‘Thought is free, or it isn’t thought.’ 

This fine remark comes from Emile Chartier (1868-1951), a French thinker, writer, teacher and humanist best known under his pseudonym, Alain. He was a prominent intellectual figure in the France of the 1930s, but is unfortunately little known in the Anglophone world, and sparsely translated into English. He remains one of the rare thinkers to make the bridge between philosophy and literature: ‘the finest prose of ideas of the century’, as the contemporary philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, has said.

Having trained as a philosopher and started a career as a teacher that would lead to the prestigious lycées of Paris, Alain began in 1903 to contribute short columns to a radical local newspaper in Normandy. From 1906, this became a daily exercise which he continued right up to the outbreak of the First World War, making a total of over three thousand pieces. He called these brief essays propos (not an easy word to translate, implying both ‘proposals’ and ‘remarks’). Their concise and vivid style soon attracted a loyal readership and they were collected into published volumes. The starting point was often a precise fact or event, something seen in the street or read in a newspaper; at first mainly comments on politics, their subject matter broadened to include philosophy, literature, education, nature, religion.  He wrote, he said, to provoke his fellow citizens into thinking for themselves, to wake people up.

To return to the opening quotation, that thought is not thought unless it is free, this encapsulates a theme that runs throughout Alain’s work. As he wrote in his intellectual biography, Histoire de mes pensées (1936): ‘I’ve not reflected upon anything as much as freedom of judgement.’  What is it to think freely?  He provided two lapidary definitions. ‘To think is to weigh’ – penser, c’est peser, almost a pun in French. The second is perhaps his best known quotation: ‘To think is to say no’ (penser, c’est dire non). The second half of this quotation is even better: ‘Note that the sign for “yes” is that of a person falling asleep; while to wake up is to shake the head and say no.’

To elaborate: ‘The problem is always the same, we have to control appearances, through the view of a free mind, which arouses and re-arouses doubt and proof together… we have to begin by not believing everything and so navigate the problem with our own strength alone, to find ourselves lost and abandoned as was always the case for a human being who rejects pious lies, and to recognise ourselves as completely deceived by appearances, and to save ourselves by the constructions of understanding alone.’ He also gives this definition of ‘mind’ (esprit): ‘at bottom the power of doubt, which is to raise oneself above all mechanisms, order, virtues, duties, dogmas, to judge them, subordinate them, and replace them by freedom, which only owes anything to itself.’ This link between the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the individual can be seen as a precursor to the existentialism of the 1940s associated with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus.

I have hinted at the variety of Alain’s interests. His propos, which he continued after the war, have been gathered into many published collections, the best known of which is Propos sur le Bonheur (one of the very few books of his to be translated into English, as Alain on Happiness). He also wrote major philosophical works after the war.  He is probably best known in France for his views on politics; he also developed sophisticated theories of perception and the imagination, but for the remainder of this article I shall focus on his humanism and views on religion.

As a thinker who avoided labels, Alain did not call himself a humanist as such. A label is a summary that must always leave something out. But it is clear enough that he is very close to it, in this definition: ‘the aim of humanism is freedom in the full sense of the word, which depends above all on a bold judgement against appearances and seductions… Humanism always aims at increasing everyone’s real power, through the widest culture – scientific, aesthetic, ethical. And a humanist recognises as precious in the world only human culture, through the outstanding works of all periods.’  We can see in this description the activity of the teacher he was, and remained in his writing. The ‘widest culture’: in his philosophy classes, as well as Plato, Descartes and Kant, he also taught Homer and Balzac; he wrote books on Balzac, Stendhal and Dickens, and commented on the poems of Paul Valéry, as well as on the arts in general  – the humanities, as he preferred to call them. Humanity lives in its works and that is where to seek it out: ‘human works, mirrors of the soul.’

Another area of humanity’s manifestations is its festivals, like Christmas and Easter. Alain reminded his readers that these are essentially pagan festivals which link us to nature and are, at the same time, powerful symbols and expressions of human feelings. Christmas promises rebirth, of which a newborn child is an image. Or, in another propos: ‘the images of Christmas are astonishing and even, when looked at closely, subversive. The child in a crib, between the ox and the ass, with the adoring kings from the Orient, this means that power isn’t worth a single grain of respect.’ Easter is resurrection of the earth. All Souls’ Day ‘falls where it should, when the visible signs make it quite clear that the sun is abandoning us…There is harmony between customs, the weather, the time of year and the course of our thoughts.’  

Alain remained firmly anticlerical all his life. In fact, in 1897 he managed to earn a headline in a local Catholic paper in one of his first teaching posts, after casting doubt on the existence of the devil and hell in a public lecture. The newspaper assured him, ‘No offence to the young man teaching philosophy in the lycée: Hell exists.’ Parents were advised to withdraw their children from his lessons. Yet he recognised that religions, like festivals, are also human constructions and activities. An anecdote he often recounted is that of being asked by a fellow soldier during the war, who had noticed that Alain was a non-believer, what he thought of religion. ‘It’s a story,’ he replied, ‘a fairy tale, which like all stories is full of meaning. No one asks whether a story is true.’ 

Alain’s meditations on religion culminated in a work published in 1934, Les Dieux, translated into English in 1974 as The Gods. Religious stories and practices, he argues, ‘are not facts, but thoughts.’ They express truths more vividly than theoretical and theological statements. Likewise, the gods themselves are human creations. ‘The gods refuse to appear and it’s through this miracle that never occurs that religion develops into temples, statues and sacrifices.’ And again, ‘the gods are our metaphors, and our metaphors are our thoughts’. There is no transcendence. There is nothing behind the signs and metaphors. All the mystery is man-made.

A further implication is that factual and historical questions are rejected. It does not matter whether Christ existed or not, whether he said this or that, here or there. The Gospels are less a historical record than like a great work of art that continues to speak to us. What matters is the truth in the story. When Jesus attacks the Pharisees in Matthew 23, for their shows of religion and their hypocrisy, what matters is whether what he says of them applies to some human beings, which might even include oneself. To ask whether Jesus actually said these words is to postpone that self-examination. In short, it is the morality taught by religion, explicitly and implicitly, that is important. ‘It is never the dogma that proves the morality; morality, as far as I understand it, supports itself; God adds nothing; paradise, hell, purgatory add nothing.’

