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The Meaning of Life:

An interview with Professor A C Grayling

PETER BRIETBART meets world-renowned philosopher, humanist and

atheist A.C. GRAYLING, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck,

University of London and a supernumerary fellow of St Anne’s College,

Oxford. He is a prolific author, whose works include Against All Gods,

Liberty in the Age of Terror and Ideas That Matter, and he is a regular

contributor to the Guardian newspaper. Their discussion ranges from

burqa bans to circumcision, free will, great literature and the right to

die.

PB: The universe can be a difficult and confusing place. How are we to find

direction or purpose?

ACG: The direction and purpose of individual lives are a function of the

work that an individual puts into creating them. When people ask ‚What

is the meaning of life?‛, the answer is that it’s the meaning you impose

on it. It’s the aim you set for yourself. There are many different kinds of

good lives, and many kinds of valid meaning in life―as many as there

are talents for living them. We’ve all got different such talents.

Professor A. C. Grayling

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The challenge we’re offered is as old as Socrates and probably older.

Socrates said that the ‚considered life‛, in effect meaning the ‚chosen

life‛, is the good life―always of course, under the government of

principles that stop you from harming other people or preventing them

from being able to form a good life for themselves.

So the idea is that we have to think about what we want to achieve, why

we want to achieve it, what our capabilities are for achieving it, what we

value―and then the pursuit of those values is what makes our lives

good to live.

PB: And personally? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What drives

you, what inspires you?

ACG: Lots of things! I’ve always wanted to try to understand this world

of ours and the human predicament: how best to live, how to form good

relationships―for these lie at the heart of good lives―especially

friendships and affectionate relationships. The business of thinking

philosophically also involves reflecting on literature and the other

narrative arts, which can tell us so much about human experience,

helping us to reflect on our own experiences and our efforts to create

something of value from it. We’re all equipped with an ability to create

value. In my case the effort is made through teaching and writing, trying

to make a difference to if possible by taking part in the conversation that

humanity has with itself about what matters.

So that’s what gets me up in the morning, because there’s a lot to be

done! There are a lot of problems in the world, and one would like to try

to be involved in understanding them and to making some contribution,

however small, to solving them.

PB: A change of tack now, from the philosophical to the political. France is

currently considering banning the burqa. Do you consider such an act justified,

and would you support the UK doing likewise?

ACG: First it’s important to note that what is meant by ‚banning the

burqa‛ is that any French citizen who accesses public provisions of the

French state, such as education or welfare, is required to do so as a

French citizen, rather than as a member of one or another self-selected

identity group such as constitutes a religion. I don’t think France is

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asking anybody not to wear their religious symbols or their religious

dress in their own private time. What it’s saying is, if you want to access

public provision in some way, don’t come disguised, masked, or wearing

any major religious symbol, which seems to give the message that you’re

demanding you be treated differently. So in principle I’m very much

with Laïcité, the idea of having a neutral, equal public domain, where

you’re not going to listen to attempts by people to say, ‚look, I’m

wearing a big crucifix‛ or, ‚look I’m covering my head‛ so, ‚you’ve got

to treat me differently.‛

I think the same should be true here. We’ve already had some similar

difficulties about a woman wanting to wear a full veil while serving as a

primary school teacher. Or people wearing visible crucifixes while

providing a public service, or refusing to help gay people in an adoption

agency because of their religious principles. The same principle applies

in all these cases. Public provision is equal to all, and so one shouldn’t

try to distort the relationships in the public sphere by means of these

major assertions of religious identity.

PB: Religious believers have been known to accuse those of a scientific mindset

of “unweaving the rainbow”. That is, taking the mystery and wonder out of the

universe and replacing it with a set of dry mathematical or logical laws. How

might you respond to such a critic?

ACG: Usually people who say that are quite ignorant of what’s involved

in scientific research and of the wonder, the beauty, the amazement that

comes out of encountering things in the exploration of nature through

science. Such a person must obviously never have had the experience of

solving a problem in mathematics or logic and realising how beautiful

those rational structures are.

Also, it’s a silly and rather shallow view, because someone might be a

technical geologist or physicist during the working day, and in the

evening hugely enjoy music or writing poetry and reading it to his

beloved, and the like. It’s a rather trivialising view that completely

misunderstands the richness and complexity of human responses,

probably all the richer in very intelligent people, people of the kind of

intelligence that can do science seriously.

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PB: If you were the Prime Minister of the UK, what actions would you take in

order to defend against Islamic extremism and to increase social integration?

