Column

It’s time to broaden our moral horizons

Frustrated by the limitations of the naked eye Galileo invented the telescope and, with boosted vision, scanned the moon to lay bare an unimagined world. Inspired by such ingenuity the science of astronomy has developed beyond recognition, and now claims to be about as near as can be to ‘seeing’ the beginning of time.

Such progress is truly amazing, but sadly has not been emulated in most other areas of human life. Certainly it is not parallelled where it really matters — there has never been a Galileo in the study of practical compassion.

There’s an earthquake in a foreign land — we watch on TV as someone else struggles to help. There’s a flood in Western Europe — if we have relatives there perhaps we will make a donation. A child from our town needs money for a life-saving operation — we meet her, we are anxious for her, we probably help in some way. Our daughter is dying — we are desperate, we will do anything to find a solution. The closer the trouble the more we are morally concerned. The more distant the problem the less obliged to help we feel.

This natural human reaction is particularly intense in health care. Traditionally doctors and nurses have acted out of duty to ‘their’ patients. When human beings come to depend intimately on you it can be impossible to refuse them. But now, with the costs of health care made more obvious by the latest administrative changes, such ‘heroic care’ is falling out of favour. Blinkered duty to the person in your charge is seen as wasteful if there are others who might benefit more from your assistance out in the cold. The trend is towards the broad view, towards saving the overcrowded life raft on the horizon before rescuing the single drowning man in the harbour.

Unlikely as it may sound, in the current storm over the redesign of the NHS we may be witnessing the emergence of a ‘moral Galileo’. And just as Galileo met fierce opposition from the Church, we might also be resisting a major advance in human understanding as we object to the flaws of a prototype ‘moral telescope’

Use of the telescope to combat moral myopia can mean that help is reduced for some people closest to home. And to many in the NHS this appears blatantly callous. But perhaps, with time and patience, the broader view can be extended beyond the walls of the NHS. If we chose to invest in more powerful moral telescopes, then even the most distant atrocities might come within touching distance. People without homes, those forced to work for a pittance just to survive, Somalians desperate for grains of rice, isolated old people -- we know now they are there but we do not really see them. A decent moral telescope would bring them all, irresistibly, into view. As Galileo changed our view of the solar system, so a moral telescope could render obsolete planning which takes account only of the health of selected groups of people. Advance the moral technology, and distance will no longer be an object.