The cruelty of the ‘greater good’

When people argue in favour of doing something for the ‘greater good’, those of us who believe in liberty and autonomy should always beware. People of a utilitarian mindset, who speak of lessening ‘the sum of suffering’, will invariably profess to care for society in the abstract, but less so for individuals as actual people.

A utilitarian impulse has long lurked in the ongoing debate over assisted dying. Journalist Matthew Parris stated the utilitarian case most honestly in a 2015 Spectator article, titled ‘Soon we will accept that useless lives should end’. He wrote: ‘The human and financial resources necessary [to keep elderly people alive] will mean that an ever greater weight will fall upon the shoulders of the diminishing proportion of the population still productive… Already the cost of medical provision in Britain eats into our economic competitiveness.’

In the run-up to the vote on the assisted-dying bill in the House of Commons last week, we heard pleas about the burden that is borne by those who suffer. But that word ‘burden’ rings alarm bells for many, it being used often in conjunction with the NHS, an institution many regard as sacrosanct and worth saving for its own sake. A survey in August showed that more than four in 10 members of the British public (43 per cent) believed that assisted dying could incentivise health professionals to encourage some patients to take their lives, given the pressures on the NHS. This fear is not undue. Many have noticed how assisted dying has become a de facto instrument of social policy in Canada for ‘dealing with’ the economically unproductive.

Utilitarian arguments abound these days for almost every cause. The ‘greater good’ imperative was deployed most militantly by those who argued for lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic – to ‘stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’, to the ultimate detriment of actual people. The long-term consequences of lockdowns today are myriad, demonstrated most vividly in a younger generation incapable of dealing with other people and the outside world. The enactment of assisted dying could have a comparable psychological cost to an older generation, whom the state will increasingly come to regard as expendable.

Laws or measures enacted over the years on ‘hate speech’, or on proposals to address ‘Islamophobia’, also rest on the ‘greater good’ theory. Such initiatives have resulted in the silencing, menacing, criminalisation and imprisonment of people for words deemed ‘offensive’. As John Stuart Mill, though initially a utilitarian, warned us, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ should never trample on the rights of the few.

Mill wrote foremost on the first practical problem with this school of political theory. The second problem is particularly pertinent to our times. How do you measure ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’? What causes ‘hurt’ and ‘offence’? How can you even separate the two? On an everyday level, this rigid dichotomy doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Of which category do the following belong: horror films, melancholy music, self-harm, sado-masochism or indeed sadism (an activity that generates pleasure for one person precisely because it generates pain in another)? Or consider alcoholism and drug addiction, where states of elation and despair are interdependent and necessarily follow each other.

Even an experience that is superficially negative can turn out to be positive. Something that you find ‘offensive’ or ‘problematic’ might wake you from your dogmatic slumber. You might be ‘triggered’ into thinking afresh and anew. An ‘uncomfortable’ truth needs confronting precisely because it is true. The opposites of stress, insecurity and anxiety are sometimes indolence and complacency.

Life is mostly suffering and struggle, enduring and overcoming. And that which doesn’t kill you can really make you stronger. In sum, bad things are often good for you.

The moral panic over Gregg Wallace

Whenever the voices of Middle England used to react to something in a seemingly alarmist fashion, it was often dismissed by middle-class liberals as a ‘moral panic’. Yet what better expression could there be to describe the overblown discussion of the Gregg Wallace affair?

He has behaved inappropriately and made sexual comments over the years. But to casually lump his misdemeanours alongside those of Jimmy Savile, as a Sun editorial tried to do this week, is obscene. Savile was accused of being a paedophile and necrophiliac. Wallace has been accused of ‘inappropriate touching’ and being rude to people.

This is a non-story for self-absorbed types who care foremost about themselves and their social standing. This is why this same myopic, cossetted class were silent about the wholesale violation and rape of young women by Asian gangs in the north of England in recent years. They care foremost about the opinion and judgement of their peers and friends.

How to talk to your kids about Kant

Social trends, like trends in fashion, tend to veer to extremes, becoming ever-more ridiculous. Just as flared trousers became more expansive and billowing in the 1970s, so trigger warnings are now becoming more inflated and inane.

This can be seen in re-runs of the series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), which are currently airing once more on Sky Mix. For this round of repeats, new cautions have been appended to episodes. These include ‘Contains adult themes and emotions’ and ‘Contains mild violence’. Each admonition here is redundant. Both are a fair description of life in the real world, and of the human condition in general.

Yet such banalities are outdone by one that I read about in Frank Furedi’s new book, The War Against the Past. It quotes a trigger warning attached to Immanuel Kant’s Critiques. It runs: ‘This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read.’

Never mind that no sane parent would read Kant to his or her child. Never mind that any adult about to embark on Kant’s obtuse writings would surely have already read up on him beforehand, and wouldn’t need an advance warning. The ultimate irony is that when it came to morality, Kant believed that standards of good and bad human behaviour transcended space and time. Were Kant true to his own universalist ethics, he would have written exactly the same philosophy no matter what time or place he lived.

Today’s ‘war on the past’, in which most things pertaining to history are mindlessly condemned, is ultimately self-refuting. That’s because many of us remember a time when society was actually more liberal, progressive, intelligent and generally superior than it is today. That time was about 20 years ago, before wokery and its philistine war on the past began.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.