Dignitas Headquarters in Switzerland (Photo: Alamy)
These days, the only time you hear the word “autonomy” said with any vigour, with heartfelt oomph, is in relation to assisted suicide. In every other area of life, the idea of moral autonomy has taken a beating in recent years. Parental autonomy is continually blitzed by know-it-all politicos and supernannies who want to subject mums and dads across the kingdom to parenting classes.
Intellectual autonomy is undermined by ceaseless state intervention into the sphere of education and by the PC culture of “You Can’t Say That!” Individual autonomy counts for little in a world governed by long-nosed nannies and nudgers keen to police every aspect of our lives, from what we scoff to where we smoke. Yet when it comes to the desperate act of electing to die, suddenly autonomy becomes important again. You could be forgiven for thinking that the only right our betters trust us with these days is the “right to die”.
Martin Green, a dementia expert at the Department of Health, used the A-word in his comments about assisted suicide at the weekend. “[If] you’re going to give people choice and control and autonomy, it should extend to whether or not they want to diem,” he said. He was echoing assisted-suicide campaigners, who frequently use the language of rights (most notably in the phrase “the right to die”) to justify/glorify helping ill or infirm people to end their lives. So we now have a situation where government experts don’t trust us to raise our children properly (hence David Cameron’s promise to intervene into 120,000 “problem families), and don’t trust us to act rationally on a day-to-day basis (hence the founding of a Behavioural Insight Team in Downing Street, designed to “nudge” us towards becoming better citizens), yet seem pretty comfortable with the idea of us taking the autonomous decision to extinguish our lives and stop being autonomous beings....read more
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100102511/its-a-depressing-sign-of-the-times-that-the-right-to-die-has-become-such-a-cause-celebre/
