Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in the news that test our moral and ethical principles to the limit, forcing us to question ourselves and what we think to such an extent that it becomes impossible to be sure of what is right? I can never understand the high-minded righteousness and full-blown convictions of the panellists on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, who each week are given a topical issue and who then spend 45 minutes tossing it about, testing the pros and cons and questioning a group of often baffled witnesses who are invited on to the programme to provide evidence for differing points of view. I always come away more confused than I was before listening, as if adopting or hanging on to moral certainty in the face of such complexity is a barrier to understanding rather than a help.
In contrast, even a half-decent radio drama that plays around with questions of how we should live, what we should live by, can help us to see things a bit more clearly, using fiction to explore worlds beyond our experience and encouraging us to think more broadly before settling on a point of view. As the barrister Lord Falconer said on Radio 4 this week: ‘The power of a play that reveals what it’s actually like for people who feel utterly abandoned by a law that appears to have no understanding is huge.’
He was talking to Deborah Bowman, professor of medical ethics and law at St George’s Hospital in south-west London, on Test Case: Debbie Purdy, a discussion between experts about the law on assisted suicide, or rather the lack of clarity about that law.
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