The week that Parliament trampled on human dignity

23 May 2008

In the light of the recent decisions made by the House of Commons, it is right to look back dispassionately and consider the values our society is establishing through democratic legislation.

Outstandingly, we no longer believe that human life has intrinsic value but only the value we choose to give it. This has been the case for some time. In vitro fertilisation has necessarily involved the conception of multiple embryos, most of whom are allowed to die. And we have now accepted that these are of so little consequence that we may create blends with other species for the sake of medical research which, in some areas at least, appears to be little more than scientific curiosity.

Lady Warnock, whose report led to the last Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990), was later to regret having suggested that respect was due to the human embryo (routinely flushed down sinks): her mature view was no more than that the embryo should not be treated frivolously. Perhaps we should be grateful for that at least. It is hard to be frivolous about "human admixed embryos" as the current Bill urbanely calls them.

A principle, which is a long-established pillar of western values, was best expressed in secular terms by the philosopher Immanuel Kant: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only." In our society that principle now lies in tatters. To destroy human beings for the sake of another's fertility is a breach; to manipulate and contaminate human beings in order to find cures for others is a breach; to generate and select for survival involuntary "saviour siblings" to provide tissues to cure others is a breach; to destroy a human being in the womb, at any number of weeks you care to choose, for the convenience of his or her mother is a breach. To quote Robert Henderson's letter to the Daily Telegraph this week, "The important thing is that the child of 22 weeks or less is viable in the womb, not that it is non-viable out of it."

You cannot avoid the breach by arbitrarily choosing to deny human status on grounds that suit your case. Along that road, over the centuries, lie the bodies of the so-called inferior races, and the Jews, and the slaves. There are many, blinded so often by good motives, who irrationally claim that what is patently a human being somehow should not count as a human being but as a mere biological entity, fit to be expended in the interests of our superior selves.

Will we ever learn, even when the lessons of history warn us again and again? We are passionate in the defence of our personal rights, and passionate in our disregard for the rights of the defenceless. It may seem a gross fantasy that one day we shall discover that people with permanent disabilities, or who are too old to contribute to society, do not qualify as human beings. After all, they consume inordinate resources in a shrinking society. But it is not a whit more unthinkable than the abandonment, over a few decades, of core values which we would once have regarded as sacred. "In nature" said Robert Ingersoll, the American freethinker, "there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences." We need not fear God's punishment, we have arranged that satisfactorily for ourselves.

We have become used to calling ourselves a post-Christian society. But we flatter ourselves. From this week onwards we have definitively chosen to become a post-human society.