The Gods also has a classification of religions, drawing on Hegel and Auguste Comte, which presents Christianity as a development of pagan religion, and an improvement in that it rejected sacrifices and oracles. It made everyone, slaves included, brothers and sisters. Alain liked to quote an anecdote from Chateaubriand’s Les Martyres. A pagan and a Christian meet a poor man. The Christian gives him his cloak. The pagan, knowing that the gods sometimes visited in the shape of a human being, says ‘No doubt you thought it was a god’. – ‘No’, replied the Christian, ‘I simply thought he was a man.’

For Alain, Christ appears as a new god who is human, who has lived the life of human beings, who was ‘weak, crucified, humiliated’ and who rejected power and force. He represents the free mind which is the final judge of all power, though the church, unfortunately, has always tended to associate itself with power. ‘The meaning of the cross is that the highest model of man lived poor and scorned by the great and that he died, punished for his virtues which denied ambition, desire, evil. It was a miserable fate, ennobled by thought, ended by an executioner.’

It is an interpretation of Christianity that leaves out the unrelenting god of the Old Testament. Stripped away are beliefs in miracles, in life after death, in divinely revealed truth, in original sin and redemption through sacrifice. There is also a refreshing avoidance of arguments about the existence or non-existence of god. (In fact, Alain has an argument that existence is not susceptible of proof.) To put it briefly, he interprets Christianity as a humanist religion.

This article can only give a taste of the richness of Alain’s writings, which are concerned with what it is to be a human being. How should we live? How should we live together? These questions do not age.

Find out more

There is an excellent website dedicated to Alain’s work https://philosophe-alain.fr/  Most of the material is in French, but there is also some English content: translations and a handful of articles, including a longer treatment of his discussion of religion.

The post A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain appeared first on The Freethinker.

9 June this year marked the tenth anniversary of the death of the Scottish author Iain Banks. A self-declared ‘evangelical atheist’, Banks’s fiction is famous for its macabre, mind-bending narratives exploring the extremes of the human psyche; his 1984 debut novel, The Wasp Factory, concerns a psychopathic teenager who believes that the future can be ordained by the movements of wasps within a cruel maze of his own design. Despite a sizeable body of well-received fiction, it is Banks’s science fiction that he himself considered his best and most important work. He differentiated his two writing styles with the addition of a middle initial, M.

Iain M. Banks believed that science fiction is the only genre that seeks to tackle the effects of scientific and technological change on the individual and society. Banks’ vision of a utopian society is the ‘Culture’: a post-scarcity, space-faring, hedonistic, egalitarian, atheistic, communist utopia, run entirely by sentient artificial intelligences. The Culture is a ‘classic’ vision of utopia: their citizens want for nothing and live in a state of hedonist bliss, freed from labour to pursue higher human meaning. A reader would find it difficult to overlook the socialistic overtones of the Culture, where money is considered a crude form of rationing and other civilisations are frowned upon for the barbarism of their hierarchical societies and lack of empathy.

The first book of the Culture series, Consider Phlebas, is set during an intergalactic war between the Culture and a species of tripedal aliens that are on a religious crusade to proselytise the galaxy. The Culture—despite not being at threat themselves—consider it their moral imperative to intervene. Over the course of a nine-novel series, Banks fleshes out the Culture’s society. To a backdrop of vivid space-opera grandeur, spattered with lasers fights and spaceship battles, Banks confronts readers with a series of moral quandaries, including the extreme eventualities of being able to upload one’s consciousness into a computer, whether the Culture should intervene in the development of nascent alien societies to mitigate war and cruelty, and the recurrent theme of how citizens occupy their time when freed from economic servitude.

The edge-of-your-seat action and immense scope of the Culture series has long been a favourite of the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, the 39-year-old co-founder of Facebook, suggested one of Banks’s books, The Player of Games, for his book club to read. Jeff Bezos has been pushing for years to have Consider Phlebas converted into an Amazon TV series. Elon Musk, too, seems to have been so inspired by the Culture series that he considers himself to be the embodiment of its ideology: in a 2018 Tweet, Musk states ‘I am a utopian anarchist of the kind described by Iain Banks.’ Previously Musk had appropriated the names of two of Banks’s fictional spaceships for his reusable rocket landing barges: the ‘Just Read the Instructions’ and ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. The Link, Musk’s brain-computer-interface (BCI) device, is allegedly responsible for the deaths of  large number of primates and other animals. It was originally to be named the ‘Neural Lace’, the namesake of the fictional BCI technology used by the Culture.

In a 2010 interview, later posted on the literary website Strange Horizons, Banks was told that many critics and reviewers regard his utopian society as representing the libertarian ideal, to which Banks responded with astonishment, stating, ‘Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, “Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness”?’ Further, he created the Culture as ‘hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ So how is it that the technology-billionaire-class could see themselves in his writing?

A sizeable body of literature has been written about the ideological motivations driving the billionaires of Silicon Valley. One of the better-known polemical works on this subject is still the contentious, although arguably prescient, essay The Californian Ideology (1995), written by the British media theorists Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook. In their essay, Cameron and Barbrook consider the conflicting ideologies of the founders of Silicon Valley, speculating on the nascent internet and predicting the birth of a new virtual social class who would rule the information age. According to The Californian Ideology, the Silicon Valley of the 1990s was dominated by liberal ideals and a feeling of technological optimism, often inspired by the hi-tech utopias described in the science fiction of writers like Isaac Asimov. Many technology-literate workers sought to break free from conventional forms of labour and leveraged their software skills to find niche employment in the unfolding dot-com boom. Because of the esoteric nature of their work and skills, workers were able to negotiate high wages and favourable working conditions.

According to Cameron and Barbrook, these workers were willing to abandon their larger utopian ambitions to become workers in the free market because of their belief in ‘technological determinism’. This refers to the theory that the technology developed by a society will firstly evolve according to its own internal rules, and secondly it will dictate the social structure, economics, and cultural growth of society. For the workers of Silicon Valley, the knowledge that the wheels of technological progress were turning, whether they were directly contributing or not, assured an inevitable technological utopia and freed them to capitalise on being skilled workers in a new era of the free market. Many predictions made in The Californian Ideology were proven incorrect, such as that the internet would be used solely to perpetuate Americo-centric, libertarian, neo-liberal ideals, and the idea of a new apartheid forming between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. However, Cameron and Barbrook successfully highlight the paradox that is the marriage of free-market libertarianism and technological-utopianism still at work in California today.

This is perhaps how the billionaires interpret Iain M. Banks’s utopia. In the far-distant future, technological determinism will bring about a post-scarcity society inevitably of its own accord, without any single human architect. As observed in a blog post by the Adam Smith Institute, effective post-scarcity may only come about because of efficiency improvements created by the free market. Following this logic, the billionaires are not misunderstanding Banks’s utopian idealism; on the contrary, they believe they are actively working towards it.

