What is “meaningful consciousness”?

Anyone wondering where the culture warriors have chosen to fight should look no further than the human body. From abortion to transgenderism, the natural processes and limits of our embodiment have been assailed for many decades. Transhumanism is merely the technological extension of something that has already struck deep roots within the modern western moral imagination: the body is a set of problems that must be overcome. Or, to put it another way, being human is not something to be accepted but something to be transcended.

For all the utopian visions that this conjures up—endless life, superhuman strength, limitless intelligence—the reality is proving far more dystopian. In February, the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that the National Health Service is withdrawing life support from a patient, against the objections of his family. Robert Barnor is a 68-year-old stroke survivor who suffered severe brain damage and now is virtually immobile and requires dialysis twice a week. The hospital made what it calls “a clinical decision” to end this. As Wesley Smith points out at National Review, this is not a clinical decision but “a value judgment that the quality of Barnor’s life is not worth living or perhaps, that it isn’t worth the cost of care.”

Several important aspects of our modern world are relevant here. Some may immediately blame this on government-run healthcare. That is certainly the immediate context of this decision. But finite resources shape medical priorities in all systems and so the idea that private healthcare would not face analogous situations is naïve. Insurance companies can be just as callous as governments.

More significant is the manner in which the decision reflects the fragmented nature of moral thinking in the modern era of the cult of the expert. Night after night during the COVID pandemic the news anchors would introduce “experts” to comment on the day’s developments and policies. Not once did I ever see a moral philosopher, let alone a moral theologian, among these “experts.”

In short, medical professionals—those trained to save lives but not to explain why a particular life is worth saving—had become the major ethical arbiters of social policy by default. And here it is the same: life and death decisions being made by doctors, and perhaps by accountants, that shape how we think of life and what makes it worthwhile. We live in a technocratic world, divorced from any broader moral framework.

Then there is the open-ended nature of this decision, which could lead to a dramatic lowering of the threshold for such killings. Some will cry foul at this point, claiming that slippery slope arguments are too sloppy and too deterministic. Maybe. But the phrase used in the decision, “meaningful consciousness,” begs an obvious and most legitimate question: What criteria are being used to determine when consciousness is meaningful and when it is not? As conscious beings, everyone reading this article has a vested interest in the answer to that question. When will our consciousness cease to be meaningful and our lives therefore no longer worth preserving? We have a right to know.

Of course, the example of Mr. Barnor is not the only one where such pressure exists. The notion that passage through the birth canal makes all the moral difference between abortion and infanticide is arbitrary, as Peter Singer has argued for many years. For him, consciousness—a state typically not gained until two years into postpartum life—is key. It is therefore easy to see the “meaningful consciousness” idea applied to Barnor migrating in the wider medical community to infants and justifying infanticide. Scaremongering? Well, to repeat—what criteria can be used to stop such a development? And when set against the background of a culture where IVF and surrogacy are widely accepted, transforming as they do the parent-child relationship from unconditional love to conditional (even contractual) acceptance, there is a perfect storm brewing that concerns how we assess the value of individual lives.

As long as the technocrats make these decisions, they will be the ones shaping society’s moral imagination. And make no mistake—they will promise heaven but will deliver the very opposite. For the Barnor family, the same technocrats are already doing so.