What is a healthy attitude to death?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2024
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
The debate around assisted dying exposes fundamental questions about our attitudes to death. We will all die. Nothing is more certain. But it’s not something most of us really think about, apart from superficially. We can often think of death as something that happens to other people. There’s a paradox – we are more distanced from death than our ancestors, yet we are exposed to it every day in the news and value it as a key component of art and entertainment. We can have a morbid fascination with death but a fear of confronting our own mortality.
While, fear, anxiety and avoidance are deeply human responses, are they good for us both psychologically and morally? Those advocating a “death positive” approach see honest conversations about death and dying as the cornerstone of a healthy society. In theory, thinking about your death should put your life into perspective and direct your actions towards things that are good for you and others. But is that necessarily the case? Should death ever be seen as anything less than a tragedy? During the pandemic, there were concerns about the subtle messaging around the ‘acceptability’ of some deaths over others. In conflict, repeated exposure to death causes a callus to form, where there may be less empathy for the dead as a survival mechanism for the living.
Does a greater openness and acceptance of death help us to live better lives? Or can losing the fear of death mean we lose something of what it means to be human? What is a healthy attitude to death?
Chair: Michael Buerk Panel: Matthew Taylor, Ash Sarkar, Konstantin Kisin and Anne McElvoy Witnesses: Charlotte Haigh, Anton Noble, Victoria Holmes, Teodora Manea.
Producer: Dan Tierney Assistant producer: Ruth Purser Editor: Gill Farrington and Chloe Walker.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Good evening. We're the only creatures on earth, it said, aware of our own mortality. |
| 0:10.4 | Perhaps that's why the parliamentary vote on assisted dying this week seems to many a visceral moral turning point. |
| 0:18.4 | Knowledge of the certainty of death is what gives human life an extra dimension, |
| 0:23.3 | whether we're morbidly fascinated with it, shy away from the unavoidability of oblivion, |
| 0:28.5 | or invest emotion in religions that promise we can get round the whole grim business if we follow |
| 0:33.3 | their rules. We're detached from death now in a way impossible for previous generations. Global life |
| 0:40.2 | expectancy was only 31, as recently as 1900. You could expect half your siblings to die in childhood |
| 0:47.0 | and the front room to be in frequent use as a mortuary. Did familiarity with death enable them to |
| 0:53.9 | deal with it better in the past? |
| 0:56.5 | Must we always regard it as a tragedy, or see it as the defining characteristic of life? |
| 1:02.2 | Should we accept it or fear it? |
| 1:04.5 | What's the right attitude to death? |
| 1:07.9 | Our moral maze tonight, the panel, I'm a McElvoy, executive editor of the news and |
| 1:11.4 | commentary site Politico, Ash Sarker from the Navarra Media Group, the chief executive of the NHS |
| 1:17.4 | Confederation Matthew Taylor and the satirist and pundit Constantin kiss him. It's a potentially |
| 1:24.3 | historic moment this week panel. How do you regard death, Matthew Taylor, |
| 1:30.5 | and how does that shape your view of assisted dying? Yeah, I'm not afraid of death, |
| 1:35.5 | but it's the manner of my dying that does concern me, which is why it is I would be a supporter |
| 1:39.7 | of assisted dying. Constantine. Well, I can easily envisage circumstances in which I'd want the option, but I am very concerned that in this particular instance, the slippery slope isn't a fallacy. We know that there are countries where this has done very well. We also know that there are countries like Canada where it's done very, very badly, and we have to make sure that we're going in the right direction if we are doing |
| 2:01.1 | this. Asch? I'm a caveated yes. So I support assisted dying, but I really do understand what |
| 2:06.8 | disability rights campaigners are saying when they're arguing that this implies that their lives |
... |
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