´óÏó´«Ã½

Punch and Judy politics is back, one newspaper noted this week, as Sir Keir Starmer took on Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister’s Questions. Rough and tumble is the stuff of Westminster politics.

But today the House of Commons is likely to be a very different place. Instead of that argy bargy and whips to make sure that MPs keep to their own party’s line, there’ll be a momentous debate on assisted dying. Unless there’s a last minute wrecking amendment to the private bill brought by MP Kim Leadbeater, her colleagues will then have a free vote to decide whether to step into this new moral territory.

After all the discussions, including on this programme, and letters from constituents about the rights and wrongs of assisted dying, its impact on society, doctors, patients and their families, a free vote means making it legal is ultimately up to the conscience of each individual MP.

Some might think that acting according to your conscience is about having some sort of internal censor to regulate what you do, with guilt as a check on you. But that is more akin to what Freud called the superego. Or perhaps it’s about what a person instinctively thinks they should do, to appease letter writers and powerful voices. But that is highly subjective.

In the Christian tradition what is meant by the conscience is rooted in the biblical idea of the heart – the source of vital decisions, derived from both feeling and reason, shaped by experience and tradition, and enabling someone to look outward beyond their own immediate needs and concerns.

Conscience is a place described by the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council as the most secret core and sanctuary of a person, where someone would listen to the promptings of God. It then means freely making a choice. Without such choice, people would surely be puppets, so exercising one’s conscience is fundamental to being human.

This Christian idea of discernment might be better understood by others outside the tradition by thinking about someone without a conscience: a psychopath. They might be able to coldly discuss right and wrong. But what they cannot do is imagine others’ feelings and experience. In other words, they lack empathy, so there’s no real conscience at work. Empathy is caring enough about somebody else to act in a particular way – or not act against them. In other words, exercising one’s conscience is about love, about what comes from the heart.

Many prayers have been said about the issue of assisted dying, but mine today is for the House of Commons to be at its very best – for MPs to listen to the inner promptings of their hearts.

Show less