Moral Maze

This week the Moral Maze asks "in a society where resources are scarce, should we take account of whether people have contributed to their own misfortune?" The issue has been raised by Phil Kay, the assistant chief constable of Leicestershire. Like other public bodies, the force is struggling to stretch resources to cover demand. He told his local newspaper that he would "far rather" officers focus on preventing crime and protecting the public than spend their time investigating break-ins where carelessness may have played a role. In time-honoured fashion Mr Kay says his remarks have been taken out of context, but does he have a point? This week it's been reported that some NHS authorities are considering closing hospitals to meet a £22 billion savings target. At the same time demand from patients has never been greater. Is making an explicit connection between our lifestyle choices and the chances of getting treatment for the consequences of them the most just and moral way to allocate resource? Or is it the worst kind of victim blaming? There are already many ways in which we reward so called "good behaviour" - no claims bonuses, reduced premiums in return for fitting better security, tax breaks for pension savings. Wearable technology like fitness trackers will make looking after ourselves even more feasible in the future, so why not punish "bad behaviour"? We already have sin taxes, and they're called that for a reason. When the cost of our collective sins is so great, is it morally justifiable to expect the rest of society to pick up the bill for our moral blameworthiness? Or is the very notion a kind of mass hardening of the heart that weakens the bonds of our collective humanity?

For Donald Trump it was an 11 year old dusty tape that appeared from the archives. For Sam Allardyce it was a sting by undercover reporters. For the Olympic gymnast Louis Smith it was a video leaked on to the internet. All of them conversations they thought were private becoming embarrassingly public, with varying degrees of consequences. We all say things in private we wouldn't want made public, so what right to privacy should those in the public eye be entitled? Is it a simple case that we have a right to know if it tells us about the character of people who have power or who are asking us to trust them? If that's the case how do explain the myriad of examples from minor sporting celebrities to victims of stings by fake sheiks? Should we put them in the same category? We may think their views are unattractive, even offensive, but shouldn't they be allowed to express them in private, like the rest of us, with some confidence that they'll remain private? What right do we have to know? Would the world be a better place if we never said anything privately we wouldn't want made public? In our clamour to expose and condemn are we creating an unhealthy reality gap between what our leaders and politicians are allowed to say and what they actually think? Or has the digital age rightly blown apart the tight and elitist clubbable privacy that was once so much part of our society? Chaired by Michael Buerk with Anne McElvoy, Michael Portillo, Giles Fraser and Matthew Taylor. Witnesses are Prof Steven Barnett, Prof Josh Cohen, Paul Connew and Tom Chatfield.

Do we want to live in a world without Down's syndrome? This isn't just a theoretical question. It could soon become a reality. A new technique called non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), detects Down's syndrome with 99% accuracy and it should soon be available on the NHS. It's already being used in Iceland where 100% of Down's syndrome pregnancies are terminated. The Danish health system declared the objective of being Down's-free and introduced the test in 2006. The termination rate there today is 98%. In Britain the termination rate for positive tests is 90 per cent and around 775 babies with Down's syndrome are born every year in England and Wales. A lot of effort has been made to increase people's knowledge of the condition which has a wide range of symptoms. Many children with it will grow in to adulthood and lead very integrated lives, but some will never walk or talk, or may have severe heart defects, glaucoma, deafness and a risk of early dementia. Would it be a sign of human progress if we reduced the number of people born with Down's syndrome to zero? Many people would agree that reducing suffering is an unequivocal moral good, yet when Richard Dawkins told a woman on Twitter that if she was carrying a child with Down's she should "abort it and try again" and "It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have a choice" there was an outcry. NIPT could soon be available for other single gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis and we've done our best to eradicate many other disabling conditions, so why not make the most of what technology can offer? Or is this a kind of nightmare eugenicist council of perfection - a triumph of cold hearted utilitarianism over our moral duty to embrace difference and care for our fellow man? Chaired by Michael Buerk with Anne McElvoy, Claire Fox, Giles Fraser and Melanie Phillips. Witnesses are Sally Phillips, Jane Fisher, Prof Dominic Wilkinson and Simone Aspis.