The ardent belief that free-market principles must be defended, government oversight fought off, and responsibility towards society shirked, has created a host of serious social issues over the course of the last twenty years. The world is still reeling from the rise of the internet, itself a utopian technology, and the panoply of innovations to which it has given rise. To take but one example, the operation of run-of-the-mill social media presents a threat to liberal democracy that cannot be overstated. During the run-up to the 2016 US election, misinformation from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group’s Internet Research Agency reached some 100 million Americans a month. That is not to mention the other ills associated with social media, such as isolation and climbing suicide rates. It is not immediately apparent that the recent products from Silicon Valley are moving humanity closer to a state of utopia.

The latest innovation out of California is vastly more significant than any product that has come before. Generative Artificial Intelligence has captured the zeitgeist; triggered a new arms race between China and America; raised questions concerning consciousness, humanity, and human expression; sparked labour strikes around the world; seeded a new scientific revolution; and caused serious concern among governments and pundits of an emerging existential threat. Most people will have been exposed to the technology in the form of the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

The unleashing of AI on the world—although the technology is in reality currently nothing more than an expert plagiariser—has many researchers screaming ‘AGI!’. ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ is the theoretical God-computer: an AI programme with agency, capable of assimilating information at the speed of light, and able to bring about its own efficiency improvements – that is, to evolve. AGI was the stuff of science fiction, the cornerstone of Banks’s Culture, Asimov’s robots, Agent Smith of The Matrix, and Skynet of Terminator. Now it is a goal towards which companies, governments and universities are actively working.

If the technology that is currently emerging turns out to be as ‘revolutionary’ as is anticipated, and not just a means of, say, churning out bad poems, then that would surely be no coincidence. Today, we are facing a ‘poly-crisis’, as it has been called. The many crises include the Ukraine war, the reawakening of great power struggles between the West and China, rampant populism and ultranationalism, economic crisis, and above all the existential threat of climate change, which exacerbates each of the other crises. Market economies have, by design, overlooked the externality—a factor outside of the remit of a business model—that is the continuation of human life on Earth.

The climate change crisis, stemming from the greenhouse effect, has now spawned a series of abstruse, secondary cascading effects—each a crisis in its own right—that threatens near every facet of life on earth. Carbon offsetting efforts, amounting to little more than planting trees, are failing to account for the influence of microplastics on the ocean, for example. Previously, climate models suggested that the planet’s oceans sequestered around one third of annual human carbon emissions – but this may no longer be the case. Nor are carbon offsets able to compensate for the effects of large-scale industrial farming on top soil fungi networks, which recent studies suggest would normally sequester another third of atmospheric carbon. Artificial intelligence will influence all these crises, for better or worse.

AGI research is inexorable for several reasons. Perhaps the most immediate drive is geopolitical: Chinese researchers, under the direction of the CCP, are making significant progress in the field of artificial intelligence; whichever nation secures the technology first may become the reigning superpower. Free market principles are another driving factor. Each company will want to beat its competitors to the prize. Third, mitigating the climate crisis will require significant technological innovation and efficiency improvements for carbon capture and the cleaning up of pollution. The need for mitigating technology is immediate and perhaps AI is the only way to bring about the technological changes required for society, as we know it, to survive in the long term.

Ostensibly, GPT4, the latest AI model powering ChatGPT, cost in the region of one billion dollars to train. In the western world, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, with the aid of many poached PhD students (whose contribution is unacknowledged but likely to be substantial), may be the only group with the resources to create an AGI. Beyond cost, as with the esoteric technologies of the 1990s, the complexity of the software architectures involved have become extreme: often the processes are obscure even to the engineers themselves. Having broken this ground, however, the companies are unlikely to restrain themselves from pursuing further innovations. In this context, it is imperative that these companies invest in ‘alignment’: that is, in ensuring that an AI programme performs tasks that are in the best interest of a human user, thereby maintaining a sort of ‘moral compass’. The need for this in areas like social media is already clear. Without such investment, the rise of AI could well lead to an existential threat.

That effective artificial intelligence has come about in this way must be considered a misfortune. Lack of government oversight presents a problem, as does the concentration of technological power in the hands of a tiny, individualist, libertarian-leaning minority rather than in a democratic, multilateral effort with well enforced fail-safes. It is also unfortunate for the billionaires who must now attempt to control this technology. They can no longer sit idly and allow technological determinism to unfold of its own volition. AGI could be construed as manifest technological determinism. How the billionaires respond to this in practice will likely revolutionise societal structures in the very near future.

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The post Ethical future? Science fiction and the tech billionaires appeared first on The Freethinker.

Born in 1971, Woodhouse studied business at Aston University, Birmingham. Although growing up in a broadly Anglican tradition, he became an atheist in his teens, and turned to humanism, attracted by its emphasis on positive moral values; this has led him, more recently, to veganism and sentientism.

Woodhouse’s podcast on sentientism has run for over 150 episodes. Guests have included the philosopher AC Grayling, the journalist Henry Mance, and Ingrid Newkirk, president of the controversial animal rights group PETA. In episode 76, the activist Peter Tatchell claimed that ‘humanism will evolve into sentientism’.

I met Jamie Woodhouse at a café in Edgware, north London. He ordered a coffee with plant-based milk, while I had a peppermint tea. In this interview, we discuss Woodhouse’s path to sentientism, what the concept actually means, and its relationship with humanism and veganism.

Is sentientism internally consistent? Is a sentientist necessarily vegan? What circumstances would justify the use of violence against people in order to protect animals? Would it matter if a species, including our own, became extinct? Can sentientism save the world?

Comments are open below.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How did you get into sentientism?

Jamie Woodhouse: I had a corporate career, mostly as a consultant. I still do some ad hoc consulting, but I mainly work on a portfolio of different projects that relate to charitable causes, NGO work, and open data initiatives. The sentientism project has become more and more central – it has become a personal mission.

Over the years, I came to view humanism as a combination of a naturalistic understanding of the world and a universal compassion. But it always concerned me that humanism was too centred on our own species. When I was about 25, I became vegetarian. Many years later, I began to realise that the ethical reasoning that led me to vegetarianism should, by implication, lead me to veganism. I went vegan about five or six years ago, but this also made me have another look at humanism.

The reason I care about other humans is not that we happen to share the same species, but because they have a capacity to suffer and flourish and they want to live. If sentience is the reason I care about other humans, why should I not extend that care to all sentient animals?

