Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Andrew Copson

29th February 2008

I want us to think today about death. Death is one of those subjects which has the power, even in a country where most people are not very religious, to inspire hopes and thoughts that depart from a rational approach to life.

In a MORI poll of British attitudes last year, most people preferred science to religious teachings as a way of understanding the universe. Most people believed that morality was a part of human nature, rather than having been given to humanity by some external force. And most people thought that moral rules depended on circumstance rather than on unchanging commandments.

When it came to the subject of death, the British population departed somewhat from its generally humanist sentiments, and only 41% of people were willing to say that they believed that death was the total end of personal existence.

Perhaps this response is not so surprising. We fear the unknown and we are unwilling to accept the truth, which can seem harsh, that we all will die, that our minds will die just as our bodies do. Just as our minds grow old and change as our bodies do.

This truth can seem a harsh one but it need not be, and the non-religious have, in the western tradition of humanist thought, powerful resources to draw upon when they turn their minds to these matters. Many philosophers have made the point that to worry about death is a fruitless exercise.

Death is nothing to us, said Epicurus in the 3rd century BC, because all pleasure and suffering consists in sensation, but death is the end of sensation. And Seneca, two centuries later, when asked if he did not fear death, made the point that death is not unmeritorious. After life is ended we are in the same position as before we were born. There was no pain then, no consciousness. So why fear it in the future?

Indeed, as Samuel Butler said in the 19th century, we can take joy in a life well lived, and take comfort from the fact that our achievements will survive us for a while at least, and that those we loved and gave happiness to in our life will remember us fondly when we are gone.

But, perhaps it is not death we fear but dying, though in this area too we can take comfort. Medical science has made such advances that the quality of care we can give the dying now may remove so much of their pain and suffering. Far more people die comfortably today than at any other time in human history because of the progress in palliative care that medicine has developed.

Just as essential than more resisted, in this country at least, is the growing recognition that we all should have the right to choose medical assistance in the ending of our lives, if they have become intolerable. Physician-assisted dying allows people to end their existence in dignity, at least in the more enlightened nations; and we can hope for changes in Britain soon perhaps, that will extend this to us all.

Bertrand Russell made the point that just because a good book eventually comes to an end, doesn't mean it wasn't a good book in the first place. Perhaps we can fill our life with meaning and purpose, and make them worth living with all the more intensity, because we know that like all things, they will have a final and irrevocable end.

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