Behold the Lord High Executioner

There’s nothing like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan to brighten your day. Their beloved operettas make light of various moral dilemmas faced by their characters. Similarly, the satire of Blackadder humorously explores historical social issues, many of them unpleasant. Plato was also a bit like that. He posed questions about morality through Socrates, his Republic protagonist, in a conversational rather than a didactic style, partly because he struggled to perfect any answers. I feel inspired to pose a morality question of my own, but I shall eschew operettas and aim for something between Blackadder and Plato … Now there’s a thought – Rowan Atkinson taking off Plato. If he ever does, I want royalties for the idea!

My question is, which is the greater moral sin – causing death unintentionally or deliberately? I’m almost tempted to leave it there and see how people tackle it. If I were on the receiving end of such a question, I’d have to ask for more details before I could respond meaningfully. Who or what is doing the dying and who or what is the cause/causes? What was the manner of the deaths and, before that, the lives? Why did they die / were killed? Does the fact that I need to know such details before passing judgment reveal underlying flaws in my own morality – for example, do I think causing death can be justified in some circumstances?

The answer to that last question is ‘yes’. Unequivocally. You might think I’m thinking of the Government’s Assisted Kill Bill, or their facilitating abortions up to full term. Nope. I’m not against euthanasia in principle, but the bill currently before Parliament is a travesty of democracy, honesty and safeguarding. As for the legal or moral right to abort a foetus, I’ve always vacillated. But full-term babies? That’s infanticide.

What my primary morality question refers to is the deaths of non-humans … the assassination of Keir Starmer perhaps. But no. I’d actually prefer to see him tried by a jury of farmers, ‘terfs’, free-speech advocates, Chagos islanders, Zionists, small-business owners, property landlords, Northern Ireland veterans, oil drillers, greenbelt advocates, The Donald and me. One non-human in my thoughts (other than Starmer) is the empress wasp that I found scuttling up my picture window in the drawing room the other day. An entomologist would have identified it as a queen wasp. But it was bigger than any I’d seen before, so I promoted it, then took off my slipper and squashed it with a satisfying cross between a ‘pop’ and a ‘squelch’. It dropped onto the floor, listless but not quite lifeless, yet. If I hadn’t killed it, it would have produced any number of offspring that could have stung people. I’ve been stung a couple of times. Not pleasant. Wasps also eat my plums and greengages. Loads of people kill loads of creepy crawlies all the time, and they never make the news or excite the League Against Common Sense.

Now we turn to the other non-human that met its end at the hands of humans, albeit that was not their intent. I’m referring to Gold Dancer, the beautiful gelding that fell at the final hurdle at Aintree, broke his back, but recovered sufficiently to struggle under the whip to victory. The jockey dismounted immediately and vets rushed to help, but there was nothing they could do. The horse was put down. Cue outrage and calls from the Be Kind to Animals and Illegal Immigrants brigade to ban horseracing.

I went to the Cheltenham Festival once. Gold Cup day. It was a business jolly and I was playing the dutiful wifey. I wore a hat. Thankfully there were no injuries or fatalities that day, and I won the Gold Cup. I mean, I didn’t win the actual Gold Cup; I just placed a bet on the nag that did win. It wasn’t odds-on favourite by any means, but it had a name derived from somewhere in the Lake District and caught my eye. Reminded me of when I went to Walthamstow dogs and placed a bet on the cutest greyhound with a curly tail. He also won. Greyhound racing is another sport that the League Against Common Sense want to see banned.

The thing is, to be morally consistent, if we ban horse/dog racing because sometimes animals are hurt or killed, surely we should also outlaw rat poison, mouse traps, insecticide and slippers that deliberately kill other non-humans. Should we ban deer culling, even though deer-kills are quick and painless and relieves the animals from the slow suffering of starvation. Should we ban Halal and Shechita slaughter because livestock is killed without being stunned first and the animals feel pain and fear. The fact that I’ve suggested this, am I guilty of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ and, if so, why not anti-Jewish hostility? That isn’t a digression but another example of lack of moral consistency.

Now, a warning. If we ban horse racing and dog racing and trail hunting, and meat eating, countless animals will no longer have a purpose and will be subject to mass slaughter. And you thought the piles of animal carcases during the foot-and-mouth catastrophe was harrowing. This leads to the question: is it morally preferable to keep animals for human servitude or kill them because they’re ‘useless’?

And did you hear the one about the silly bism who ‘rescued’ a crayfish from a restaurant – where it was kept as a pet, not a menu-item – and threw it into the sea where it died because of the sudden change in water temperature? Its crayfish-friend, with whom it shared a tank, then died, probably from grief.

The point I’m making is that a rush to moral judgment (the flames fanned in echo chambers) leads to wrong decisions and moral inconsistencies and is a dangerous thing. The other point is that non-humans need humans as much as humans need (some) non-humans.

Restating my original question – which is the greater moral sin: causing death unintentionally or deliberately? – I think Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado would have had a field day with it. After all, it was his very humane endeavour:

"To make, to some extent

Each evil liver

A running river

Of harmless merriment."