Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Today I invite emails debating any of the following subjects: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, or natural resources. Read on for more context.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

After the television host Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News, he posted a video message to Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, he noted that, in his newfound “time off” he has observed that “most of the debates you see on television” are so stupid and irrelevant that, in five years, we won’t even remember we had them. “Trust me, as someone who's participated,” he added, which squares with my impression of his show––an assessment I feel comfortable making only because I have carefully documented its shoddy reasoning.

But then Carlson added: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.” I disagree, and not just because I intend to air your perspectives on those very subjects.

Last March, this newsletter invited debate about the war in Ukraine and ran your responses. On the whole, The Atlantic––and most of the mainstream media––has published a lot more total articles from people who are supportive of Western aid for Ukraine, as I am, than contrary perspectives. But as you can see, this newsletter has made it a point to highlight the smartest writing I could find from different perspectives. If you look, you can find additional examples of contrasting perspectives from across the U.S. media: in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Review, Vox, and beyond. There are all sorts of plausible critiques of the way the American news media has covered Ukraine. But “debate is not permitted” is demonstrably false.

On civil liberties, which I’ve championed on scores of occasions in The Atlantic, the notion that debate isn’t permitted is likewise preposterous. Few issues are debated more than the parameters of free speech, abortion rights, gun rights, transgender rights, pandemic rights and restrictions, and more. “Emerging science” is a bit vague, but surely debates about mRNA-vaccine mandates and artificial intelligence count. The Atlantic has repeatedly published entries in ongoing debates about demographic change. I understand corporate power to be a perennial topic of debate in journalistic organizations. As for natural resources, I’ve recently read about subjects including climate change, gas stoves, Colorado River water supply, oil drilling and pipelines, and plastics pollution.

Again, there are all sorts of critiques of the media that are plausible, on those subjects and others, but the particular critique that Carlson actually prepared and uttered is demonstrably false, so I find it strange that so many people reacted to it by treating Carlson as if he is a truth-teller. Lots of people in the American media work much harder at avoiding the utterance of falsehoods.

How to Mark May 1?

The law professor Ilya Somin commemorates it every year in a highly nontraditional fashion, arguing that we all ought to treat the traditional workers holiday as Victims of Communism Day.

Here’s his case:

Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so …

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

Meanwhile, at the World Socialist Web Site, David North published the speech he gave to open the International May Day Online Rally. His remarks included provocative statements about the war in Ukraine:

The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago. Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion—as if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russia—the war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.

In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to “organize Europe,” it was the ambition of US imperialism to “organize the world.” Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotsky’s analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: “The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table … the world does not organize itself.” But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.

Imperialism is objectionable but to me that premise leads to a starkly different conclusion: that the imperial ambitions of Russia and China ought to be resisted and that insofar as NATO or the United States helps Ukraine or Taiwan, we are reducing the likelihood of imperial conquest, not engaging in it.

More to Come on Trans Issues

Another batch of responses from readers should be coming soon. (If you missed the first batch, they’re here.) In the meantime, here’s a question from the Up for Debate reader Paul, who writes:

I have come to understand and accept that the concept of “gender” is largely a social construct, is not synonymous with “sex,” and indeed is not dependent upon or related to sex in any objective way. This notion—that gender and sex are independent attributes—is, I think, one of the ideas that is fundamental to understanding and accepting transgender people. For many young people, this idea seems simple and self-evident. Yet, for anyone who has lived any length of time in a culture where, for centuries, these two words held virtually identical meanings, separating them can be a real struggle.

It is with that thought in mind—the acceptance of the fundamental difference between gender and sex—that I approach the issue of transgender people participating in competitive sport with the following sincere question: Are sports competitions divided by gender or are they divided by sex? If sports are divided by sex, then it follows logically that gender should have nothing to do with the discussion. That is, it follows that transgender people should only participate in sports along with those of their same birth sex. On the other hand, if sports participation is divided along gender lines, then everyone of the same gender (obviously, by definition this must include transgender people) should be invited to participate, regardless of sex. Is there more evidence that sports are arranged as a competition between those of the same sex, or those of the same gender?

Provocation of the Week

At Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider writes that for a long time, she assumed that “with no material incentives in one direction or another, people will think more freely. A world in which no one has to worry about where their paycheck will come will be a world in which people are more likely to be courageous, and tell the truth more openly. And of course, it is obvious how financial incentives can distort truth-telling. This is, of course, the justification for academic tenure.”

Now she wonders if tenure may actually pave the way for more conformity. She explains:

First and foremost, it is not the case that free people will necessarily speak truthfully. No matter the romantic notions we like to hold about ourselves, humans do not deeply desire to “speak the truth”. There are more beautiful things to say, things that make us feel good about ourselves and our respective tribes, things that grant us hope and moral strength and personal significance—truth, meanwhile, is insufferably inconvenient, occasionally ugly, and insensitive to our feelings. But lies, by their very nature, can be as beautiful and emotionally satisfying as our imaginations will allow them.

Unfortunately, some degree of fidelity to reality is often required to prosper, and so occasionally we must choose truth. But that degree is dependent on our environments: lies are a luxury which some can afford more than others. Material freedom isn’t just the freedom to tell the truth, it is the freedom to tell lies and get away with it. As I’ve noted before, the lack of economic pressures can clear the way for independent thinking, but they can also remove crucial “skin in the game” that might keep one tethered to reality.

