, ever enquired why that was. And of course she was given no liquids. She was in fact just abandoned in the heart of a national symbol of care.
Again governments and courts who reserve to themselves the right to determine that all life is worthy of being lived show a different face when it comes to supplying the necessary budgetary resources to ensure that every life, dementing, with learning disability or whatever, is treated with dignity and respect until its natural end. There is often more dignity for all the family in a planned death than that offered by the random lottery of hospital and elderly care that this country affords its citizens. And the church is complicit in its silence. I briefly draw attention to the fact that here is a wonderful opportunity for the church to speak and organise itself to provide the volunteers to provide such a voluntary service to their local hospital. If we truly value life and quality of life we would surely make this a number one missional objective - but of course we won't.
Now this is an agenda that the church could take up with conviction!
Just another demonstration of how there are so many anomalies in both state and church on this ethical issue. Death by indifference can never be presented as more ethical than death by deliberate decision.
(Download Death by indifference, Mencap Report)