ACG: First, I’d get rid of faith-based schools. I’d make it a requirement

that if people want to bring their children up in a faith-dominated

environment that (a) it should be at their own expense and remain a

private matter, and that (b), it should be open to inspection. But it should

also be the case that religious instruction be removed from our publicly-

funded schools because it’s very distorting, divisive, and could lead,

eventually, in a small

number of cases, to people

becoming extremists if they

follow the logic of what

their faith requires of them

< although If everybody

followed the logic of what

their faith requires of them,

they would all become

extremists.

PB: Without an objective

moral arbiter, how can we

make meaningful moral judgements, and furthermore, how can we justify them?

ACG: It is actually very easy to identify and to act upon the moral

baselines. Moral baselines derive from our understanding of what it is to

be human and what human beings need to flourish. For example, at a

minimum people need food, they need somewhere comfortable, dry and

warm to be, they need friendship, they need opportunities to use their

intelligence, because we’re a highly intelligent species. People need

opportunities to develop, they need time to rest and benefit from the

creativity of leisure, they need safety, and they need social bonds.

We know all these things, and if you look at human rights instruments

like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what they say is what

the minimum requirements are for opening a space around individuals,

so that they can use their abilities to do things that are good and

satisfying for them.

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So this very basic understanding of what it is to be human, along with

what we dislike, what we want to avoid, what we need, what we benefit

from, tells us something about what our obligations are to other people.

It tells us how we should respond to them, and on the basis of that, how

to deal with more complicated and sophisticated matters, including

recognising that other people have interests and needs that we may not

share, understand or even like―while recognising that they have a right

to them.

That’s where the hard work of being tolerant towards other people

comes in. We all think we’re tolerant, but that’s because we usually don’t

really mind what others are doing. It’s when we do mind and yet we’ve

got to let other people have their margin to be their own way, that we

know what’s needed to be tolerant. So we have to start with our most

sympathetic understanding of human nature and the human condition,

and work from that to a livable system.

PB: On a completely different tack, do you think there is a place for the

circumcision of male infants in the 21st century?

ACG: No. There are arguments regarding AIDS and HIV, and about

how much more hygienic it is, and how much women prefer the look of

it, and all that kind of thing―but it is a form of mutilation. The practice

started in religious myth, which is hardly a good reason for continuing

to do it in the 21st century.

It does seem to be true that there is less HIV transmission, reduced risk

of genital warts, cervical cancer and such. But what this suggests is that

men need to wash more carefully and more often.

PB: And in areas where hygiene is very difficult to maintain at high levels? Is

there no case that could be made for it as a preventative measure?

ACG: Well, with consenting adults, and in circumstances where there is

no alternative to it as a prophylactic against the transmission of STDs,

then of course there might be a reluctant case for it. This is an example of

saying, in general terms, any form of mutilation would have to be

extremely well justified by powerful case by case arguments. Would one

similarly argue a case for chopping off someone’s willy altogether if he

were an absolute sexual maniac, say? Generally speaking, circumcising

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infant boys because it’s a fashion, because it’s a tradition, is not

acceptable.

PB: We’re in complete agreement there. Now, what do you think can account for

the multiplicity of independent and separate religions around the globe?

ACG: One reason has to be their falsity―that they’re all spurious, man-

made inheritances―derived from humanity’s very earliest attempts to

make sense of the world. I think that it matters tremendously that people

recognise the plurality of religions as being an instance of evolution, and

another indicator of support for the general presence of evolutionary

tendencies socially and ideologically as well as biologically.

What we now call religion wasn’t always ‘religion’ among our earliest

ancestors. It was proto-science and proto-technology. It consisted in

attempts to impose some kind of explanatory framework on things. To

ascribe agency to the clouds, the lightning, the wind is just a projection

of our own felt capacity as agents too push things and throw things, to

make things happen. So, people might have thought that the thunder

was some great being walking on the clouds, that wind was a great

invisible being puffing its cheeks and blowing. And as our knowledge

grew and as our understanding of nature increased, so these agencies

ceased to be part of the natural world, and beliefs about them ceased to

be attempts at naturalistic explanation.

And therefore they receded over the horizon, and then upwards: first, to

the tops of mountains, then up into the sky, and now the gods are

outside space and time altogether. So the further our knowledge

advances, the further away these beings go. They’re now in the realm of

ineffability. Theologians now tell us we can’t understand them at all, but

up to a few thousand years ago they were a part of nature. They weren’t

religion. Attempts to appease them, make sacrifices to them, talk to

them, a belief that you were making contact with them when you were

drunk, or epileptic or after eating psychedelic mushrooms, probably

suggests that our ancestors thought we could communicate with them:

ask them to send us rain or keep the floods or disease away, cure our

diseases, and so on.