I suspect that on the whole, tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments. If keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be “concern-free”. Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers. (And in fact, we do see this playing out at universities. Professors are more protected from the pressures of the outside world due to tenure, yet they are uniquely subservient to the politics within their local university environment.) …

Academics actively shape their own environments. They grant students their doctorates, they help hire other faculty, they elect their department chairs. When an idea becomes prominent in academia, the structure of the environment selects for more of the same … When you are forced to coexist with the enemy, you develop norms which allow both parties to function with as much freedom and fairness as possible. Ideologically mixed groups will, in other words, tend to emphasize objective process because they do not agree on ends. This environment is fairly conducive to the pursuit of truth.

More uniform groups, on the other hand, will tend to abandon process—rushing instead towards the end they are predisposed to believe is true and willing to use dubious means to get there. This creates a hostile environment for dissenting members, and over time, there will be less of them and more uniformity, which will inevitably lead to an even more hostile environment for dissent. When a majority ideology develops, it is likely only to increase in influence, and when it is sufficiently powerful, it can begin competing with reality itself.

I retain hope that tenure does more good than harm but encourage faculty members who enjoy it to exhibit more courage to dissent from any orthodoxies of thought they regard as questionable.

By instilling patriotic values, he hopes to fend off decadent Western influences

Russian schools are trying to inculcate patriotic values to fend off decadent Western influences

Illustrations by Vartika Sharma

In October of 1858, John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet, were traveling near Avignon, France. She developed a cough, which seemed like just a minor inconvenience, until it got worse. Soon Harriet was racked with pain, not able to sleep or even lie down. Mill frantically wrote to a doctor in Nice, begging him to come see her. Three days later her condition had worsened further, and Mill telegraphed his forebodings to his stepdaughter. Harriet died in their hotel room on November 3.

Mill sat alone with her body in their room for a day. He was despondent over the loss of his marriage: “For seven and a half years that blessing was mine. For seven and a half years only!”

Later that same month, he sent a manuscript to his publisher, which opened with a lavish dedication to Harriet. He subsequently wrote that she had been more than his muse; she had been his co-author. The book was, he said, “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together.” The book’s “whole mode of thinking,” he continued, “was emphatically hers.”

The book was called On Liberty. It is one of the founding documents of our liberal world order. Individuals, the Mills argued, have the right to be the architect of their own life, to choose whom to marry, where to live, what to believe, what to say. The state has no right to impinge on a citizen’s individual freedom of choice, provided that the person isn’t harming anyone else.

A society organized along these lines, the Mills hoped, would produce a rich variety of creative and daring individuals. You wouldn’t have to agree with my mode of life, and I wouldn’t have to agree with yours, but we would give each other the space to live our fullest life. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice would be the rocks upon which we built flourishing nations.

The liberalism that the Mills championed is what we enjoy today as we walk down the street and greet a great variety of social types. It’s what we enjoy when we get on the internet and throw ourselves into the messy clash of ideas. It is this liberalism that we defend when we back the Ukrainians in their fight against Russian tyranny, when we stand up to authoritarians on the right and the left, to those who would impose speech codes, ban books, and subvert elections.

After he sent in the manuscript, Mill bought a house overlooking the cemetery where Harriet was buried, filled it with furniture from the room in which she’d died, and visited every year for the rest of his life. It’s a sad scene to imagine—him gazing down at her grave from the window—but the couple left us an intellectual legacy that has guided humanity another step forward in civilization’s advance.

Many good ideas turn bad when taken to their extreme. And that’s true of liberalism. The freedom of choice that liberals celebrate can be turned into a rigid free-market ideology that enables the rich to concentrate economic power while the vulnerable are abandoned. The wild and creative modes of self-expression that liberals adore can turn into a narcissistic culture in which people worship themselves and neglect their neighbors.

These versions of liberalism provoke people to become anti-liberal, to argue that liberalism itself is spiritually empty and too individualistic. They contend that it leads to social breakdown and undermines what is sacred about life. We find ourselves surrounded by such anti-liberals today.

I’d like to walk with you through one battlefield in the current crisis of liberalism, to show you how liberalism is now threatened by an extreme version of itself, and how we might recover a better, more humane liberalism—something closer to what the Mills had in mind in the first place.

In 2016, the Canadian government legalized medical assistance in dying. The program, called MAID, was founded on good Millian grounds. The Canadian Supreme Court concluded that laws preventing assisted suicide stifled individual rights. If people have the right to be the architect of their life, shouldn’t they have the right to control their death? Shouldn’t they have the right to spare themselves needless suffering and indignity at the end of life?

As originally conceived, the MAID program was reasonably well defined. Doctors and nurses would give lethal injections or fatal medications only to patients who met certain criteria, including all of the following: the patient had a serious illness or disability; the patient was in an “advanced state” of decline that could not be reversed; the patient was experiencing unbearable physical or mental suffering; the patient was at the point where natural death had become “reasonably foreseeable.”

To critics who worried that before long, people who were depressed, stressed, or just poor and overwhelmed would also be provided assistance to die, authorities were reassuring: The new law wouldn’t endanger those who are psychologically vulnerable and not near death. Citing studies from jurisdictions elsewhere in the world with similar laws, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that this “simply isn’t something that ends up happening.”

