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Woke academics have canceled David Hume’s work because of a footnote in which he expresses his doubts about the intellectual capacities of black people. Given that the Scottish skeptic, not without reason, refused to believe reports from the New World, and given that he traveled little, it is not absurd that he would think so. The Catholic world, which excluded Scotland, considered that all humanity descended from Adam and Eve and, therefore, did not develop racial hierarchies. In the Protestant world, things were much less clear – so much so that Locke believed in the rationality of a parrot, since a report from the New World reported that a Brazilian parrot was interviewed and, with the help of the translator, gave rational answers. The fact that a Brazilian parrot was a animal rational was yet another evidence contrary to Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy.

Nevertheless, if woke academics were capable of studying moral issues seriously, they would realize that Hume’s ethics contains a pillar of liberalism and utilitarianism: it was he who, during the Enlightenment, broke the taboo on suicide and voluntary death in general. His short posthumous essay “On Suicide,” published in 1777, laid the foundation for today’s euthanasia programs. Just as today, death was thought of as a solution for a man “ tired of life, and hunted by pain and misery”  who “bravely overcomes all the natural terrors of death”. If life is unbearable, it is perfectly rational to end it, and a prohibition can only be considered superstition. Here is perhaps the most bombastic part of the essay:

“It is impious, says the old Roman superstition, to divert rivers from their course, or invade the prerogatives of nature. It is impious, says the French superstition, to inoculate for the small-pox, or usurp the business of providence, by voluntarily producing distempers and maladies. It is impious, says the modern European superstition, to put a period to our own life, and thereby rebel against our creator. And why not impious, say I, to build houses, cultivate the ground, and sail upon the ocean? In all these actions, we employ our powers of mind and body to produce some innovation in the course of nature; and in none of them do we any more. They are all of them, therefore, equally innocent or equally criminal.”

The fallacy here is obvious, since one could defend murder under the same premise. Perhaps we could say that defending the construction of houses and the cultivation of fields does not imply defending the construction of houses anywhere, or that any field be cultivated, without regard to the legal system – likewise, killing someone is not intrinsically wrong, since it can be done in self-defense, or as a capital punishment, or in a war. However, in another part of the essay, he makes explicit the intrinsic devaluation of human life on which this form of reasoning is based: “ the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.” Within this framework, in which human life has no intrinsic value, the most we can do to defend it is by placing it in a social contract. However, participating in society is optional for the individual, and he can decide to withdraw from it by ending his own life. Hume includes this line of argument in the defense of suicide.

In the century following Hume’s, Goethe’s 19th century, modern science found out that suicide is far from being a purely individual issue, since the book The Sorrows of Young Werther made it a fad among young people and was perceived as contagious. Roughly speaking, it is as if Werther were a passionate Harry Potter who killed himself at the end, and some young fans of the book imitated not only Werther’s clothes and mannerisms, but also his suicide. The phenomenon became known at the time as Wertherfieber, or Werther Fever, and today the social contagion of suicide is called  “Werther effect”. To avoid it, journalism usually (or used to) cover up suicides, instead of publicizing them.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, however, we have seen that freedom to die was and is used as a prelude to coercion. After all, Nazi doctors did not start applying euthanasia out of the blue, without first advertising it. The government hired a film director (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) and made a pro-euthanasia film (Ich klage an, 1941), a melodrama in which a doctor is accused of murder for killing his sick wife who was suffering greatly and begging him to put an end to her misery. The Nazi euthanasia program presented itself as very compassionate. It had a conception of what were lives worth living and, in a merciful way, put an end to the indignity of some. It was also a way to reduce hospital expenses.