Is anyone else involved in the sentientist movement – if there is one?

There is a movement, but it is anarchic, informal, unorganised – no governance, no money, no membership. There are many people who are working on different aspects of it who would not necessarily label themselves sentientists. At the same time, the commitment to a naturalistic understanding of the world goes back through history, predates religion, and, I would argue, predates humanity as well. Non-human animals have, in a sense, a naturalistic way of understanding the world. They are using their senses, they are trying to explore and to develop beliefs and understandings about the world to help them survive. That is a putative sort of basic naturalism.

Another ancient source of sentientism is the idea of ahimsa, which simply means ‘do no harm’, and which is central to Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Sentientism is also based on the idea that we should care about one another – this idea runs through religious worldviews as well as humanism, but arguably also predates humanity. Non-human animals often care about each other. They did so long before humanity arrived on the scene.

How far is it possible for sentientism, as a single worldview, to be consistent with ethical pluralism? Surely some moral attitudes are inconsistent with others?

Sentientism is pluralistic in the sense that there are lots of different ethical systems you might apply once you adopt a ‘sentiocentric’ moral scope that cares about all sentient beings. But if you have an ethical system that carves out or disregards or ignores some group of those sentient beings, then it is clearly not sentientist. Or if you have a nihilist ethical system, or maybe a morally relativist ethical system that says that some group of sentient beings do not matter, that does not qualify. You have to have universal compassion for all sentient beings. But once you do, you can apply it in many different ways.

Does ‘universal compassion’ entail that we must not kill animals?

I have tried to suggest that we set some form of baseline – a minimum degree of compassion for one another. We would expect this compassion to be universal, not just for friends or family. Similarly, a humanist might ask what the minimum was that he or she could expect from another human. Compassion or moral consideration means that no sentient being should be needlessly harmed or killed. That is the suggested baseline.

What does ‘needlessly’ mean? What about animals that can harm humans, such as mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, or lions?

Many people would agree with the naturalistic commitment of sentientism in theory and many people will agree with the sentiocentric commitment in theory. But when it gets to the implications, it gets tough. Just like humanism, sentientism does not have all the answers – it is not a complete ethical system. It just says that we should have serious moral consideration for every sentient being that is involved. There might well be situations where we would need to harm or even kill other sentient beings – but as with harming or killing humans, we would need a strong justification.

Some sentientists will argue that all sentient beings are equal and will push for an egalitarian approach. Others will argue that even if we have a universal compassion for all sentient beings, there is still an ethical basis by which we might differentiate between them.

What would an ethical basis of differentiating between animals be? Something like a hierarchy of levels of consciousness?

That is probably the most common way of doing it. People might look at factors like longevity, richness of experience, the different types of interests that different beings can have, and they might use that to apply some form of differentiation that could guide their approach in difficult situations.

Some animals can, of course, flourish more than others. In particular, humans can flourish and have experiences to a much higher degree than any other species that we know of – can’t they?

A naturalistic and scientific approach will help us understand whether that is true or not. Different sentientists will disagree, but in my view, there are types of experience, interests, needs, that humans can have that non-humans probably do not have – just as there are types of experience that a dolphin or a bat might have that we cannot. We can experience existential angst. I can worry about things that other animals might not. This is important and valid; we should use a scientific approach to determine how far these differences hold.

However, it can work the other way around too. Suppose you were to rewrite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights. The right to education might seem not to make sense for non-human animals. But if you think broadly enough about education, maybe it does – the right of a mother to teach her children how to live as an animal, in a way, is a right to education. As to the rights that are the most fundamental to humans – the right to family life or to food and shelter, the right not to be tortured or killed – these foundational needs and interests are relevant to all sentient beings because they are so central to our common evolutionary history. At the same time, humans have ways of mitigating suffering that are not available to non-human animals. So it is possible that their experiences of pain might be worse than ours.

Peter Singer has views about degrees of self-consciousness and ‘personhood’ that are similar to sentientism. On this basis, he has argued that infanticide could be morally acceptable in some circumstances. Would you agree?

This is another area where ethical pluralism comes in: people answer in different ways. My view is that the best way of approaching these situations is to genuinely and deeply consider the best interests of the being we are talking about in every respect. I can imagine situations in which it would be in the being’s best interests for their life to be ended. Or there are situations where individuals choose that for themselves. The best we can do is to imagine ourselves in their position and ask ourselves what we would want – and have some humility about it. But that does not mean that sentientism is going to answer every question clearly and easily.

Isn’t there a need to work out some generally applicable principles?

The danger is that the desperation for clear principles can lead us to a position where we are more confident than we really should be. Having clear principles does not necessarily mean that they are right, or that they lead to the right conclusions. We are apes who have evolved to survive on the Savannah: sometimes we are just not going to know what the best thing is to do.

Is there a difficulty that other animals do not have compassion for one other, or for us, in the way that you are saying we should for them? How can we make sense of the fact that our relationship with them is so asymmetrical?

Universal compassion is the right starting point, but it might lead us to other principles that we then apply in our lives, depending on the ethical system we choose. If we put anything else before universal compassion, we will risk causing needless harm to some sentient beings because we have excluded them. This is a clean dividing line. If you do not warrant moral consideration, you do not warrant compassion and are outside of our moral scope. Anything can be done to you with impunity. You can be tortured, killed, treated like an inanimate rock. That is a serious exclusion. There is no logical or philosophical reason for excluding any sentient being, any suffering from moral consideration.

Does sentientism, therefore, advocate a sort of unilateral disarmament by humans – that we should give up our rights and allow animals to live without any interference from us?

In some parts of the animal advocacy and the vegan movement, activists have, understandably, come to be so cynical about the human race and our track record that they have lost compassion for humans and humanity. One of the things I want to do with sentientism is to reset that balance and remind everybody that humans are sentient beings too, and warrant serious moral consideration.

If you look at all of the habitable land on the earth, humans themselves take up less than one per cent of it. All of us, human and non-human beings, have plenty of space. What occupies most of the land is agriculture. That is one area where there is a conflict, because agricultural land takes away space from free-ranging animals. If you took all of the agricultural land we use today and switched everybody to using plant-based agriculture, it would free up three quarters of the land.

Isn’t the reason why so much space is taken up by fields, agriculture, and animal products, that there are so many people in the world? Wouldn’t a better solution in the long term be to gradually lower the human population to a more sustainable level, rather than for everyone to become vegans?