But the program has worked out rather differently. Before long, the range of who qualifies for assisted suicide was expanded. In 2021, the criterion that natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable” was lifted. A steady stream of stories began to appear in the media, describing how the state was granting access to assisted suicide to people who arguably didn’t fit the original criteria.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you’re in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

For example, the Associated Press reported on the case of Alan Nichols. Nichols had lost his hearing in childhood, and had suffered a stroke, but for the most part was able to live independently. In June 2019, at age 61, he was hospitalized out of concern that he might be suicidal. He urged his brother Gary to “bust him out” of the facility as soon as possible. But within a month, he applied for a physician-assisted death, citing hearing loss as his only medical condition. A nurse practitioner also described Nichols’s vision loss, frailty, history of seizures, and general “failure to thrive.” The hospital told the AP that his request for a lethal injection was valid, and his life was ended. “Alan was basically put to death,” his brother told the AP.

In The New Atlantis, Alexander Raikin described the case of Rosina Kamis, who had fibromyalgia and chronic leukemia, along with other mental and physical illnesses. She presented these symptoms to the MAID assessors and her death was approved. Meanwhile, she wrote in a note evidently meant for those to whom she had granted power of attorney: “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” She was put to death on September 26, 2021, via a lethal injection, at the age of 41.

[Read: Is aid in dying a better death?]

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reported on the case of a 23-year-old man named Kiano Vafaeian, who was depressed and unemployed, and also had diabetes and had lost vision in one eye. His death was approved and scheduled for September 22, 2022. The doctor who was to perform the procedure emailed Vafaeian clear and antiseptic instructions: “Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” Vafaeian could bring a dog with him, as long as someone would be present to take care of it.

About two weeks before the appointment, Vafaeian’s 46-year-old mother, Margaret Marsilla, telephoned the doctor who was scheduled to kill her son. She recorded the call and shared it with The Free Press. Posing as a woman named Joann, she told the doctor that she wanted to die by Christmas. Reciting basic MAID criteria, the doctor told her that she needed to be over 18, have an insurance card, and be experiencing “suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.” The doctor said he could conduct his assessment via Zoom or WhatsApp. Marsilla posted on social media about the situation. Eventually, the doctor texted Marsilla, saying that he would not follow through with her son’s death.

Personally, I don’t have great moral qualms about assisted suicide for people who are suffering intensely in the face of imminent death. These cases are horrible for individuals and families. What’s important here is that the MAID program has spilled beyond its original bounds so quickly.

When people who were suffering applied to the MAID program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules.

Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned (the overwhelming majority of them by lethal injection). In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths. The great majority of people dying this way were elderly and near death, but those who seek assisted suicide tend to get it. In 2021, only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible.

If autonomy is your highest value, these trends are not tragic; they’re welcome. Death is no longer the involuntary, degrading end of life; it can be a glorious act of self-expression. In late 2022, the Canadian fashion retailer La Maison Simons released a branding video that paid tribute to the assisted suicide of a 37-year-old woman afflicted with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissue. The video, titled “All Is Beauty,” was released the day after the woman’s death. In a series of lush images of her on tourist-destination beaches and at a dinner party, the video portrayed her death as “the most beautiful exit”—a sort of rich, Instagram-ready consumer experience that you might get from a five-star resort.

Back in 2016, critics of the MAID law saw this coming. They warned that soon enough, people in anguish and near death wouldn’t be the only ones given assistance to die. That warning turned out to be understated. Within a few years, Canada went from being a country that had banned assisted suicide to being one of the loosest regimes in the world.

Some people leading pathos-filled lives have begun to see assisted suicide as a release from their misery. Michael Fraser, though not terminally ill at age 55, had become unable to walk and suffered from an array of medical problems—liver disease and incontinence, as well as mental-health issues after what he described as prolonged sexual abuse as a child. His monthly check from the Ontario Disability Support Program was barely enough to live on. “Some of the struggles he talked to me about was this feeling of not being worthy,” the doctor who gave Fraser a lethal injection on July 2, 2022, told the Toronto Star. “There’s a social aspect to poverty, a hierarchy, that affected his psyche. He told me that it did.”

Vartika Sharma

As assisted suicide has become an established part of Canadian society, the complex moral issues surrounding the end of life have drifted out of sight. Decisions tend to be made within a bureaucratic context, where utilitarian considerations can come to dominate the foreground. Or as the president of the Quebec College of Physicians, which regulates medical practice in the province, put it, assisted suicide “is not a political or moral or religious issue. It is a medical issue.” A materialist cost-benefit analysis, for some people, crowds out affirmations that life is sacred, and socioeconomic burdens weigh heavily in the balance.

Tyler Dunlop is a physically healthy 37-year-old man who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and PTSD, and has no job or home or social contact. “When I read about medically assisted dying,” he told a local news website earlier this year, “I thought, well, logistically, I really don’t have a future.” Knowing that “I’m not going anywhere,” as he put it, he has started the process for approval under MAID. The New Atlantis published slides from a Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers seminar, in which a retired care coordinator noted that a couple of patients had cited poverty or housing uncertainty, rather than their medical condition, as their main reason for seeking death.