The technology side of these early beliefs thus involved attempts to

interact with those agencies to influence their behaviour. This became

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ritual, tradition and taboo. You can see how priesthoods, specialists in

dealing with the gods, would want to hang on to their privileges and

power. You can see how the temporal authorities would find it

extremely useful that the ecclesiastical powers could help them to govern

the people.

There’s nothing more powerful than persuading your subjects that

there’s an invisible policeman who watches everything you do, all the

time, even in the dark when you’re on your own.

It keeps control of people and so it evolves into a very useful tool.

It’s interesting to note that the major religions of the world today:

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, even to some extent Hinduism, were

modified from these early semi-naturalistic views at a time when

political and social structures were monarchical: kingly and hierarchical.

So all their gods are modeled on the idea of kings. They’re rulers who

give orders, and who punish and execute. That’s exactly what the God of

the Old Testament is―a tyrannical, kingly figure. Yet these religions are

very young religions, only two or three thousand years old. For tens of

thousands of years before that, what we had was quasi-naturalistic

efforts to explain the world. Not really religion at all, but early science.

PB: Daniel Dennett talks about it in terms of memetics, but why do you think

religion has hung around so long?

ACG: It’s partly because humanity is in a very, very early stage in its

history. We tend to think that we’re at the end of a long process but

we’re not actually, we’re in a very early stage. But religions become

institutionalised and get reinforced by society. You only have to look at

something like the time, effort and money that has gone into building

cathedrals and mosques and the like to see how deeply institutionalised

religion really is in society. This is why a child will believe in God, the

Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas until about the age of ten, then give up

the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, but keep the deity. After that time,

that’s when society reinforces it in the form of adults who take the idea

of a deity very seriously.

...and then try and believe it.

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If it weren’t for, in effect,

proselytising and brainwashing

children in early life, religion

would vanish. That is the one

major thing that keeps it going.

Most children lose it for a while

though, during the teenage years

when hormones and sex make it

rather inconvenient to be religious.

But then later something will

happen: failure, grief at a parent

dying or divorce, their first child

born―a ‚miraculous‛ experience―and they go back to these beliefs for a

time.

Most religious people don’t really think about their beliefs though. They

don’t really believe them either. It’s a kind of con-trick they perform on

themselves. What they want to do is believe that they believe. They

would like it to be true, so they just act as if it were.

PB: It’s a much more optimistic approach than that of, say, Christopher

Hitchens, who reckons that the religious impulse just can’t be rid of. But you

say there is hope for humanity? We can be rid of all superstitious thought?

ACG: I’m not sure about superstitions because, in just the same way as

someone splats a Rorschach pattern and we see images in the shape, like

someone’s face or an event simply because we are narrative seeking

creatures. We impose interpretation on things.

Further, we’re very naturally credulous, which is a great evolutionary

advantage for very small children who believe everything they’re told.

Ghost stories and alien abduction stories, urban myths and conspiracy

theories, we Hoover them up with enthusiasm. We love that kind of

thing because they’re stories that are easy to understand and which

provide alternatives to the dreary truth.

We really have a natural propensity for this, but if we didn’t feed that

propensity during childhood, especially with all the gravity and

seriousness of grown-up, religious behaviour it might not be so bad. It

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makes children think, ‚Well, it’s got to be true because the grown-ups

take it so seriously.‛ If we didn’t do that, it would have a very, very

loose grip. If I come to you in adulthood and present you with a story

that a three-wheeled car plummeted from the sky, hit the ground and

immediately dispersed into its component molecules, or made up some

even more incredible and ridiculous story, you would laugh it out of

court. But if I told you when you were very young and said, ‚This is

really true and really important, and you’re in serious trouble if you stop

believing it or ever turn your back on this‛ and I frighten you with it,

then you’d accept it. It would be a powerful reinforcement.

PB: If we consider humanism to be a good grounding for law and ethics, what is

to stop it being corrupted by the same kinds of people that corrupt everything

else? What makes humanism better?