That is one approach. The latest projection is that the human population will peak at around ten billion – our growth rate seems to be flattening off already. My worry with those who suggest a more radical population reduction is that, in the past, the only way that people have achieved those sorts of population reductions was through abject horror.

There can be an interesting tone that comes through some of those conversations, where there is an implication that the people who will survive will be of a certain type and that those who will not will be of a different type.

Doubtless population control could be used as a pretext for genocide. But respectable people have also supported it: see, for example, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Could not the human race agree that in the long term it would be better if we could find voluntary ways of controlling the population?

Autonomy is important, as is people’s ability to take intelligent decisions about whether to have families. But I am nervous about those downsides because I see them coming through in many debates. People start out from a good place and end up in ecofascism or somewhere extremely dark. I am not sure how we would navigate that path and I am not sure that many humans want to go down that route.

On the other hand, we cannot have indefinite population expansion.

No, but I think we will flatten off at ten billion and we will be fine. There are much easier strategies than population control which avoid its ethical downsides. There may be eight billion humans on the planet, but there are about 100 billion farmed animals just on land, and another 1-2 trillion farmed aquatic animals. If we have a population problem, we can either choose to look at eight billion humans or we can choose to look at 100 billion farmed land animals. The latter is an easier problem to solve ethically.

That is partly what leads me to think that the Earth’s carrying capacity is already much higher than what is needed to support even ten billion humans. If we freed up three quarters of the agricultural land we could rewild and put up solar and wind energy facilities, or public parks, and the carbon capture through the reforestation would be enormous. Or we could grow more plant-based food – so instead of freeing up three quarters of agricultural land, if we freed up half of it, we could double our current food production with the other quarter.

Is it not the case that population control could reduce all types of environmental damage caused by humans, whereas veganism and sentientism focus only on one particular type of damage, namely the use of land for farming animals?

It could, but we would need to think very carefully about how our economy would work in that context. Often the economy and the poorest humans are harmed when the population falls. We would need to find an intelligent way of managing that. Ethical population management and veganism could complement each other.

However, my main reason for wanting to transition away from farming animals is that this practice is needlessly harming and killing sentient beings that do not want to be harmed and killed. This is independent of environmental concerns.

How far would the sentientist distinguish between the rights of humans and other animals in particular situations? For example, what about the damage to animal habitats that is being caused by the construction of new housing developments?

It depends on which ethical system you apply. If new housing needed to be built in an area where there were wild animals living, instead of killing those wild animals, they could be rehoused or encouraged to move to another place. As far as the effect on insects is concerned, the science about them is developing rapidly at the moment. It is thought that the more social ones are sentient, but the simplest ones may not be sentient. You could also take estimates of their degree of sentience into account. We need to act with compassion for all the sentient beings involved.

Should wild animals – sentient ones, at least – be given a legal right to the land they inhabit?

Some go beyond sentientism to extend moral concern to the environment, or plants, rocks, rivers and trees. Personally, I believe that all value strictly comes back to sentience: the view that the experience of things, the feelings you and I are having every second, is the root of all value and all moral worth. I view plants, rocks, rivers, trees and the environment instrumentally. I appreciate them and care about them deeply, but only because of their impact on the sentient beings, not because a tree, a rock or a house has its own intrinsic worth. I am not sure that wild animals have the same sense of ownership that we do, although many have an appreciation for territory and the homes they build.

What would happen to all the farm animals if they were no longer farmed?

At the moment, farmed animals are force-bred. When you stop this practice, the population of farm animals will naturally come down over time. I am comfortable with the idea that the population of farmed animal species would ultimately reduce towards zero – with any remaining animals being cared for in sanctuaries.

So there would be no intrinsic harm if any particular species disappeared altogether?

There is no intrinsic value in any particular species. What matters is the existence, experience and will to live of the individual sentient beings. Often we humans value a species for aesthetic reasons, but ultimately it is the individual sentient beings that matter.

On that line of reasoning, would you be equally happy with the idea that humans might become extinct one day?

It would be a shame, because we have enormous positive potential, and I see value in our experiences, our lives and our flourishing. But again, what matters to me is individual human beings, not humanity as a species or as a construct.

Surely people have often been motivated by the desire to perpetuate the human race and improve life for future generations beyond their own death?

I think this is important to the degree that it is important to the individuals – including those potential future individuals.

Aren’t you adopting a relativistic morality?

Sentientism rejects the sort of relativism that accepts a group’s agreed ethics regardless of the harms they cause. Instead, it is trying to value the perspective of other sentient beings in the same way that they do. That standard should apply to every group.

If you take the view that what matters is each person’s experience to them, then, once that person had died – or once all people had died – there would be no more experiences to matter. Can the long-term survival of the human race be of any concern to the sentientist?

Extinction would be a shame, because there is positive value in experiences and good lives as well. I am not advocating human extinction. I would love to see humanity persist, continue and improve. Part of the reason for this is that there is catastrophic suffering in the non-human world, for example among free-ranging animals. One of the possibilities of humanity continuing is that we might actually be able to mitigate that suffering or help those free-ranging animals in some way. Many humans already do this on a small scale.

Without humanity, there is just biological evolution. And gene propagation evolution is amoral, harsh and brutal. Despite the terrible track record of humanity so far, the prospect of benefit to all sentient beings might be greater if we persist in the future than if we do not.

Would you see humans as the moral arbiters of the other species?

It is less about being moral arbiters than just being ethical and caring about morality. It is not about us as arbiters deciding one way or the other, it is just about having a motivation to help others.

I am also not suggesting that humans are the only beings that have the capacity to be moral or to care. However, we are able to use our rationality and power to extend our compassion in a much richer, more impactful way than other species. We have already demonstrated we have the power to cause greater suffering than other species – it would be good to set that right.

Must the sentientist be vegan?

I would suggest so. There are some who call themselves sentientists who disagree. They have found some way of rationalising their consumption of sentient animal products, but I think they have made mistakes. There is so much noise and hyperbole with veganism that it can feel like a club, a cult, an identity, but it is not any of those things. It is simply a philosophical stance and a set of actions that aims, as far as is possible and practicable, to avoid needlessly causing suffering, death or exploitation. When you put it like that, it is hard to understand why the idea gets so much resistance.

On the question of diet, would it not be possible to have a compromise in which everyone in the world cut down on animal products but did not abandon them completely?

Cutting down is better than not cutting down. Is it good for people to be a bit less racist or sexist, or to cut down on exploitative labour? Yes – the less of these things you do, the better. The system of farming animals is an ethical horror. Reducing can be a step along the way. If there is an argument to reduce, there is an argument to reduce a bit more and a bit more – and to bring these bad things to a complete end.

