Experiments in Living --

* a defeat for a generation lost in a world with no taste

A bloody vessel for your peace

We recognise the right to live because it is the most fundamental right, on which everything else is based. It isn’t linked to Christian culture; the desire to live is a human universal. If the lack of equivalence with animals bothers you then by all means become a vegan or convert to Jainism or something, but treat animals better, not humans worse. Anyway, it is a reflection of modern Western societal norms to treat humans as distinctive and having a unique level of consciousness and sentience which justifies special treatment. Maybe it’s looking out for number one, maybe it’s an arrogant assumption, but it does reflect the views of the majority of people in the society that our criminal justice system serves. Don’t force the alternative perspective on people.

Slippery slope arguments are often a bit dodgy, but to be honest the point can be legitimately made here: if you don’t recognise the right to life at all, why recognise anything else? No right to education, or clean drinking water, or freedom from cruel and degrading punishment, no right to a fair trial, or to participate in free and fair elections... if your very right to exist can be made contingent on a cost-benefit analysis carried out by somebody else, then there’s no logical justification for not treating all these other fundamental rights in the same way. Your approach to the issue might be an interesting philosophical process, but if actually implemented it would represent a slide back towards barbarism, losing all the gains that the modern enlightenment has brought. Society is better because people have rights.

And to answer question 3 ” In circumstances where historical precedent (religion) has shown fear can work as a deterrent, why shouldn’t a secular state employ the same methods to ensure social cohesion? “ Religions don’t play on the fear of death; they play on the fear of the unknown beyond the grave, and on the fear that life lacks meaning. These are universal human concerns, and the attempt to provide answers to them (rather than to scare people per se) will always attract followers as a result. A secular state can’t answer those questions: it can just present fear, pure and simple, with no greater meaning than that. People might be afraid of God. But there is a long and proud tradition in human society of being prepared to tell politicians and judges and the establishment to go fuck themselves, regardless of how harsh they want to be. Nobody has ever stopped it, and your model certainly won’t.

Kier Howie

written in reply to: Archives of Pain