ACG: Because it’s not premised on the idea that there is an orthodoxy,

that there is one right way of doing things, that some humanists know

better than others about what the truth is or how to understand ‚the

great founding texts of humanism‛. There’s no ‚Arch-Humanist‛, no

bishops of humanism. The point about it is that it is nothing more than a

premise. The premise is: our ethics must be derived from our best and

most sympathetic understanding of human nature and the human

condition, that there’s plenty of room for discussion and negotiation, that

we must move with the needs of society and be responsive to what

happens in history. Of its very nature it’s about discussion, thinking,

reflection, argument, being tolerant of other people’s points of view. It’s

not about observing an orthodoxy. It’s not about obeying. It’s not about

the submission of your will to the deity. It doesn’t tell you that you’re

proud, and therefore in danger of hellfire if you think for yourself. It’s a

very different mindset, a different way of thinking about everything.

PB: If we are to agree that the mind is the brain, then it must be held in

accordance with deterministic physical laws. Where, then, is free will?

ACG: The free will question is by far the hardest question in

metaphysics. All the evidence that is coming out of brain science,

neurology and neuro-psychology at the moment tends to push us in the

direction of thinking that as a part of the natural world, the brain and

what it secretes, that is, consciousness, thought, memory and so on, must

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be subject to deterministic causal laws. We look as though we’re headed

in the determinism direction rather than the free-will direction.

There are several things to think about here. Firstly, we shouldn’t be too

simplistic with the problem, to think that what we call the mind is the

same as a set of physical events in some structure in the brain, pure and

simple.

Identity theory is too simple, and for the following reason. Mental

properties are properties of properties. They’re not properties

immediately of the brain. They’re outputs of very complex interactions

of the brain. The parallel would be to say that the property of a motorcar

of being able to be driven from London to Brighton is a property of the

combination of the parts of the motorcar. You couldn’t dissemble a

motorcar and then expect it to drive to Brighton. It’s got to be organised

in the right way, everything has to be in the right relationship so that is

can have the property of being able to drive to Brighton. So conscious

and mental phenomena are high-level properties, which arise from the

relationship of the low-level properties.

Secondly, remember that the mind is not just what the brain does. The

mind is also the relationship with other minds and with the

environment. Meaning is the relationship between something that you

know and things out there in the world to which these things refer and

of which they can be true and so on. In the same way, your mind, your

experience, your consciousness are only really understandable with

regards to the relationship between your mind and the physical and

social environment through which you move throughout your life. It’s as

if the mind were somehow connected with the outside world. The

activity of the brain is responding to information from the outside world,

information which is both natural, like light and sound, but also social,

like the significance of the noises and marks produced by other people.

So when we think about ‘mind’, we’re thinking about something, a full

description of which would have to contain more than a description

about brain events alone.

Now, what that says about free will, one can’t yet work out. It doesn’t

say anything one way or the other. So we have to set against it the

following thought: That if there is no such thing as free will, if

everything that we do is written into the early history of the universe

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and is simply an outcome of all the causal occurrences that connect us

with 13 billion years ago, then all our thinking about human nature,

morality and human life is massively and systematically wrong. It seems

very odd when we consider that, that we live with this completely

unfounded error theory about other people’s behaviour, their intentions,

their choices, how to relate to them, how to predict them, what their

character is, we’re just completely wrong about it because they are just,

in fact, automata. We think of ourselves and others as agents, but we

wouldn’t be, we’d be patients of the causal process.

It’s very hard to accept that as true. It might be true. If science settles that

it’s true then we’ve got to accept it. We’d have to think again about

reward and punishment, praise and blame, the idea of choice, the idea of

changing ourselves through reflection. It’s all just accident, just

chemistry.

PB: So as we currently understand the mind/body free-will problem, would you

call yourself a compatibilist?

ACG: I think I’m some kind of compatibilist, yes. My own temptation is

to think that there is more to this than it seems. Imagine this: there are

two people standing at the side of a field. The first person, a physicist,

describes the set of events on the field in terms of bodies of a certain

mass, velocity, the principles of mechanics, emissions of radiation and so

on. The second person, a sociologist, describes the same set of events as a

rugby match. In the vocabulary of the sociologist there will be

explanatory concepts of a try, a penalty, a fly-half. There won’t be any

such concepts in the language of physics. But in the language of

sociology there are no such concepts of velocity and radiation. They

don’t have a role there.