When is a personal opinion so offensive that it becomes morally unacceptable? This weekend former Tory leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom discovered her comments on motherhood had transgressed an unwritten social convention. The outraged legions of leader writers, columnists and Twitterati descended and by Monday she was gone. As the politics of offence, identity and rights become ever more toxic, they become equally hard to navigate and the price of transgression is ever higher. The whole Brexit debate and its aftermath have been characterised by claim and counter claim of racism, ageism and classism. We've had laws against "hate speech" for many years now, but are we too keen to create whole new categories of "-isms" to which we can take offence? If morality rests on the ability to distinguish between groups and make judgements about their lifestyles, how do you distinguish between a legitimate verdict and an unjustifiable prejudice? Why is it acceptable to say 'It's good that the President is black' but not to say 'It's good that the next President will be white'? Why is the insult "stale, male and pale" OK, but it wouldn't be if you changed gender and race? Is this about defending the powerless against the powerful, or limiting people's rights to say what they think? Where do we draw the line between policing the basic principles of equal rights and mutual respect with a capacity to judge people by what lies in their heart? Chaired by Michael Buerk with Anne McElvoy, Claire Fox, Giles Fraser and Matthew Taylor. Witnesses are Maya Goodfellow, Josh Howie, Peter Tatchell and Dr Joanna Williams.

As someone once said 'Whoever you vote for the government wins'. Whether we thought it was a conspiracy or not we've got used to the idea that something we called the establishment ran societies like ours. No longer. From Brexit voters agreeing with Michael Gove that we shouldn't listen to experts, to Donald Trump supporters relishing the hostility to their man of every part of the American establishment or Jeremy Corbyn supporters rejecting conventional wisdom about what is needed to win elections: everywhere it appears the conventional, the expert, the elite, the establishment view is on the defensive. For some this is a brave new world of openness, activism and renewal. For others it's a post-factual world of populism, extremism and damage. Is the establishment dying? Is this the assertion of the independent-minded? A welcome jolt for a complacent ruling class? A time of renewal? Or a brainless twitch by people bored with issues and complexity, ushering in a host of dangerous isms - populism, extremism, nationalism. "The Summer of 2016" - should we cheer, worry, or despair? The Moral Maze. Witnesses are Will Moy, Ian Chamberlain, Milo Yiannopoulos and Philip Collins.

Going to a music festival has become a rite of passage for the post GCSE teenager. Their excitement at the prospect of a long weekend of unsupervised possibility is perhaps only matched by the anxiety of their parents who know exactly what that might entail. Those fears may have been heightened by the news that a music festival in Cambridgeshire has just become the first UK event of its kind to offer people the chance to have their illegal drugs tested to establish the purity of content before they take them. The testing facility, at the Secret Garden Party, was offered with the co-operation of the police. The organisers said the aim was to reduce harm from drug taking and promote welfare. The group conducting the forensic tests this weekend hope other festivals will follow suit. Is this a pragmatic and realistic approach to drug taking that will save lives or a tacit endorsement that will cost them? Is it part of a gradual slide toward decriminalisation of drug taking? According to the 2016 European Drug Report, ecstasy has surged in popularity in Britain among those aged 15-34 in the past three years. Is it logical on the one hand to criminalise the sale of legal highs, but on the other to make it easier to take an illegal drug like ecstasy? Needle exchanges have long been available to registered intravenous drug addicts. Is this a logical extension or does discovering people have illegal drugs and then allowing them to walk away and use them, while the police turn a blind eye, cross a moral Rubicon? It will make it safer for people who want to take drugs, but what about those people who want to attend a festival knowing it is drug free? How should we balance those competing moral goods? Witnesses are Dr Ian Oliver, Johann Hari, Steve Rolles and Deirdre Boyd.