You draw an emotive analogy between eating animal products and being racist or sexist. Racism and sexism, it could be argued, are morally wrong in human terms because they involve one human harming another. But there are things about eating animal products that all humans can share in: not only in dietary terms, but also because so much of world food culture, as well as clothing and other artefacts, depends on them.

Someone who is defending racism might say the same thing – that racism benefits the racist – that supremacy benefits the supremacist. In doing so, they exclude the perspective of and harms done to those they oppress. But benefits to oppressors do not justify the harm done by oppressing others.

Intra-human and intra-species forms of oppression are very different, but there are some common themes. One is that ending bad things is better than just reducing them. Another is that we should work to end them while having compassion for those implicated and those trapped by immoral social norms – however difficult that might be.

Which comes back to the question of whether the animal’s perspective should be treated on an equal footing with the human’s.

It does not have to be equal. It should be in accordance with their interests. Being farmed for food does not accord with even a minimal level of moral consideration outside of a sustenance or a survival situation.

What about the argument that many farm animals only exist because people have bred them in order to be farmed?

This is called the ‘logic of the ladder’. If you have two choices between a being not existing at all or being brought into existence, having a short, happy life, having one bad day and then being killed for food, you might argue that the latter was preferable. But this does not work for humans, because otherwise, farming toddlers and babies would be ethical. For the same reason, it does not work for animals. The fact that we may have created them does not mean we are justified in then hurting or killing them because we enjoy the taste of their flesh – whatever deal we might have done with ourselves in advance.

Is killing a cow as bad as killing a baby?

I would not say it is, but they are both bad and needless. That is why I reject the ‘logic of the ladder’: even at the point where you walk towards a non-human sentient being with a knife, because you have bred it to be killed, that being will look you in the eyes and will not want to be hurt and killed.

What we are getting to there is the point is that sentientism does not distinguish between humans and non-human animals in the way that a human might. You do not see the human as having any particular moral claim on other humans that other animals do not have.

I would not put it quite that way. Being a member of a species does not carry any moral significance, even the human species. There might be other reasons why you would want to care in particular ways about humans, and that could be about the potential for them to do good in the future. It might be their longevity, it might be the richness of their experience. But their membership of a particular species is not in itself relevant.

You have identified two core aspects of sentientism: evidence-based reasoning and universal compassion. Where does the principle of universal compassion come from?

It can just be a choice. Sentientism is neutral about moral realism and moral anti-realism. A sentientist would reject a ‘divine command’ theory that derives moral imperatives from God or a relativism that accepts whatever a particular group agrees as moral. Instead there are sentientists who think there is no such thing as an objective moral truth, but that we construct it various ways. There are others like me who ground their morality in a naturalistic understanding of what it is to be a sentient being – for example not liking suffering and not wanting to die.

So there are different ways of answering your question. Factors could include enlightened self-interest, the benefits of reciprocity, the ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ moral behaviour can give. For people who are committed to a rational way of understanding the world, there is an attraction to having an ethics that is coherent and consistent. We do not like cognitive dissonance. If we acknowledge that we already have compassion for at least some other sentient beings, for humans and for companion animals and for some charismatic wild animals, for example, we already feel that compassion, and we choose to care about them. If we want to be consistent and coherent, we should extend that compassion to every sentient being.

Is it possible to be consistent unless you have principles against which to judge your consistency, judging, say, the hierarchy of different animals with different creative senses?

I am not saying that becoming a sentientist fixes all those problems. There is so much more complexity to work through. Sentientism does not answer everything. It just answers the question of moral scope: who should and should not be included in our moral consideration.

If the scientific consensus were that humans need to eat animal products in order to have a healthy, balanced diet, would you stop being a vegan?

I think that is unlikely.

But suppose it were the case.

I genuinely do not know. Cultivated meat will fix that problem for us. But the scenario is almost inconceivable, because meat is just a collection of nutrients – and we can get those nutrients from elsewhere. Your question is similar to asking a humanist whether, if science discovered that we could only be healthy by eating each other, they would become a cannibal.

To many people around the world, having a diet that includes some animal products, such as cheese, butter, eggs, meat and fish, is strongly preferable to a purely plant-based diet. Does this matter?

I think that, as we cultivate plant-based meat and dairy replacements, those differences will erode to nothing. In any case, marginal taste preferences and social norm compliance are not a sufficient justification to mutilate, harm or artificially impregnate non-human animals, or to separate them from their families.

Can animal testing be justified, for example, in the interests of scientific progress?

There might be situations where it is justifiable, but they are extremely rare and getting rarer all the time. Similarly, testing on humans can be justifiable in some circumstances – for example, the vaccination trials during the Covid pandemic, where people volunteered to participate in trials.

Do you think that science needs to be directed by sentientist principles?

I think everything does. A humanist would say that we should motivate even our intellectual pursuits by some sort of ethical framework. No sphere of human interest should be exempt from ethics.

Animal rights organisations such as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty have sometimes been involved in violent protest. Can violence against humans to protect animals ever be justified?

I can imagine situations where it could. If I saw my neighbour torturing his dog in his front yard and the only way I could stop him doing it was to put him in a chokehold, I would do it. In the UK, if someone is hurting their pet, the police can be called out and that person will be prevented, by force if necessary, from continuing to do so. If people thought of farmed animals as they think of their companion animals, we would all be on the same page.

Your family has a rescue dog as a pet (or ‘companion animal’). How compatible is the practice of keeping pets with sentientism?

There are different points of view about this from within sentientism and animal advocate communities. Some people argue that all forms of pet ownership are exploitation. I do not agree – I think it is possible for us to have positive interspecies relationships. I would end the deliberate breeding of companion animals. But in terms of rescue animals, providing a happy home and a positive life for one that already exists can be a positive thing for the animal concerned.

Do any environmental considerations need to come into play when deciding whether to have a pet?

Yes, they do. It is like having children. Our children are going to have an environmental impact. Companion animals have an environmental impact. All life causes some impact. That is unavoidable.

Can dogs be vegans?

Not in the sense that it is a philosophical stance, but modern science shows they can thrive on a completely plant-based diet. It is becoming clearer that there is can be positive health benefits for dogs and cats from plant-based diets. There are nutritionally complete, vet approved products out there on the market today. The process of making animal-based foods is often so brutal that it destroys many of the nutrients that dogs and cats need. The animal-based food makers add synthetic supplements to put these nutrients back into their products. Plant-based producers use exactly the same supplements.