Health-care costs also sometimes come into play. According to the Associated Press, Roger Foley, a patient at a hospital in Ontario who has a degenerative brain disorder, was disturbed enough by how often the staff talked about assisted dying that he began recording their conversations. The hospital’s director of ethics informed Foley that if he were to stay in the hospital, it would cost Foley “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that he felt he was being coerced into death. “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist replied. “I told you my piece of this was to talk to you about if you had an interest in assisted dying.” (The hospital network told The Atlantic that it could not comment on specific patients for privacy reasons and added that its health-care teams do not discuss assisted dying unless patients express interest in it.)

These trends have not shocked Canadian lawmakers into tightening the controls on who gets approved for MAID, or dramatically ramping up programs that would provide medical and community-based help for patients whose desperation might be addressed in other ways. On the contrary, eligibility may expand soon. On February 15, a parliamentary committee released a set of recommendations that would further broaden MAID eligibility, including to “mature minors” whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.” The influential activist group Dying With Dignity Canada recommends that “mature minors” be defined as “at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.” Canada is scheduled to move in 2024 to officially extend MAID eligibility to those whose only illness is a mental disorder.

The frame of debate is shifting. The core question is no longer “Should the state help those who are suffering at the end of life die?” The lines between assisted suicide for medical reasons, as defined by the original MAID criteria, and straight-up suicide are blurring. The moral quandary is essentially this: If you see someone rushing toward a bridge and planning to jump off, should you try to stop them? Or should you figure that plunging into the water is their decision to make—and give them a helpful shove?

I don’t mean to pick on Canada, the land of my birth. Lord knows that, in many ways, Canada has a much healthier social and political culture—less bitter and contentious—than the United States does. I’m using the devolution of the MAID program to illustrate a key feature of modern liberalism—namely, that it comes in different flavors. The flavor that is embedded in the MAID program, and is prevalent across Western societies, is what you might call autonomy-based liberalism.

Autonomy-based liberalism starts with one core conviction: I possess myself. I am a piece of property that I own. Because I possess property rights to myself, I can dispose of my property as I see fit. My life is a project that I am creating, and nobody else has the right to tell me how to build or dispose of my one and only life.

The purpose of my life, in this version of liberalism, is to be happy—to live a life in which my pleasures, however I define them, exceed my pains. If I determine that my suffering outweighs my joys, and that things will never get better, then my life isn’t working. I have a right to end it, and the state has no right to prevent me from doing so; indeed, it ought to enable my right to end my life with dignity. If you start with autonomy-based liberalism, MAID is where you wind up.

But there is another version of liberalism. Let’s call this gifts-based liberalism. It starts with a different core conviction: I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself. The essential activity of life is not the pursuit of individual happiness. The essential activity of life is to realize the gifts I’ve been given by my ancestors, and to pass them along, suitably improved, to those who will come after.

Gifts-based liberals, like autonomy-based liberals, savor individual choice—but our individual choices take place within the framework of the gifts we have received, and the responsibilities to others that those gifts entail. (This understanding of choice, I should note, steers a gifts-based liberal away from both poles in the American abortion debate, endorsing neither a pure abortion-rights stance rooted in bodily autonomy, nor a blanket ban that ignores individual circumstances and pays no heed to a social consensus.) In our lives, we are citizens and family members, not just individuals and property owners. We have obligations to our neighbors as well as to those who will come after us. Many of those obligations turn out to be the sources of our greatest joy. A healthy society builds arrangements and passes laws that make it easier to fulfill the obligations that come with our gifts. A diseased society passes laws that make it easier to abandon them.

I’m going to try to convince you that gifts-based liberalism is better than autonomy-based liberalism, that it rests on a more accurate set of assumptions about what human life is actually like, and that it leads to humane modes of living and healthier societies.

Let me start with four truths that gifts-based liberalism embraces and autonomy-based liberalism subverts:

You didn’t create your life. From the moment of your birth, life was given to you, not earned. You came out bursting with the gift of being alive. As you aged, your community taught you to celebrate the prodigality of life—the birds in their thousands of varieties, the deliciousness of the different cheeses, the delightful miracle of each human face. Something within us makes us desperately yearn for longer life for our friends and loved ones, because life itself is an intrinsic good.

The celebration of life’s sacredness is so deeply woven into our minds, and so central to our civilization, that we don’t think about it much until confronted with shocking examples of when the celebration is rejected. For example, in the early 2000s, a German man named Armin Meiwes put an ad online inquiring whether anybody would like to be killed and eaten. A man came by and gave his consent. First, Meiwes cut off the man’s penis, and the two men attempted to eat it together. Then Meiwes killed and butchered him; by the time of his arrest, he had consumed more than 40 pounds of his flesh. Everything was done with the full consent of both participants, but the extreme nature of the case forced the German court system not only to sentence Meiwes to life in prison, but to face an underappreciated yet core pillar of our civilization: You don’t have the right to insult life itself. You don’t have the right to turn yourself or other people into objects to be carved up and consumed. Life is sacred. Humanity is a higher value than choice.

You didn’t create your dignity. No insignificant person has ever been born, and no insignificant day has ever been lived. Each of us has infinite dignity, merely by being alive. We can do nothing to add to that basic dignity. Getting into Harvard doesn’t make you more important than others, nor does earning billions of dollars. At the level of our intrinsic dignity, all humans are radically equal. The equal dignity of all life is, for instance, the pillar of the civil-rights movement.

Once MAID administrators began making decisions about the life or death of each applicant based on the quality of their life, they introduced a mode of thinking that suggests that some lives can be more readily extinguished than others—that some lives have more or less value than others. A human being who is enfeebled, disabled, depressed, dwindling in their capacities is not treated the same way as someone who is healthier and happier.

When such a shift occurs, human dignity is no longer regarded as an infinite gift; it is a possession that other humans can appraise, and in some cases erase. Once the equal and infinite dignity of all human life is compromised, everything is up for grabs. Suddenly debates arise over which lives are worth living. Suddenly you have a couple of doctors at the Quebec College of Physicians pushing the envelope even further, suggesting that babies with severe deformations and limited chances of survival be eligible for medically assisted death. Suddenly people who are ill or infirm are implicitly encouraged to feel guilty for wanting to live. Human dignity, once inherent in life itself, is measured by what a person can contribute, what level of happiness she is deemed capable of enjoying, how much she costs.

You don’t control your mind. “From its earliest beginning,” Francis Fukuyama writes, “modern liberalism was strongly associated with a distinctive cognitive mode, that of modern natural science.” In liberal societies, people are supposed to collect data, weigh costs and benefits, and make decisions rationally. Autonomy-based liberalism, with its glorification of individual choice, leans heavily on this conception of human nature.

Gifts-based liberals know that no purely rational thinker has ever existed. They know that no one has ever really thought for themselves. The very language you think with was handed down as a gift from those who came before. We are each nodes in a network through which information flows and is refracted. The information that is stored in our genes comes from eons ago; the information that we call religion and civilization comes from thousands of years ago; the information that we call culture comes from distant generations; the information that we call education or family background comes from decades ago. All of it flows through us in deep rivers that are partly conscious and partly unconscious, forming our assumptions and shaping our choices in ways that we, as individuals, often can’t fathom.

Gifts-based liberals understand how interdependent human thinking is. When one kid in high school dies by suicide, that sometimes sets off a contagion, and other kids in that school take their own life. Similarly, when a nation normalizes medically assisted suicide, and makes it a more acceptable option, then more people may choose suicide. A 2022 study in the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health found that in four jurisdictions—Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium—where assisted dying is legal, “there have been very steep rises in suicide,” including both assisted and unassisted suicide. The physician who assists one person to die may be influencing not just that suicide but the suicides of people he will never see.

[From the March 2010 issue: Ludwig Minelli crusades for “the last human right”]

Gifts-based liberals understand the limitations of individual reason, and have a deep awareness of human fallibility. Gifts-based liberals treasure having so many diverse points of view, because as individuals, we are usually wrong to some degree, and often to a very large degree. We need to think together, over time, in order to stumble toward the truth. Intellectual autonomy is a dangerous exaggeration.

Gifts-based liberals understand that at many times in life, we’re just not thinking straight—especially when we are sick, in pain, anxious, or depressed. My friend the Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who died of cancer last year, once said, “Depression is a malfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality.” When he was depressed, lying voices took up residence there, spewing out falsehoods he could scarcely see around: You are a burden to your friends; you have no future; no one would miss you if you died. This is not an autonomous, rational mind. This is a mind that has gone to war with its host.

In these extreme cases, human fallibility is not just foolish; it is potentially fatal. To cope with those cases, societies in a gifts-based world erect guardrails, usually instantiated in law. In effect the community is saying: No, suicide is out of bounds. It’s not for you to decide. You don’t have the freedom to end your freedom. You don’t have the right to make a choice you will never be able to revisit. Banish the question from your mind, because the answer is a simple no. Individual autonomy is not our ultimate value. Life and belonging are. We are responsible for one another.

You did not create your deepest bonds. Liberal institutions are healthiest when they are built on arrangements that precede choice. You didn’t choose the family you were born into, the ethnic heritage you were born into, the culture you were born into, the nation you were born into. As you age, you have more choices over how you engage with these things, and many people forge chosen families to supplant their biological ones. But you never fully escape the way these unchosen bonds have formed you, and you remain defined through life by the obligations they impose upon you.

Autonomy-based liberals see society as a series of social contracts—arrangements people make for their mutual benefit. But a mother’s love for her infant daughter is not a contract. Gifts-based liberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured the difference this way: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ ”

A society constructed on gifts-based liberalism does everything it can to strengthen the bedrock layer of covenants. The MAID program, by contrast, actively subverts them. It has led a mother to plead with a doctor not to end her son’s life. It has left a man enraged, feeling that he and his other family members were shut out of the process that led to the killing of his brother. The state, seeing people only as autonomous individuals, didn’t adequately recognize family bonds.

Families have traditionally been built around mutual burdens. As children, we are burdens on our families; in adulthood, especially in hard times, we can be burdens on one another; and in old age we may be burdens once again. When these bonds have become attenuated or broken in Western cultures, many people re-create webs of obligation in chosen families. There, too, it is the burdening that makes the bonds secure.

I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who told me that he and his three siblings had not been particularly close as adults. Then their aging dad grew gravely ill. His care became a burden they all shared, and that shared burden brought them closer. Their father died but their closeness remains. Their father bestowed many gifts upon his children, but the final one was the gift of being a burden on his family.

Autonomy-based liberalism imposes unrealistic expectations. Each individual is supposed to define their own values, their own choices. Each individual, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, is left to come up with their own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that; most of us can’t. Most of us are left in a moral vacuum, a world in which the meaning of life is unclear, unconnected to any moral horizon outside the self.

[Jeffrey Rosen: The Supreme Court justice who believed in America ]

Autonomy-based liberalism cuts people off from all the forces that formed them, stretching back centuries, and from all the centuries stretching into the future. Autonomy-based liberalism leaves people alone. Its emphasis on individual sovereignty inevitably erodes the bonds between people. Autonomy-based liberalism induces even progressives to live out the sentence notoriously associated with Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society.” Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville feared that this state of affairs not only makes

men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

As Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1897, this is pretty much a perfect recipe for suicide. We now live in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life. In short, autonomy-based liberalism produces the kind of isolated, adrift people who are prone to suicide—and then provides them with a state-assisted solution to the problem it created in the first place.

Gifts-based liberalism, by contrast, gives you membership in a procession that stretches back to your ancestors. It connects you to those who migrated to this place or that, married this person or that, raised their children in this way or that. What you are is an expression of history.

This long procession, though filled with struggles and hardship, has made life sweeter for us. Human beings once lived in societies in which slavery was a foundational fact of life, beheadings and animal torture were popular entertainments, raping and pillaging were routine. But gradually, with many setbacks, we’ve built a culture in which people are more likely to abhor cruelty, a culture that has as an ideal the notion that all people deserve fair treatment, not just our kind of people.

This is progress. Thanks to this procession, each generation doesn’t have to make the big decisions of life standing on naked ground. We have been bequeathed sets of values, institutions, cultural traditions that embody the accumulated wisdom of our kind. The purpose of life, in a gifts-based world, is to participate in this procession, to keep the march of progress going along its fitful course. We may give with our creativity, with our talents, with our care, but many of the gifts people transmit derive from deeper sources.

A few years ago, the historian Wilfred McClay wrote an essay about his mother, a mathematician, in The Hedgehog Review. One day he mentioned to her that H. L. Mencken had suffered a stroke late in life that left him unable to read or write and nearly unable to speak. His mother coolly remarked that if such a fate ever befell her, he should not prolong her life. Without a certain quality of life, she observed, there’s no point in living.

A couple of years later, she suffered a near-fatal stroke that left her unable to speak. She cried the most intense sobs of grief McClay had ever heard. It might have appeared that her life was no longer worth living. But, McClay observed, “something closer to the opposite was true. An inner development took place that made her a far deeper, warmer, more affectionate, more grateful, and more generous person than I had ever known her to be.”

Eventually McClay’s mother moved in with his family. “It wasn’t always easy, of course, and while I won’t dwell on the details, I won’t pretend that it wasn’t a strain. But there are so many memories of those years that we treasure—above all, the day-in-and-day-out experience of my mother’s unbowed spirit, which inspired and awed us all.”

She and her family devised ways to communicate, through gestures, intonations, and the few words she still possessed. She could convey her emotions by clapping and through song. “Most surprisingly, my mother proved to be a superb grandmother to my two children, whom she loved without reservation, and who loved her the same way in return.” McClay noted that her grandkids saw past her disability. They could not have known how they made life worth living for her, but being around her was a joy. After she died, McClay writes that “it took a long time to adjust to the silence in the house.” He concluded, “Aging is not a problem to be solved, my mother taught us. It is a meaning to be lived out.”

[Read: Why disability-rights advocates are fighting doctor-assisted suicide]

Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices have been constrained, reveal what is most important in life. Sometimes those whose choices have been limited can demonstrate that, by focusing on others and not on oneself, life is defined not by the options available to us but by the strength of our commitments.

If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that help people address difficulties all along the path of life. Autonomy-based liberalism is entrenching an apparatus that ends life. Gifts-based liberalism believes in providing varieties of palliative care to those near death and buttressing doctors as they forge trusting relationships with their patients. These support structures sometimes inhibit choices by declaring certain actions beyond the pale. Doctors are there for healing, at all times and under all pressures. Patients can trust the doctor because they know the doctor serves life. Doctors can know that, exhausted and confused though they might be while attending to a patient, their default orientation will be to continue the struggle to save life and not to end life.

John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed that a just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life—to family, friends, and nation, to the past and the future—properly put a brake on individual freedom of action. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.

The good of humanity is not some abstraction—it’s grounded in the succession of intimates and institutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member of the procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide a syringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give, merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see. Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Canadian Way of Death.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Whenever China launches a rocket and drops dangerous debris in a populated area, Western observers tend to feel superior because US and European launch sites are meant to adhere to stricter safety regulations and a bias toward public opinion. This is helpful context for the debate over SpaceX’s Starship launch site in…

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Ever since the defeat of Japan in World War II nearly 80 years ago, the United States has been the preeminent military power in East Asia. Today China is on the verge of matching or even eclipsing the U.S. military’s presence in the region, having marshaled its newly acquired wealth and technological prowess to expand the scale and capabilities of its armed forces.

The military balance between the U.S. and China in Asia is “very delicate and trending in an unfavorable direction in this decade for the U.S. and its allies,” Elbridge Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative, a policy-research organization, and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, told me. “We should regard ourselves in a dead-heat race against an incredibly formidable competitor and take nothing for granted.”

The implications for American security and global influence are immense. The U.S. has not confronted a potential adversary that is so close a peer in military strength or industrial capacity since the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and has not actually fought one since it battled the Axis powers in World War II. As China’s relationship with Russia deepens, Washington must also worry about fighting two nuclear powers simultaneously on opposite sides of the world.

