The title for this blog is a quotation from the BBC’s ‘Big Quotations’ programme in which Lord Jonathon Sumption said:

“All lives are not of equal value. The older you are, the less the value of your life because there is less of it left” ‘The Big Questions’, Series 14, Episode 1, @10 mins, 28 seconds[1]

Lord Sumption has a formidable intellect and is one of the pre-eminent law and history scholars alive today. These qualities do not amount to wisdom. Even allowing for the fact that Lord Sumption was constrained by the limitations of a TV appearance which does not permit nuanced development of arguments, at best it would have been wiser had he expressed himself differently, and at worst he appears to be inviting us to venture down a very dangerous path.

Sumption believes the government’s lockdown laws are disproportionate and unjustified. He believes the government should have taken into account that ‘all lives are not of equal value’ –in particular that the old are worth less than the young. Such arguments are horribly reminiscent of those of eugenicists and the Nazi argument that some lives are “not worthy of life”. (See also “War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” by Edwin Black). It is here that Sumption’s eminence as a lawyer does not assist him and may even count against him. Commercial lawyers are trained to develop the skill of making very fine distinctions and to hold in tension arguments which are subtly different from each other and then to tease out those differences to distinguish them from each other as if they were as separate as night and day. This is a difficult skill and one in which the best commercial lawyers excel. Sumption was one of the very best. In the rarefied atmosphere of a court this skill is priceless because it fits the forensic demands of the common law process which demands a minute examination of precedent. Outside the Courtroom the skill can become a hindrance where, for example, it blinds one to connections between arguments that one is holding separate in one’s mind. The BBC’s audience instinctively sensed that Sumption’s argument that “All lives are not of equal value” cannot be quarantined from policies which end in a very dark place.

If circumstances force us to make decisions which we know will result in the death of some and the survival of others, what criteria should we apply? That is a hard question and I have no neat answer. Of this I am sure: preferential treatment should not be given to a category of people on the basis that someone, even someone as eminent as Lord Sumption, regards them as ‘more valuable’ than others and treatment should not be withheld on the basis that some people are regarded as ‘less valuable’ than others[2].

I am a Christian and this informs my views on the issues raised in the BBC programme. To me, the crux of the matter is that all of us are of equal value to God, our creator and He places very great value on each and every one of us without distinction. I am reminded of the story Jesus told to a lawyer (Luke 10:25-37) about a half-dead person who was left naked on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho after robbers had beaten him up and stolen from him. Three people come across the body on the road but only one of them stops and looks after him. Jesus’ punchline in the story is ‘Go and do likewise’. Is it far-fetched to imagine that the one who stopped was the only one who saw that the half dead, naked victim was valuable?

  1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000rhfg/the-big-questions-series-14-episode-1 Accessed 18/01/21 ↑
  2. It is true that when medical resources exceed the demands put on them, doctors have to triage patients to ensure that the resources available are used appropriately. What is or is not ‘appropriate’ can be debated and ‘quality adjusted life years’ may have a part to play. What is being assessed in such a situation is the potential of the value of the treatment for the individual, not the value of the individual. Furthermore, that circumstance is different from the situation where a government is deciding what restrictions it should impose in order to limit the risk that the NHS might be so overwhelmed as to be unable to treat people in future. ↑