What are your personal aims in talking about sentientism to people – on your website, your podcast, or in interviews like this one?

I want to persuade eight billion humans to agree with me, thereby helping to solve all of the world’s problems. In a way, that is not even a joke. These problems seem to be caused either by a failure of compassion – we have excluded certain humans or other sentient beings from our moral scope – or a failure of evidence, reasoning and understanding. Sentientism has implications for our personal choices, our institutions and politics, from local to international. If people applied sentientist principles at every level of human endeavour and governance, that would be a good thing for us human sentients, for non-human sentients and for the world we all share.

The post Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse appeared first on The Freethinker.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, while the Netherlands and Belgium had already made legislative provisions about assisted dying, in France, the debate has continued endlessly.

Three laws were made on this subject from 2005 to 2016, primarily by the same deputy [in the National Assembly], a cardiologist opposed to euthanasia, who once even claimed that his law was a model for other countries to follow. With self-serving complacency, this same doctor, although opposed to euthanasia, admitted to Le Point in 2008 that he had ‘switched off respirators in order to free [hospital] beds’.  

The debate in the French media about the end of life was launched in 2003 by the case of Vincent Humbert, a young firefighter who, following a car accident, found himself locked in his body and only able to communicate with one finger. Through the mediation of his mother, he asked the president of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, for the right to die with dignity. But this was denied him.

Humbert was finally freed from his body, which had become a prison, by his mother and his doctor. His case provoked an immense emotional response in the French population. It was the first of many such cases. From then up to the present, the debate on assisted dying has continued.

France adopted three laws about the end of life in 2005, 2010 and 2016. These pieces of legislation firstly gave guarantees to doctors and allowed them to acknowledge advance healthcare directives (or ‘living wills’), even if, while being restrictive, these could not always be contested. The doctor could always decide not to honour them in a situation of vital urgency or if they were ‘manifestly inappropriate’ – something which, in French law, does not mean anything.

From 2005, although euthanasia and assisted suicide were completely ruled out by the legislature and successive right and left-wing governments, palliative sedation became a possibility. Finally, the latter was redefined and limited to the patient’s dying moments. Since 2016, ‘profound and continuous sedation’ up to death has been the only legal way of stopping mental suffering or futile, unbearable and unassuageable pain.  

If sedation of this kind can be a genuine solution for people who are very old or completely debilitated, it becomes an act of medical cruelty when it lasts two or three weeks – as is unfortunately too often the case in France.

In fact, as it was put rather naïvely by Jean Leonetti, the architect of the laws of 2005, 2010 and 2016 (and also, extraordinarily, their evaluator), in order to let someone ‘sleep before dying’, it is necessary to stop giving them food and water, thereby provoking a sickness so that their kidneys are affected, and death at last follows. Everything, in fact, remains under the control of the doctor, who can choose whether or not to accelerate the sedation. Moreover, under the influence of this type of slow sedation, there is no study that shows that the patient does not suffer. What is certain is that people close to the patient, such as carers (in particular the nurses), do suffer from this slow form of death.

The politicians responsible find it hard to understand that our death can belong to us. They have always followed the lead of doctors who wish to medicalise death and retain sole control over it. But as a result of cases [like Humbert’s] and debates in the media, our elected representatives have finally admitted that they ought to have a change of approach and put the dying person at the centre of these decisions – that it ought to be the patient or their healthcare proxy who decides.

Under the previous government, the National Assembly ought to have adopted the legislative proposal of the deputy Olivier Falorni, which would have legalised active assistance in dying. For the first time, there was a large majority in favour, but the government did not want to allow this law to pass all the way through the legislative process. However, during his presidential campaign, Macron, who would be reelected, committed himself to launching a citizens’ debate and even expressed himself in favour of the Belgian model.

This commitment is now on the point of being honoured. In September 2022, the National Consultative Ethics Committee issued Opinion 139, paving the way to a law that could authorise euthanasia. The French President has announced a citizens’ convention that will be held from December 2022. This convention will be put under the control of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council. An evaluation of the last ‘Leonetti-Claeys’ law of 2016 will be made by the National Assembly in the coming months.

At last, a debate will be organised throughout the country. This will be an important occasion for supporters of the ultimate freedom to demonstrate that a law that permits assisted dying is a possibility given to every individual – and not an obligation, as some people would have it considered.

The issue today is about defending a law which strictly respects the wish of the dying individual. This law ought to rest on two limbs: on the one hand, universal access to palliative care, and on the other, the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

This law will be faithful to our republican triptych – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – which applies to all of our official institutions:

Liberty to live as long as possible for those who wish to. Liberty of conscience for carers who will never be obliged to assist in a case of euthanasia, thanks to a ‘conscience clause’. Liberty, finally, for those who cannot endure to live any more, because there is no principle, in a secular democracy, that obliges anyone to die at the last possible moment – and especially to die in pain and suffering.

Equality before death. There is no doubt that all of us are going to die – even if certain politicians seem not to have not realised it – but we are not all going to die in the same conditions. If you have relatives or the means to do so, you will end up dying abroad, in Belgium or Switzerland. But to do so in Switzerland, you need to scrape together more than 10,000 euros (£8,650). The vast majority of French people do not have this sum. It is like when abortion was forbidden in France: up till 1975, women who sought one had to flee abroad. Those who did not have the means to do so submitted to backstreet abortionists (so-called ‘angel-makers’), and some of them died. Similarly, in France today, old and very ill people are being driven to violent suicide, because they are not guaranteed a serene and dignified end to their lives.

Finally, Brotherhood, because not all physical pain and psychological suffering can be assuaged. What can be said to people who have pains that resist treatment? ‘Die in agony!’

To conclude, the law that we want for France will at last allow each person to control the end of his or her life. A society which gives individuals this final right elevates itself. France will thus be able to reassume its vocation as a leading country for the respect of fundamental human rights. Roll on 2023!

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La fin de vie : enfin une loi d’Ultime liberté en France ?

Depuis le début des années 2000, alors que les Pays-Bas et la Belgique avaient déjà légiféré, la France n’a cessé de relancer d’ininterrompus débats sur la fin de vie.

