Secular liberal ethics for beginners

'From what I've been able to read (the evidence to the committee is on their website), the scientific community of individual scientists and outstanding institutions is virtually unanimous that as the science moves forward, the legislation should keep up. This means that things which 10 years ago had a high "ugh" factor among the public are being pressed forward by the scientific community.

'Cloning, hybrid embryos, "saviour siblings" - created to help save the life of an existing child - all these have a chance to take their place in the panoply of treatments that are changing the nature of our lives and health. We are in the middle of a burst of scientific achievements which have human welfare as their purpose. Each of us, as we age and deteriorate will have reason to be grateful that such advances give us options that make life more bearable. Those with ethical objections do not have to take them.'


- Joan Bakewell in the Independent, my emphasis.

It's all just so thrillingly modern. The clever people doing this stuff think it's perfectly OK, and are very much in favour of being allowed to do what they want to do. And what kind of people are they? Well, they make up a 'scientific community' (twice in one paragraph, indeed) and communities are always a Good Thing. Self-evidently, then, these are warm and caring human beings whose judgment on matters of human welfare is beyond question. Moreover, some of us are not in quite such good nick as we used to be (even if renowned as the Thinking Man's Crumpet) and have high hopes of benefiting personally from new sources of spare parts. So kindly keep your ethical objections to yourself.


And in another ten years' time the scientific community will be pressing forward... what? And in twenty, thirty years? Who knows, but we may already be certain that they will have nothing but our best interests at heart. So let's just hope that the legislation can keep up.

Anglicans for eugenics

'Sir, The Dean of Southwark Cathedral, the Ven Colin Slee, summarises and endorses a report calling for allowing very sick children to die, with the couplet “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive/ officiously to keep alive”.

'Mr Slee seems not to have noticed that this is not “King James Version language” (as he puts it), but a quotation from the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough. In his poem The Latest Decalogue, Clough parodied attempts to update each of the Ten Commandments in turn, with such couplets as “Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat/ When it’s so lucrative to cheat”, or the one quoted above, and they are obviously deeply ironic.

'It is doubly ironic, therefore, that Mr Slee seems unaware that the lines he quotes were written to subvert and pillory the very liberalising tendency he represents.'

- a letter in the Times. The fact that the writer is a Rev gives one some faint hope that it is worth keeping the C of E on its life support machine.

Bioethics for the Intellectually Challenged

“We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?”

- says John Harris, a member of the government’s Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University, quoted in the Sunday Times.

What do people think has happened between when a baby's just been born and when it's a day old? What do people think has happened between when it's a day old and when it's two days old? What do people think has happened between when it's two days old and when it's a week old? What do people think...