One of the most striking revelations from the debate on Assisted Suicide is the sheer lack of comprehension among the Bill’s proponents, including those who drafted its deeply flawed text. Astonishingly, they fail to understand what they’re asking Parliament to legislate for. The groaning reactions to Danny Kruger’s pitch-perfect speech in the House of Commons on Friday 29 November—where he rightly called the Bill out for what it is, a matter of suicide—highlight a worrying truth: too many MPs either fail to grasp or willfully ignore the concrete issues and consequences at stake. Make no mistake, the Bill is about suicide. It amends the Suicide Act 1961 and explicitly deals with assisting adults in “ending their lives”—a reality spelled out in its very title.

There is, without question, a hefty dose of bad faith baked into this broken logic. What stands out even more glaringly, however, is the eagerness of many parliamentarians to retreat into a moral cocoon built on tone-policing and the veneer of “niceness” or “kindness”. This tendency is spectacularly illustrated by a range of comments during the debate. Take Kim Leadbeater, for instance, who made it a personal crusade to urge everyone to “be careful” with their language—a familiar refrain of hers. Or Lewis Goodall, clutching his pearls at what he described as the “inflammatory language” of certain opponents of the Bill.

This transparent strategy is deployed unfailingly whenever legislation of moral significance or sensitivity is put forward—a pattern that has persisted for decades. It is not confined to the UK, either. Across Western countries, there is a pervasive reluctance to use precise and honest language when debating iterations of Assisted Suicide laws. The same evasion has played out repeatedly in discussions on other delicate topics, abortion being a prime example.

This is hardly a new problem, as countless intellectuals throughout history have observed. Michel de Montaigne grappled with a strikingly similar issue when reflecting on the pervasive fear of death within his Christian society. In the Essais’ chapter “To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die”, Montaigne meditates on “death [which] is our journey’s destination, the object on which we must set our sights. If it frightens us, how can we take a single step forward and not be worried sick? For common folks, the solution is not to think about it. But what kind of primitive stupidity leads them to such crude blindness? No wonder they usually find themselves trapped. These people are easily scared when we bring up death. Most cross themselves upon hearing the word, as they do with the devil’s name. Do not expect them to draw up a will, where death is mentioned, unless a doctor has handed them a death sentence. At which point, caught between pain and fright, Lord knows how they can keep a clear head to deal with it!”

Well, big surprise, the “common folks” are back at it. Except that, this time, they have a whole pseudo liberal worldview that gives them carte blanche for gaslighting people about their actions and intentions. It is well summarised in the motto “Be Kind” that is agitated in the public sphere ad libitum. We know perfectly well the latent tyranny encapsulated in this one-trick pony, the word-play veiling easy-going, mild benevolence, which is asserted as paragon for basic human decency. As Robert Wyllie brilliantly summarises in his essay “Against Humanity” (2024), “Today’s loudest liberals are simply trying to see how much mileage they can get out of ordinary humanity, insisting that petty and even agentless cruelties are the slippery slopes to the greatest moral disasters of all time.”

Again, this issue is far from confined to these shores. Yet, as a French expat, I can’t help but wonder why the Brits are so averse to calling a spade a spade and challenging rhetoric that cloaks so much harm. I doubt this reluctance is a symptom of the famous British phlegm, that stiff-upper-lip stoicism so often celebrated. If it were, it would imply that some MPs—including those who were undecided and thus bore a moral duty to oppose the Bill—chose to back a deeply flawed text simply because stirring the pot is considered impolite. Surely, that can’t be the case—or can it?

Let us not forget that “nice” wasn’t always a compliment. The word traces its origins to the Latin nescius, meaning “unaware” or “ignorant”. This sense carried over into English when the term was borrowed (via French) in the early 1300s. For nearly a century, nice was used to describe someone “stupid, ignorant, or foolish”. That we use it as shortcut for polite and soft pleasantness shouldn’t obscure the fact that one also has a moral duty to appropriately speak the truth. In that sense, the “nice” or “kind” thing to do, as Kruger and other MPs demonstrated today, is to show courage in front of the greatest evils, whether they come in a polite form or not.

Pithily, Kruger concluded by reminding his peers that “the Rubicon was a very small stream; but on the other side lies a very different world, a worse world, with a very different idea of human value.” In this world, the state gives itself a licence to do harm, and it does so with the soft authoritarianism of semantic and bureaucratic games.

We need more than liberal wishy-washy notions of humanity—because justice, true justice, cannot be substituted by the hollow platitude of merely “being kind”. We need higher virtues; we need to reclaim an entire world of concepts that feel too weighty to exist in the sugary, dissolving cloud of “kind humanitarianism”. Otherwise, how can we meaningfully discuss the ethics of care in any form—whether at the end of life, the beginning, or anywhere in between?