It’s not often you find yourself nodding along with those with whom you normally profoundly disagree, and raising an eyebrow at the contributions of those you would count as political allies. But it was the position I found myself in listening to MPs debate assisted dying last week.

What to make of my outbreak of fervent agreement with Conservative Danny Kruger and DUP MP Ian Paisley? Some may see this as the mark of a repressed rightwinger, or a born-again social conservative. If you agree with a member of tribe X, you must de facto be part of that tribe, or so the argument goes.

I see this unlikely affinity differently: as healthy proof that even in the polarised political discourse of 2024, there are some ethically complex issues that resist alignment along a left-right spectrum. How people value the individual in relation to the collective often cuts across divisions between left and right. Do you privilege individual freedom and autonomy, even when that may come at a cost to others? Or do you believe that constraining individual liberty is the price we sometimes have to pay to avoid exploiting those whose autonomy is limited by their material or emotional circumstances?

This axis is key to understanding why people have different views on assisted dying. The strongest arguments in favour are that it should be up to an individual when to end their own life with medical assistance if they are suffering from an illness likely to be terminal. As I wrote last month, one strong reason against legalisation is the clear risk of state-sanctioned wrongful deaths as a result of people being coercively controlled, or even just........

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