A few years ago, the possibility that the U.S. and China could come to blows in the near term seemed far-fetched. That is no longer the case, as tensions have been rising over the status of Taiwan. A leaked memo recently grabbed headlines with a quote from Michael Minihan, a U.S. Air Force general, arguing that war with China could erupt in 2025. Hopefully, such predictions will remain hypothetical, because a war with China would be a catastrophe for both sides, win or lose.

[Read: Biden looks east]

But war is not the only concern. American military dominance in the western Pacific has underpinned the American economic and security system in East Asia. A shifting balance of military power in the region could strain American alliances by raising doubts about Washington’s ability or willingness to protect its Pacific partners. Washington would then struggle to sustain the region’s liberal order against intensifying Chinese pressure.

Beijing may be counting on exactly this. Sam Roggeveen, a former senior strategic analyst at Australia’s top intelligence agency, says that China’s leaders are banking on the United States to “eventually reduce its commitment to its allies in Asia, and at that point China will have a force available … to exploit that gap, and China itself becomes the dominant power.”

China’s ascent as a military power is therefore concerning not only because of the near-term risk of conflict over Taiwan, but also because it raises fundamental questions about America’s role in the region and the world. As China’s military might mounts, Washington will need to commit ever greater resources to maintain American primacy. The balance of power in the Pacific will, in the end, be determined as much by political will as by weapons systems. Will the U.S. have the fortitude to preserve its leadership in Asia? Or will it lose out to a more determined China?

The fact that Washington faces such a dilemma is an unfortunate irony. China has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the U.S. security system in Asia, which ensured the regional stability that made possible the income-boosting flows of trade and investment that propelled the country’s economic miracle.

Today, however, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping claims that China’s model of modernization is an alternative to “Westernization,” not a prime example of its benefits. Chinese leaders have come to see the chain of American bases and alliances in the region as a cage containing the country’s rightful rise into Asia’s premier power. (In a sense, Beijing feels the same way Washington would if a potential adversary had troops stationed in Canada and Mexico.)

That’s why China’s top leaders routinely affirm the attainment of a “world class” military as a key pillar of the nation’s great “rejuvenation,” or the restoration of its historic wealth and power. And China has invested heavily in building such a military. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Beijing’s military budget reached $219 billion in 2022, more than double what it was a decade earlier (though it is still less than a third of U.S. spending during the same year). With that investment, China has undertaken what Colby asserted is “an unprecedented, historic military buildup that is the largest since the Cold War, possibly since the Second World War.”

China’s navy has already overtaken its American counterpart to become the world’s largest by number of ships. According to the Pentagon’s latest assessment of China’s military, the Chinese air force—the world’s third-largest—“is rapidly catching up to Western air forces and continues to modernize with the delivery of domestically built aircraft,” including a bomber that will enhance its ability to use nuclear weapons. As of 2021, Beijing was constructing three fields with at least 300 new intercontinental-ballistic-missile silos, while its efforts to upgrade the country’s nuclear capabilities “exceed previous modernization attempts in both scale and complexity,” according to the report. The Pentagon projects that China will expand its warhead stockpile from some 400 today to 1,500 by 2035.

Technologically, too, the Chinese have been steadily whittling away at American advantages. Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies, wrote to me that China has made a priority of developing missiles to target ships and aircraft that fly faster and farther than similar U.S. weapons, such as land-launched ballistic missiles. Though China’s advantage is small, he added that “the bottom line is that we are engaged in a near peer or peer competition, and we are unlikely to dominate in all areas” of missile systems. The U.S. intelligence community was flabbergasted after China tested a high-tech hypersonic missile in 2021.

[Jonah Blank: China’s troubling new military strategy is coming into view]

The Chinese are amassing this force in the exact theater where war is most likely to break out—in maritime East Asia, probably around Taiwan—which is also not far from their home base. That location gives Beijing a substantial advantage. China does not (yet) project military power globally. Its interests, and its military assets, are largely concentrated in East Asia. By contrast, the U.S., as a global superpower with commitments all over the world, keeps only a portion of its military forces in Asia. In the event of a war, says John Culver, a retired CIA analyst who once served as Washington’s top intelligence officer for East Asia, “for the U.S., the game is to move what it doesn’t have in the theater and to get it there to be relevant to the fight, whereas China starts with this hypothetical war in your front yard.”

The United States faced a similar situation in the Pacific during World War II, when the Navy had to project power far from home and deep into hostile territory. Chinese strategists have prepared to counter just such a projection of force, or, at the very least, to raise its cost. China has developed advanced missile systems, for instance, that can smash U.S. bases in the region and target American aircraft carriers steaming across the Pacific at great distances from the Chinese mainland, potentially putting them out of action before they can make a difference in the fight.

Of course, hardware alone, even if crammed with technology, doesn’t automatically convey a military advantage. And it is difficult to really know how effectively Chinese generals and soldiers would deploy and operate the new weaponry. The People’s Liberation Army hasn’t fought a war since China attacked Vietnam in 1979 (and even then, its performance was hardly overwhelming). Xi began a significant reform of the PLA in late 2015 aimed at improving its ability to stage large-scale joint operations with its varied branches. In theory, this program would make the PLA a more formidable fighting force. But Culver cautions that Beijing is only about halfway through this process, and therefore “you kind of still have your pants around your ankles if you’re the PLA.”

