Assisted suicide: how would Ebenezer Scrooge have voted?

Near the start of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens describes Scrooge as ‘a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone’. When a pair of portly philanthropists assail Scrooge on Christmas Eve, looking for a charitable donation, he says something that proves the description accurate. On being told some would rather die than go to the workhouse, Scrooge says, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population’.

It is a moment of heart-stopping heartlessness. In the peerless Muppet adaptation, Beaker and Doctor Bunsen Honeydew shake their heads in disbelief and consternation. This moment has signalled Scrooge’s unmistakeable depravity to generations of readers, staking out just how far his inhumanity goes — and therefore just how drastic his redemption will need to be.

This Christmas, however, will be the first time since Dickens wrote those words that Scrooge’s mentality has begun to find its way into our government legislation. Even if the proponents of assisted suicide see it as an advance in compassion, dignifying individual autonomy, we have crossed a border into Scrooge territory. Now, ‘they had better do it’ no longer unambiguously signals man’s inhumanity to man: it is the watchword of those who count themselves on the side of the angels.