Trois lois de 2005 à 2016, trois lois faites principalement par le même député, un cardiologue opposé à l’euthanasie, et qui un jour prétendit même que sa loi était un modèle dans le monde. En terme, d’autosatisfaction, on n’est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même. Lequel médecin, opposé à l’euthanasie, avouait dans un grand magazine, en 2008, avoir « arrêté des respirateurs pour libérer des lits. »

C’est l’affaire Vincent Humbert, du nom d’un jeune pompier qui, à la suite d’un accident de voiture, se retrouve enfermé dans son corps n’ayant plus qu’un doigt pour communiquer, qui va lancer médiatiquement le débat sur la fin de vie en France. Par l’intermédiaire de sa maman, il va demander au président de la République, Jacques Chirac, le droit de mourir dans la dignité. Ce qui lui sera refusé.

Il sera finalement libéré de son corps devenu une prison par sa mère puis par son médecin.

Cette affaire va provoquer une immense émotion dans la population française. Elle est la première de nombreuses autres. Et le débat sur la fin de vie sera ininterrompu jusqu’à ce jour.

La France a donc adopté ses trois lois sur la fin de vie en 2005, 2010 et 2016. Ces législations ont d’abord donné des garanties aux médecins et ont permis de reconnaître les directives anticipées même, si tout en étant contraignantes, elles ne sont toujours pas opposables. Le médecin peut toujours décider de ne pas les respecter en cas d’urgence vitale ou si elles sont manifestement inappropriées, ce qui, en droit français, ne veut rien dire…

Dés 2005, si l’euthanasie et le suicide assisté ont été totalement écartés de la loi par le législateur et les gouvernements de droite et de gauche successifs, la sédation terminale est devenue une possibilité. Finalement, elle a été redéfinie et limitée à l’agonie. Depuis 2016, la sédation profonde et continue jusqu’à la mort est devenue la seule possibilité d’arrêter des souffrances ou des douleurs inutiles, insupportables et inapaisables.

Si cette sédation peut être réellement une solution pour des personnes très âgées ou totalement affaiblies, elle devient un acte médical cruel quand elle dure deux ou trois semaines, ce qui est malheureusement encore trop souvent le cas en France.

Car, en effet, pour laisser dormir avant de mourir, comme l’énonce avec un peu de naïveté Jean Leonetti, l’artisan des lois de 2005, 2010 et 2016 – mais aussi, extraordinaire, l’évaluateur de ses propres lois ! – il faut arrêter d’alimenter et d’hydrater la personne et donc provoquer une maladie pour que les reins soient atteints et que la mort s’en suive enfin ! Et, tout reste en fait sous le contrôle du médecin qui peut accélérer ou non la sédation… D’autant que sous le coup de cette forme de sédation, lente, aucune étude ne prouve que le patient ne souffre pas ; ce qui est certain, c’est que l’entourage, dont les soignants, au premier rang desquels les infirmiers, souffrent de cette lente agonie.

Les responsables politiques ont du mal à comprendre que notre mort puisse nous appartenir et ont toujours suivi ces médecins qui souhaitent médicaliser la mort et en garder, seuls, le contrôle.

Mais, à force d’affaires et de débats médiatiques, les élus ont enfin admis qu’il fallait changer de logique et mettre la personne mourante au centre des décisions. Que ce soit elle qui décide ou sa personne de confiance.

Sous la précédente mandature, l’Assemblée nationale a failli adopter une proposition de loi du député Olivier Falorni légalisant l’aide active à mourir. Pour la première fois, il y avait une large majorité pour le faire mais le gouvernement n’a pas souhaité permettre à ce texte d’aller au bout du chemin législatif. Cependant, pendant la campagne présidentielle, le candidat Macron, réélu président, s’est engagé à lancer un débat citoyen et s’est même prononcé en faveur du modèle belge.

Cet engagement est en passe d’être tenu.

Le conseil consultatif national d’éthique a rendu un avis à l’automne 2022 permettant d’avancer vers une loi qui autoriserait l’euthanasie et le président de la République a annoncé la tenue d’une convention citoyenne à partir du mois de décembre 2022. Elle sera placée sous le contrôle du Conseil économique, social et environnemental.

Une évaluation de la dernière loi de 2016 dite Leonetti-Claeys sera faite par l’Assemblée nationale pour janvier 2023.

Enfin, un débat sera organisé partout dans le pays. Ce sera notamment l’occasion pour les militantes et les militants de l’ultime liberté de démontrer qu’une loi sur l’aide active à mourir est une possibilité donnée à chacune et chacun. Et non une obligation comme certains voudraient le faire croire.

Il s’agit de défendre aujourd’hui une loi qui respecte strictement la volonté du mourant. Cette loi doit reposer sur ses deux jambes : d’une part, l’accès universel aux soins palliatifs et d’autre part, la légalisation de l’euthanasie et du suicide assisté.

Cette loi sera fidèle à notre triptyque républicain, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité qui s’étend sur toutes nos édifices officiels !

Liberté de vivre le plus longtemps possible pour celles et ceux dont c’est le vœu. Liberté de conscience des soignants qui ne seront, jamais obligés d’accompagner une euthanasie grâce à une clause de conscience. Liberté enfin de celles et de ceux qui n’en peuvent plus car il n’existe aucun principe, dans une démocratie laïque, qui vous oblige à mourir le plus tard possible, notamment dans la douleur et la souffrance.

Égalité devant la mort. Certes 100% d’entre nous allons mourir même s’il semble que certains politiques ne s’en rendent pas compte, mais nous ne mourons pas dans les mêmes conditions. Si vous avez des relations ou des moyens, vous arriverez à mourir à l’étranger, en Belgique ou en Suisse. Mais aller en Suisse, ce sont plus de 10 000 euros qu’il faut réunir. L’immense majorité des Français n’ont pas cette somme. C’est comme quand l’avortement était interdit en France jusque 1975, les femmes devaient fuir à l’étranger. Celles qui n’en avaient pas les moyens se donnaient aux faiseuses d’anges et certaines en mouraient. Comme aujourd’hui, on pousse en France les seniors et les personnes très malades à se suicider violemment faute de leur garantir une fin de vie sereine et digne.

Fraternité enfin, car on ne peut soulager toutes les douleurs physiques et toutes les souffrances psychiques. Que dire à des personnes qui ont des douleurs réfractaires ? Agonisez dans la souffrance !!!

En conclusion, la loi que nous voulons pour la France permettra enfin à chacune et à chacun de maîtriser sa fin de vie.

Une société qui donne ce droit ultime s’élève. La France renouera alors avec sa vocation de pays exemplaire pour le respect des droits humains fondamentaux… Vivement 2023 !

The post Assisted dying: will the final freedom be legalised in France? appeared first on The Freethinker.