Still, China’s military expansion has completely altered the rules of war in East Asia. “Back in the mid-1990s, when we had a Taiwan Strait crisis, all we had to do is show up with one or two carrier strike groups, and China had no answer to that,” Culver told me. “China now has many answers to that.”

For now, the U.S. may still have an edge. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recently conducted an extensive war game and concluded that in most scenarios, the U.S., with the help of Japan, was able to repel a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But not easily. “This defense,” the report reads, “came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers.”

In real life, such losses would take years to replace, Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser and co-author of the study, told me. “During that time, the United States would be weakened,” he said. The war “would have repercussions for U.S. defense strategy and security strategy for many years.”

Defeating China in such a conflict may not get any easier either. Cancian noted that “if current trends continue, the Chinese would be in a stronger position in 10 years than they are today.”

[David Frum: China is a paper dragon]

Washington policy makers are clear-eyed on this threat. The Biden administration, in its new national-security strategy, identified China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it” and pledged to “continue prioritizing investments in a combat credible military that deters aggression against our allies and partners in the region.”

Some security analysts worry that Washington’s response remains short on urgency. “We are moving in the right direction but too slowly and with inadequate scale,” Colby told me. “I personally think there is a tremendous discounting of what China is capable of.” Culver said that “we’re only now starting to do the kind of investments that we really need, and it probably won’t take full effect until the mid-2030s and beyond. We need to regain the advantages we usually have.” Unless the Biden administration makes the investments its strategy entails, Cancian told me, “at some point you are bluffing.”

But an effective response to China is not just a matter of budgets and bombs. To determine what type of force to deploy in the region, American leaders need to define what kind of power the U.S. can, or wants to, be in the future. “Part of the problem is the phrase ‘military balance,’” Stephen Biddle, a defense-policy specialist at Columbia, told me. There is no generic balance of forces that implies an absolute advantage. Rather, military strength depends on how well a force is suited to its mission. And as to what the U.S. mission should be in East Asia, Biddle said, “There is a big debate going on in the United States over this issue, and I don’t think it is resolved yet.”

Much will depend on what Washington is willing to spend on its military in East Asia. As China’s military capabilities advance, the United States will have to commit ever greater resources to countering them. The political benefit of retaining a decisive military advantage over China would have to be weighed against the mounting expense. Colby, in his recent book, The Strategy of Denial, wrote that “the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the U.S. economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength.” And even if the U.S. spent what it could, the Chinese government has ample room to follow suit. Though the Chinese military budget has grown, it remains below the global average at the equivalent of 1.2 percent of national output, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“In the Cold War, the United States could spend the Soviet Union into the ground in an arms race because our economy was bigger than theirs and it was growing faster than theirs, and we knew that they couldn’t keep up,” Biddle said. “That’s not true with China. They can keep up if they want to.”

And they almost certainly do. Roggeveen says there is “an imbalance of resolve” between the U.S. and China. East Asia is more important to China than it is to the United States on account of its proximity, and China wants a status there “that at the moment is still denied to it by the U.S.,” Roggeveen told me. “I think China is going to fight harder to get that status than the United States is prepared to fight to keep it.”

The costs and risks led Colby to conclude in his book that “even though U.S. military dominance over China is certainly desirable, it is simply no longer attainable.” Instead, he recommends that the U.S. stress “denial,” which “does not require dominance, only the ability to prevent the adversary from achieving its objectives.” In this case, “success for China is to subordinate the targeted state: defeat is to fail to do so.” Similarly, Roggeveen suggested that the U.S. and its allies should “focus on capabilities that can nullify China” and make “maritime Asia too dangerous for the massive Chinese surface fleet,” which would entail beefing up submarines and aviation.

Like it or not, the changing military equation seems destined to create an East Asia that is vastly different from the one that has existed for decades. The region would be split into zones, with a no-man’s-land between them, etched into the waters of the Pacific.

“We’re headed to a likely future of competing spheres of influence,” Biddle said: “a world where the Chinese will have a sphere of influence in which it becomes very expensive for the United States to enter,” but “the United States and its allies will also have spheres of influence … that are cost-prohibitive for the Chinese to enter in a sustained kind of way. You’ll have a more differentiated pattern of power and influence in the region in which there isn’t just one hegemon who can go anywhere they want and do whatever they want.”

From an American perspective, such an outcome would not be ideal. The U.S. would be less able to use the threat of military force to coerce Beijing to alter its policies or behavior. But the spheres-of-influence scenario is also not inevitable. China can comfortably sustain its military expansion only if its economy continues to strengthen—and this trajectory is by no means assured, because the country faces serious obstacles to its growth and technological advance. Meanwhile, if the U.S. stays the course and makes wise strategic decisions, it can still achieve its chief aims in East Asia, which include deterring possible Chinese aggression and maintaining its alliances and security order in the region. Even a regionally powerful China would, in that case, be contained.

What the changing military situation in Asia highlights most of all is the continuing transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, with all its new risks to American power and interests. Such a shift does not automatically mean that U.S. power will decline. But it does require new U.S. commitments.

The governor of Rwanda’s Western province told reporters that a search for more victims was underway following heavy rain Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.