Accordingly, the vocabulary of brain science and the vocabulary of

intentionalistic ‚folk psychology‛ are two quite different vocabularies

that address two quite different phenomena, and with respect to which

we have very different interests. And what we want is to make

everything simple, we have a very good, well rounded desire to effect a

reduction of a psychological explanation to a physiological or

neurological explanation. It’s a sound and scientific impulse. But that

doesn’t mean that we won’t find out that high level properties of brain

activity are such that different aspects of our conscious life interact with

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one another in certain ways, as for example, you might have an impulse

to bash somebody in the face, but you control yourself. You deliberately

think, ‚I’m not going to do that‛, I’m going to control myself. So there

was a point when you could genuinely have done either of those two

things. If the proposition ‚Peter could have done A but chose to do B‛ is

literally true in a way that makes the use of the concept ‚choice‛

irreducible. If such a proposition could be true then we have free will.

PB: In your view, and, given human nature, what might Eutopia look like?

ACG: It would be a place where people are given the maximum

opportunity to explore different ways of living and relating, but without

harming other people or causing them distress or getting in the way of

their lives. A sort of John Stuart Mill paradise. But that does seem to be a

bit unrealistic given human nature! As it is, human nature is full of greed

and selfishness and so on, making it very difficult. It seems to me that if

we had the right resources and the right teachers that we could really

make education work. To get children to think and to really see why

they shouldn’t harm others, and why it is important that they have

freedom, and how to enjoy it responsibly. Given the flaws we have,

Mill’s view might be the best we can achieve.

PB: And if we could transcend the merely human with the aid of science and

technology, what sort of trans-humanism can you foresee?

ACG: It looks as though we’ve evolved contradictory sets of capacities.

On the one hand, we have the capacities to be very empathetic and

concerned about other individuals, even if we don’t know them. To

shout, ‚Look out!‛ if we see they are in danger. On the other hand we

have things that are purely self-regarding, non-altruistic, greedy and

aggressive, that may make us respond with anger. We elect people into

out-groups and de-humanise them and so on. What one would hope is,

since any journey has to start from here, any trans-human reality that

eventuates is going to have to be a down-playing of the negative and the

aggressive, hostile and divisive aspects and a promotion of the more

empathetic and positive emotions. One can imagine a situation where

people have a greater propensity to be tolerant, generous and kind

towards other people and a lessened propensity to be aggressive and to

place people into out-groups, without at the same time everything

collapsing into a kind of pink, fluffy nursery where there’s no edge,

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criticism or discussion. Ideally like a philosophical discussion between

friends, unlike in a seminar with people showing off and trying do

someone else down.

PB: I’ve experienced my fair share of that. Now, what question do you wish you

were asked more often, and why?

ACG: That’s a tough one. I must preface this admittedly unsatisfactory

answer by saying that these ‚beauty contest questions‛ like ‚who is the

greatest philosopher‛; ‚what is the most important thing to know‛;

‚what question do you wish you were asked more often‛ really force me

to pick from a range of all of the things I know. All I can really say is

what subjects I like to talk about, so that I can try and articulate an

answer that I’ve spent some time thinking about.

I like to talk about why the arts matter to human life. We all take them

for granted, we all produce pieties about them, we’re all meant to be in

favour of them, but there are deep reasons why humans have always

told themselves stories and drawn pictures and enacted things. They’re

part of the continuing education of our sensibilities, which is terribly

important. If someone were to ask me where the best philosophy is to be

found, I would say: in literature, in novels, in plays. That’s where we

really get an opportunity to explore something which is real, and makes

a difference to people’s lives.

PB: So, whilst I’m asking these broad, sweeping questions, would you care to

name some of the novels that you consider to contain the greatest philosophy to

be found?

ACG: Yes, I could certainly. One thing I think that is distinctive about

literature with a capital L and a golden glow, as opposed to railway

station paperback thrillers, is that they do strike us as having an insight

into the human condition from which we can learn. Not that I’m saying

that it is a criterion of literature that it should be educative―god forbid

it. Literature is many things, including the beauty of the prose and so on.

Let me give you some examples. Everybody knows Pride and Prejudice by

Jane Austin. Among all of its other virtues, including its wit, the beauty

of its prose, the sense of irony in it, and the wonderful perception of

human variety< that novel is about moral epistemology. It’s about

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characters misreading one another and having to rethink the judgments

that they should properly make about one another. So Elizabeth Bennet

and Darcy misunderstand one another, and through the events of the

novel they recalibrate their understanding. It always amuses me that

Elizabeth finally understands Darcy when she sees his big house. In the

end, they get one another as a reward for having re-learnt something

quite painful to them about how they judge other people.

A much more powerful example would be in the series of fictions

written by Dostoevsky round about the 1850s, starting with Notes From

Underground, going on to Crime and Punishment and then, later, The Idiot.

