Unsurprisingly, the recent parliamentary debate on assisted suicide was emotive. Andrew Mitchell spoke of surgeries in which he had tears pouring down his face while hearing about loved ones who died in pain and indignity. Kit Malthouse spoke of a constituent with lung disease who had committed suicide by lying on train tracks, “in lonely circumstances in the middle of the night”. Catherine Fookes spoke movingly of her father’s tragic death from cancer. 

All this was to be expected. The media commentary had for weeks introduced any discussion of it with phrases like “an emotional issue”, “charged feelings”, “strong reactions”, and “highly emotive”. 

I don’t think it can be said that pro- or anti- side of the assisted suicide discourse were more prone to emotive reasoning in recent weeks. Proponents of both camps have gone down this road, and perhaps that’s inevitable.  

That said, I received a fair few DMs, and noticed more than a fair few tweets, that read something like, “Wait till you see someone you love dying in pain from cancer”, or “I watched my Dad struggle in agony for his last breath, why do you want to force people to experience the same?”, and so on. 

There is an obvious reason why emotional firsthand accounts came easily to the pro- camp. It is much more cumbersome to give an account of having accompanied a loved one, over a course of many years, through a degenerative course of physical and mental suffering which ended with a natural death. It is also much harder to explain why such an experience left you as sure in your convictions against assisted suicide as all those who had similar experiences and reacted the opposite way. 

I can’t write further about my own personal experience without undermining the point I want to make. That is, I felt unable to respond to such people with what would have seemed like a steel-man argument I was keeping hidden in my back pocket. I was unsure about why I felt so unwilling to play “death of a loved one” top-trumps. But let’s just say I could have done. 

… the tradition of English reserve around public displays of emotion should not be understood as dismissive of the interior life and the depth of our feelings

It wasn’t because I’ve imbibed ancient YouTube videos about facts not caring about feelings. Quite the opposite, in fact. It might be deeply counter-cultural in an emotionally incontinent age, but the tradition of English reserve around public displays of emotion should not be understood as dismissive of the interior life and the depth of our feelings. It relates much more to a sense that the most significant things in life should only rarely be spoken of, precisely because they’re so important. 

There are two sides to this. The first is practical. It is extremely difficult to do justice to the seemingly infinite depth of vertiginous feeling that perpetually accompanies matters of life and death. This is why reading novels can feel so therapeutic, because it takes many thousands of words even to gesture toward the oceanic feelings involved in such things. Similarly, traditional English reserve when it comes to talking about religious belief reflects a deep conviction about the sacredness and solemnity of the subject matter, not its denial or repression. Silence speaks volumes. 

The second side element at play is moral. It feels indecent, somehow, to use an incredibly heartrending circumstance of one’s own life for the purpose of political argument. I’m not accusing anyone in particular of having done this over assisted suicide – I’m just saying I myself felt unable to speak in these terms, and maybe this was why. 

A dislike of emotional incontinence in political debates is about more than mere cultural conditioning around reserve and discretion. Alaisdair MacIntyre had his own definition of the word “emotivism”, which gets, I think, to the nub of the problem. For MacIntryre, emotivism is an attitude whereby all moral judgements are expressions of feeling: what feels right is therefore right, for you. This relates to what Charles Taylor calls “expressive individualism” – the mindset that it is simply good, in and of itself, for an individual to express their innermost selves. It is attitudes like these which have resulted in today’s sanctification of personal desire as morally superior to, say, collective responsibility, religious commitments, cultural expectations, marriage vows, etc.  

Again, a dislike of emotional incontinence is not about dismissing our emotional lives. It is about being mindful of the power our emotions have. The broader context of MacIntyre’s discussion is his diagnosis of our time as one in which there is no longer a shared tradition — no community consensus defining ethical orientation, no collectively perspicuous moral compass. This then means personal preferences become the most decisive thing in life, and the most persuasive argument in any ethical or political discussion is that which is most intensely expressed. The more emotive the language, the more compelling the case. The more affecting the circumstances, the more valid the position. 

An ethos doesn’t deny your feelings, it provides long-held ways of interpreting them

In a society with a collective tradition of moral orientation, however, the power of one’s own feelings would be situated in relation to commonly held goods. This is not about denying the power of feelings, it reflects deep wisdom about how this power needs to be orientated if the world isn’t to descend into a noisy rabble of argumentative emoting. An ethos doesn’t deny your feelings, it provides long-held ways of interpreting them, and outlets by which they can be expressed in relation to higher goods.    

Many have defined our age as indelibly marked by a therapeutic mindset. This doesn’t mean that everyone is in therapy, but rather that the underlying contentions of therapy are embedded in the way people today understand the world. This is shown particularly in the pursuit of personal happiness and fulfilment as ultimate goods, and the ever-present chimera of “wellbeing” being writ large in education, media, and the corporate world. It is shown also by the assumption that talking about your emotions is always good, and that it fosters the “processing” of those emotions. Maybe it’s the Englishman in me that wonders if, like ultra-processed foods, ultra-processed emotions are formed too quickly, and too inorganically to foster the genuine sustenance that comes from letting them ripen, quietly, in the context of a shared worldview.

In any case, the psychotherapeutic paradigm is shown particularly in the common trope of a “breakthrough moment”, a pivotal realisation, a painful moment whereby you could finally forsake some unwarranted social pressure against revealing your true self. It is in the re-enacting of such moments that today’s emotive expressivism is most apparent. Tears are a self-legitimising seal of authentic truth, the wavering voice is the most authoritative. We needn’t go too far back in history to remember when the opposite was the case. 

When those media commentators called assisted suicide an “emotive” or “highly charged” issue, they tellingly avoid particular constellations of words which would have framed things very differently: “morally significant”, “gravely important”, “huge ramifications on the vulnerable and infirm”, and so on. By saying the issue was “emotive”, they were saying this was about conflicting personal preferences, not our ability to respect a commonly held sense of the good. The problem is that many can’t even speak those other words today — because to do so would commit them to an ethos rooted outside themselves, to a certain tradition, and maybe even a cohesive belief system binding on the many and not just oneself.