Nowadays, Canada is not embarrassed to show that MAiD, its voluntary euthanasia program, reduces health care costs. And there is at least one case reported in the press of a patient who chose euthanasia because he was going to be homeless and did not want to go back to being a beggar. Fortunately, Amir Farsoud survived and was interviewed by Liz Carr in the anti-euthanasia documentary Better Off Dead? (2024). Liz Carr, a comedian who suffers from a very debilitating disease, insisted on making this documentary for the BBC after the British state-run TV broadcasted Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (2011). The time gap between the two documentaries is striking. (By the way, her conversation with the Canadian doctor who has already killed more than 400 people is exemplary.) Obviously, the Western world does not call Canada Nazi, because, as we have seen, it suddenly decided that Hitler was evil because he invaded countries and was not democratic – not because he was a mass murderer.

The Canadian euthanasia is very different from the Nazi euthanasia because, in theory, Canadian euthanasia is voluntary and Nazi euthanasia is involuntary. Consequently, it becomes legitimate to manipulate vulnerable people into seeking death. One socially accepted form of manipulation is propaganda, which, when called the dissemination of ideas, is sacrosanct because of free speech. In times of economic crisis, widespread mental illness and the end of old taboos, it is not at all difficult to convince large sections of society that death is preferable to life. Someone who is born in an environment without taboos, who has a family that follows fashions and goes to a bad school will have no defense mechanism when faced with the death propaganda.

In this, we can once again return to Hume. One intriguing thing is how woke people in particular and the English-speaking world in general tend to deplore the conquest of Mexico by Spain, when Cortez’s men, not without bloodshed, put an end to a horrendous Empire that made colossal human sacrifices. Back in the 18th century, David Hume justified it this way, in the Natural History of Religion:

“The human sacrifices of the Carthaginians, Mexicans, and many barbarous nations[51], scarcely exceed the inquisition and persecutions of Rome and Madrid. For besides, that the effusion of blood may not be so great in the former case as in the latter; besides this, I say, the human victims, being chosen by lot, or by some exterior signs, affect not, in so considerable a degree, the rest of the society. Whereas virtue, knowledge, love of liberty, are the qualities, which call down the fatal vengeance of inquisitors; and when expelled, leave the society in the most shameful ignorance, corruption, and bondage. The illegal murder of one man by a tyrant is more pernicious than the death of a thousand by pestilence, famine, or any undistinguishing calamity.”

In other words, free speech is a supreme value because the heretic embodies all the virtues of society. Carthage and Mexico did not kill heretics; therefore, they did not purge the virtues from their societies – since they did not purge the virtues, those who killed infants and ripped out beating hearts must be virtuous. (As for the deaths of the Inquisition, they obviously do not compare, in number, to the Mexican sacrifices. Hume did not apply his skepticism to the anti-Catholic propaganda on which he was educated.) If the human sacrifices of the Carthaginians and Mexicans are acceptable, Canadian euthanasia is a piece of cake. And if the Inquisition would certainly prohibit the apology of euthanasia, we would have to assume that the most virtuous in society would be those who made the greatest apology for it. It is as if Hitler’s problem was that he did not convince the Jews to enter the extermination camps willingly after signing a paper consenting to their own death and that of their dependents.

An addendum

Well, this quick foray into the 18th century shows that Unitarianism and theological liberalism, discussed earlier (here and here), have a precedent in the Enlightenment (although British, David Hume was a star among the French Enlightenment thinkers).

Unitarianism, which in the 19th and 20th centuries spread theological liberalism in churches and synagogues in the United States, and which was propagated in a secular form by J. S. Mill, denies the Trinity to claim that Christ was a moral reformer ahead of his time. Thus, there may be many Christs throughout history, with Socrates being a precedent. The way to recognize such moral reformers is through repression by society: Socrates and Christ were condemned to death. So, if someone appears advocating sex with children and everyone wants to kill him, boom! He is a new Christ. The root of the sacralization of free speech for dissidents, therefore, lies in the valorization of the heretic as a well of virtues. On a superficial level, it is a revolt against common sense (since it welcomes any kind of idea that arouses widespread repulsion); on a deeper level, however, it is a revolt against the Catholic Church, which defines the heretic.