What’s interesting is that if you read Dostoevsky’s letters of

correspondence at the time, we see he was trying to do something with

those novels. In Notes From the Underground he was writing about

someone who’s so abased, so degraded, so humbled that when he was

walking home after being humiliated at that party he sees all these old,

toothless ex-prostitutes sitting at the side of the road and he feels a kind

of compassion or love for them, because he feels worse than they are.

This is Dostoevsky’s attempt to try and explain what it would be like to

have true Christ-like compassion for other people. Of course, it’s because

he’s got a religious agenda going on.

In Crime and Punishment he wrote about a man, Raskolnikov, who

commits murder because he wants to see if he can do it, and then live

with having done it. He finds that he can’t, but is it because he’s being

confronted with the true horror of a moral crime? Or is it just because he

is weak? So he’s in the dilemma and he can’t work it out. When he

finished the novel, Dostoevsky wrote to his niece and said that he was

going to try and write about someone who had plumbed the depths like

Raskolnikov, but come back to a position of virtue. He found that he just

couldn’t write it.

So he just left the position of absolute virtue to the character of Prince

Myshkin, trying to explore in this fictional context how it would be

possible for such a character to be. I suppose the closest thing we can

think of is Peter Seller’s character in the film Being There, which is again

about this Christ-like figure who is weirdly detached from the world

around him, and yet, strikes people with his simple wisdom.

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Now Myshkin doesn’t actually do that: what he does in The Idiot is fail,

because an entirely good person can’t survive in this world. It’s an

analogue of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov saying that

if Jesus Christ were to come back now he’d be thrown straight into

prison for being disruptive.

Now there’s an example of a real effort being made through fiction,

through the medium of a novel, to grapple with very fundamental moral

questions, admittedly from a certain point of view, a 19th century,

superstitious point of view, but it’s a very good example of it.

Better examples might be found in Thomas Mann in, say, The Magic

Mountain, which is all philosophical discussion. There are so many good

examples, but those are some favourites.

PB: Should there be a legal right to end one’s own life, or seek the assistance of

another in doing so? Should Britain change the law?

ACG: Yes, it should. There’s no question about it. We’re thinking

specifically about people who are condemned to interminable suffering,

or suffering that can only be terminated by death, mainly those with

incurable diseases or terminal illnesses. If you think about being old and

being diseased with no hope of recovery, but able to linger on and on

and on with medical help, being incontinent, having to be cleaned up all

the time by nurses, but offered an alternative. Either you go on like this,

progressively being more and more drugged until you can’t even

interact with your family, or you could choose to die at a time and in a

manner of your own election.

PB: Do you worry about a subtle pressure on the elderly? A sort of suggestion

that they could just get out of the way? That seems to be the only contra-

argument that carries any weight.

ACG: That is an argument, and it does carry weight. The truth is,

however, that families keep people alive who don’t want to stay alive, by

saying, ‚Oh daddy don’t die. We love you, what are we going to do

without you?‛ So 99 percent of the pressure comes from the other

direction. But it is certainly true that there will be cases where elderly

people will be subtly coerced to choose early assisted death by family

members. The fact that is possible, the fact that something may be

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abused, is not a good enough reason for continuing the suffering of tens

of thousands of people because we’re too squeamish to do anything

about it.

I sometimes tell a related story that makes me ashamed. We had some

pet hamsters when my children were very young, and a very typical

thing that happens to hamsters is that they get inverted intestines,

whereby their intestines come out of them because of the diet we give

them. And when that happens, they die. If they are not put down they

die in a very slow and painful manner. So this happened to one of our

hamsters, and I rang a friend who was a vet and asked what I should do.

She said to take the hamster and just twist its neck sharply and kill it. I

just couldn’t bring myself to do it. She said in that case I should put it

inside a plastic bag, put it under the wheel of your car and drive over it. I

told her I was sorry, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that to a living

creature. I cannot do it. She gave me all sorts of other suggestions of how

to kill it, but in the end it died as a result of what had happened to it, and

not as a result of us helping it to die quickly as possible to release it from

its suffering. To this day I feel ashamed: that my squeamishness

prolonged the suffering of a little thing like that.

That’s what happens in our society. There are people in the most awful

situations. Whilst pain can be controlled to a large extent, it’s the

indignity of it, having to worry about choking to death and so on. People

want to make their own choices about their own life and death. Suicide

used to be regarded in the Roman era as ‘the last great freedom’. The fact

that you could commit suicide and that it was a real possibility for

people to do it really made them powerful, because it made them free. In

the end, no-one other than themselves could make a final decision about

how they felt on the matter.