15 JUNE 1985, Page 18

EMBRYONIC DEBATE ABORTED

The press:

Paul Johnson on

Lady Warnock's relativism

THE Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times are in some respects better quality papers than the Times, but in one area it is still supreme — launching a public debate. It was the only paper to set a match to the moral and intellectual tinder of embryo research and get a real blaze. By publishing Lady Warnock's ferocious attack on the Enoch Powell Bill, the Times must have clarified the issue for many people. It did so for me, at any rate. Up to this point, I had not realised that the Warnock Report, at any rate in the mind of the chairman of the committee which produced it, was an unblushing plea for moral relativism. The title the Times put on her Philippic, 'Absolutely Wrong', could not have been more misleading: Lady Warnock does not believe in absolute right or absolute wrong: everything is relative to her. Those who make absolute distinctions between right and wrong are, in Lady Warnock's view, irrational and indeed dangerous people.

She even accuses them of 'rhetoric', thus falling into the common misapprehension that rhetoric is the use of emotional lan- guage to conceal poverty of argument. The mistake originated in America and is be- comming common here among the three- quarter-educated but it is sad to see the head of a Cambridge college making it too. Rhetoric is in fact the art of using language

persuasively. As its happened, by her own mistaken definition, Lady Warnock was

guilty of 'rhetoric' too, slinging highly charged words at her opponents with great energy. They were 'extremists', 'absolut- ists', people whose 'passions run high', guilty of 'fantasy' and 'moral simplicity'.

Lady Warnock thinks that to accept moral relativism is to 'defend the rule of law' whereas the 'absolutes' live in 'the jungle of moral simplicity'. Mr Powell and those who agree with him are on the side of 'moral fundamentalism', which she sees as 'a genuine threat', associated with 'dog- matism, intolerance and fanaticism'. It is all 'terrifying'.

If Lady Warnock would look again at the sad history of our times she would discover that the great catastrophies of the 20th century were created not by the dwindling band who support the absolute codes of Jewish and Christian teaching but precisely by the moral relativists — by those who constructed their own codes to fit what they conceived to be the needs of their societies. Lenin called his 'the revolution- ary conscience'; Hitler's was 'the higher morality of the Party'; one led straight to Auschwitz, the other to the Gulag. There have been many post-war tyrannies which have devised relativistic moral codes — 'Zambian humanism', 'guided democracy' (Indonesia), `ufamaa' (Tanzania), 'consci- encism' (Ghana), 'Negritude' (Senegal) and `Mobutuism' (Zaire). All have become the cover for wickedness of one kind or another. Surely the one great lesson of our century is that man is not to be trusted to devise his own fundamental rules: that he needs a lawgiver external to himself. It was ironic that, at the very time Lady Warnock was identifying medical research with values to be equated with 'the sanctity of human life', the Brazilian police were exhuming the supposed body of Dr Mengele, another moral relativist who set a high value on 'research'.

'To my wine merchant I leave my liver.' Needless to say, Lady Warnock did not have to wait long to find enthusiastic support from a member of the Anglican

hierarchy. The Archbishop of York promptly wrote to the Times a long letter

warning of the 'dangers of moral absolut-

ism' and setting out the case for a relativis- tic view of morals. Dr Habgood asserted

that 'most contentious ethical issues' fell into a 'murky area' where 'principles con- flict' and 'differences are largely a question of degree'. There had to be 'give and take'.

We must all, the Archbishop said, use 'the powers God has actually given us' — i.e., make up our own minds. I must say, I find Dr Habgood's view of morals chilling and, coming from a Christian prelate, extraor- dinary. The entire Pentateuch, and espe-

cially the Decalogue, are emphatic asser- tions of absolute morality; both the Jewish halaka and Christian moral theology are based on the assumption that rabbis and divines can employ the absolute moral teaching of the Judaeo-Christian texts to provide the answers to our moral dilem- mas. Our legal system is empirical only up to a point: in all the most important areas it has been, up till now, based on natural and divine law. That, incidentally, is why the Archbishop of York, among other Angli- can prelates, has an ex officio place in our legislature.

Roman Catholic prelates, by a historical anomaly, do not, and that seems all the odder now, since they still publicly sub- scribe to the notion of divine law — that is, absolute moral law — as the foundation of our public system of morals. This was reasserted, I thought, very skilfully by Cardinal Hume, Archbishop of Westmins- ter, in another contribution to the Times. Unlike either Warnock or Habgood, the Cardinal made the vital distinction be- tween ends and means. Treating a human embryo as though it were a piece of inanimate matter, and justifying such an act on the grounds that we need medical research, is a classical case of using the end to justify the means. All very elementary, and it is odd that Cardinal Hume should have to reiterate such a moral truism. He was also right to point out that Warnock's '14-day rule' on embryos is not to be trusted. We got similar reassurances over abortion: and abortionists are now des- troying perfectly legal, healthy creatures which have been 28 weeks in the womb and are liable to be slung in the dustbins, still screaming. The Cardinal was right to con- clude: 'The abandonment of objective moral principles and the dogmatism of permissiveness have combined in our day to undermine society. This is our crisis.' Indeed it is. Nor is it a crisis which our political system seems capable of solving. Although the Powell Bill has the support of a big majority of MPs, it was destroyed on a technical point engineered by the leader of the Commons hobbledehoy element, Denis Skinner. Warnock, Habgood, Skin- ner: there's a blessed trinity for you. I hope her Ladyship and his Grace like the com- pany they are keeping.