Kathleen Stock, born-again conservative
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” Albert Camus once wrote. For philosophers like Camus, death was viewed as a private affair; we must all decide, for ourselves, whether our existence has meaning – whether life is worth living. For Martin Heidegger, death was the absolute temporal limit of our own experiences, not anybody else’s. To be, or not to be? – that famous question is a private one, offered in a soliloquy. No one else on stage is meant to hear it.
The philosopher Kathleen Stock does not agree. In Do Not Go Gentle, a polemic against the legalisation of assisted dying, Stock emphasises that we die, and live, surrounded by other people, to whom we are united in bonds of obligation and love. “A man who retires from life does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good,” that childless bachelor David Hume was able to assert. “He wasn’t thinking of those who have to pick up the pieces afterwards,” Stock retorts.
We are, in this view, too forgetful of the essentially communal nature of being human. “Modern hyperliberal times,” Stock argues, “encourage us to think of the self as a thing with clean edges, metaphysically separated at birth from the vaguely threatening masses of other people.” Those she terms “hyperliberals” think they can and should have anything they like on demand: entertainment, consumer products, their own death… or – of course – gender-affirming care.
This is not a book about gender – so it would be uncharitable to assess it primarily in the light of Stock’s earlier work on the metaphysics of gender and her activism in support of gender-critical feminism, for which she has become a highly controversial public intellectual. Still, it’s hard not to see how her previous work has led her to the question of assisted dying.
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Stock’s origin story runs something like this. For decades, she was a seemingly mild-mannered philosophy lecturer at the University of Sussex: a specialist in the unfashionable subdiscipline of analytic aesthetics, who argued (still more unfashionably) for author intentionalism – the view that the meaning of a literary work is exactly what its author intended. Then, in the mid-2010s, Stock started posting about gender. Quite rapidly, a new Stock was born. This Stock was a controversialist: belligerent, rarely offline and determined to translate her work on gender identity into real-world victories against the apparent scourge of “gender ideology”. To her supporters, though, she was the fearless, lucid champion of a feminism grounded in the “real world” of biological sex. In 2021, the controversies around Stock came to a head following a campaign by a group of student activists to force her out of Sussex; they contended her presence there made queer students feel unsafe. Meanwhile, Stock, herself a lesbian, found her own safety threatened by activists. Intimidation and death threats meant the police asked her to stay away from campus. She received support in parliament and the press, but not much from colleagues in her union branch or her employer. She resigned.
Having left academia, Stock is now firmly established in the right-wing commentariat and there will be people reading this review for whom anything but the most hostile engagement with Stock remains unacceptable. But as a trans-inclusive leftist, I was pleasantly surprised by Do Not Go Gentle. Stock is one of the last of a dying breed: an actual conservative intellectual, not just someone like Matt Goodwin who plays one on TV.
The occasion for the book is of course the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, or the assisted dying bill, which was passed in the Commons last year and had seemed poised to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults. It has since stalled in the House of Lords. Stock writes as if the bill’s passage is inevitable, which most observers would say it no longer is. But her book is not invalidated by the inability to establish assisted dying in this country; her criticisms are aimed not only at a hypothetical British National Death Service, but also at actually existing regimes in Canada, Oregon and the Netherlands.
Stock’s case against assisted dying hinges on two ethical “personas”, through whom she ventriloquises the position she is arguing against: the “Freedom Lover” who thinks we ought to have the right to die for its own sake, and the “Merciful Helper”, who thinks that, sometimes, the only way to alleviate another’s suffering is to help them die. Stock is sympathetic to both the Freedom Lover and the Merciful Helper – but neither, in her view, makes a satisfactory case.
Freedom-based arguments might plausibly give one the right to non-interference when it comes to one’s own death: what philosophers, after Isaiah Berlin, call a “negative freedom”, to be free from something. I might well have the right to allow myself to die by my own volition without anyone else stopping me. But it is much harder to use these arguments as the basis for a “positive freedom” – to be free to do something – when others are involved. Why, after all, should I have the right to oblige another – whether a private individual or the state – to kill me, just because I want it?
Perhaps the answer here will seem obvious: some people, whether because of injury or illness, have lost this negative freedom (non-interference) in the matter of their own death. While any able-bodied person might, in principle, be able to find some way of ending their own lives, a severely disabled person might not. But then, note, the Freedom Lover is leaning on Merciful Helper-type arguments: they are arguing that an assisted dying service should be set up because it would help alleviate certain people’s suffering.
So the Freedom Lover needs the Merciful Helper. This is a problem, since Merciful Helper arguments don’t really support establishing an assisted dying service at all. Stock is not against euthanasia in all instances: it might sometimes, she tells us, be the most compassionate thing for a doctor, or a loved one, to help a terminally ill patient to die. But, in practice, an assisted dying service is not, Stock emphasises, the same as legalised euthanasia for the terminally ill; assisted dying services do things like provide patients with suicide pills, which patients then take themselves. Patients tend to qualify for an assisted death not because they are dying, but because they are in pain – and since pain is irreducibly subjective, this means that the qualification criteria are inevitably broad. An assisted dying service, then – and this is based on evidence from actually existing assisted dying regimes – ends up also being used by, for instance, healthy older people who fear becoming a burden to relatives or individuals who are depressed or struggling with the effects of poverty. Far from being merciful, then, there is evidence that assisted death services are instigated as an alternative to investing in welfare, therapy or palliative care. Mercy, real mercy, is a matter of seeing people both compassionately, and for who they are: an assisted dying service, strapped for funds, would only see people as applicants, as entries on a form.
Beyond the well-intentioned, but confused, Freedom Lovers and Merciful Helpers, then, Stock discovers much darker forces. The first is a kind of Malthusian utilitarianism. Reading between the lines, one might conclude that in the case of the assisted dying bill, Westminster seems willing to countenance establishing a National Death Service because helping certain sick or disabled people to “make the autonomous decision to die” (a decision that might legally be suggested to them by their doctors first) seems like it would be cheaper than keeping them alive. And the second, of course, is the “hyperliberal” modern self, who wants everything on demand – death no less than gender.
Here, Stock’s case against assisted dying risks becoming simplistic. I agree that the bill ought to be a non-starter – probably any attempt to establish an assisted dying service in the UK right now would be a disaster – but this doesn’t mean everyone who supports the legalisation of assisted death is in thrall to a shallow, consumerist worldview within which everyone ought to get whatever they want, just because they want it. The modern world might keep us atomised and impatient, but in at least some cases, I’d warrant, people are smarter than Stock seems to think. Just as individuals might come to a transformative understanding of their gender identity through a careful, socially mediated process over time, so individuals might also come to believe that at a certain point, over the course of their illness, they would like to be helped to die painlessly, in a safe setting, surrounded by their family and friends, without this being part of an all-encompassing hyperliberalism.
And here we see how Freedom and Mercy might more robustly support one another – since at least part of what mercy demands is listening to people: for instance when they tell you what’s going on with them, or who they are. It can sometimes be merciful to allow another to exercise their freedom, even if they are pursuing a course of action you do not yourself believe to be the best for them. The assisted dying bill is misbegotten. But the moral case for some sort of assisted dying remains stronger than Stock gives it credit for. Assist the death of this particular legislation, by all means – but let’s not kill off the principle itself.
Tom Whyman is a philosopher at Liverpool University
Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted DeathKathleen StockBridge Street Press, 204pp, £22
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[Further reading: Jim Jarmusch and the parental pleasure principle]
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This article appears in the 08 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall
