A dementia tax would be a euthanasia bonus

Had Theresa May not on Monday summarily abandoned her manifesto threat to raid the savings of those who end up senile in care homes, I had planned to defend the idea here in terms that might have added to her woes. I’ll do so regardless. The so-called dementia tax would, over time, have become a euthanasia bonus. And that would be a good thing.

As I argued on this page two weeks ago, morality is the father of religion, and not the other way around. Secular morality can be largely explained by social Darwinism. For a society to prosper it requires an ethical framework that boosts, rather than encumbers, the tribe’s chances of survival; this explains previous or current taboos on (for example) homosexuality, suicide, incest or abortion, as well as ethical premiums placed on marital fidelity, ‘family values’ and civic responsibility, and the virtues of heroism in battle. Religious faiths latch on to these essentially secular values and clothe them in the garments of piety; and because in so doing such ideas are invested with divine authority, the church (or mosque, or synagogue) often gets stuck with rules that have become harmful, dragging its feet as secular morality moves on.

A difficulty, however, that both religious and secular morality share arises from what genetic science calls ‘spandrels’ (a term for small, circular architectural features, often decorated, whose insertion arises from the fact that if you support a platform upon an arch, you end up with curved/triangular spaces to the left and right of the top of the arch). Spandrels may be incidental to the structural engineering but have come along for the ride.