MP's have voted overwhelmingly to renew our Trident nuclear weapons system and the first job of any new prime minister is to write the "letters of last resort" which contain prime ministers' instructions for what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. The handwritten notes are taken to the UK's four Vanguard-class submarines, the ships which carry the ballistic missiles the Royal Navy calls "the nation's ultimate weapon" and contain instructions of what to do in the worst-case nuclear scenario: the obliteration of the UK state. The value of nuclear weapons is in their deterrence - the promise of mutually assured destruction. Theresa May has told the Commons that she wouldn't hesitate, but she could do no other. It is rumoured previous prime ministers may not have been so certain. By their nature the letters have to make broad moral judgments rather than situationally-dependent ones. They're about morality and ethics, not tactics. In the event that deterrence fails and we are attacked, would it be moral to use our nuclear weapons against civilians in retaliation? What would you do in the event of nuclear war? Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishment is a war crime. If you think the moral principles of collective punishment are clear when it comes to nuclear weapons what about in other stories in the news? Is it always wrong to punish the innocent in pursuit of a wider justice? Should we ban all Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics to punish the drug cheats? Is protecting American citizens against terrorist attacks a greater good than the right of Muslims to travel to the USA? The morality of retaliation and collective punishment on the Moral Maze. Witnesses are Major General Patrick Cordingley, Air Vice Marshall Nigel Baldwin, Avia Pasternak and Austen Ivereigh.

130 sessions of oral evidence,150 witnesses, 150,000 documents, more than 2.5 million words - the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War was finally published on the day of this programme. The inquiry was set up to examine our reasons for taking part in the US-led invasion of Iraq, how the war was prosecuted and its aftermath. But was the decision to go to war morally justified? Chilcot confirms that there was a massive failing in intelligence in the lead-up to the decision to go to war, especially around WMD; it accepts that Tony Blair was acting in good faith and did not deliberately mislead Parliament and the public about that intelligence. The relationship between morality and consequences is complex and sometimes contradictory. If Tony Blair and his government were acting in good faith but the consequences of that war were so catastrophic, can we still describe the decision to go to war as a moral one? If the government were a limited company, isn't this the kind of gross negligence that would lead to directors being prosecuted for corporate manslaughter? On the other hand, if - being wise after the event - we were to hound all politicians for making decisions that went wrong, wouldn't that produce sclerosis and the replacement of democratic judgement with technocracy? Is this a counsel of moral perfection that produces only paralysis of the will? When does ignorance become a moral failing? Is that contingent on outcomes? What if the war had been a success and Iraq transformed into a flourishing democracy? Would we still be worrying about whether it was moral? Would we have spent £10m on an inquiry about it? Chaired by Michael Buerk with Michael Portillo, Matthew Taylor, Giles Fraser and Melanie Phillips. Witnesses are Prof Michael Clarke, John Rentoul, Haider Al Safi and Dr Dan Bulley.

Pundits and politicians alike are struggling to capture the enormity of the consequences of the result of the referendum vote. It's at times like these people often turn to George Orwell for inspiration. He likened our nation to "a family with the wrong members in control" - "that" he said "perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase." Who'll be left standing and in charge after all the political recriminations and bloodletting have ended is still not clear. It's been described as the worst peace-time constitutional crisis this country has faced. So this week on the Moral Maze we're asking what should now be the moral priority for the victors and the vanquished? Has the democratic will of the people been clearly expressed so that the victors must now deliver Brexit at any price? Is it the moral duty of those who championed Brexit to deliver on all their promises made during the campaigning? Or, once normal politics has resumed, should the utilitarian principle of cutting the best possible deal triumph - even if that means forgetting campaign promises on immigration and the single market? Should the vanquished now support Brexit and work towards it with all the enthusiasm they can manage? Or was this a mistake by the British people that means they have a moral duty to go on fighting to keep Britain in the EU and campaign for a second referendum? Or should the priority, above all others, be to find a way to heal a divided nation?

The murder of the MP Jo Cox has cast a very long and dark shadow across the closing days of the EU referendum. The nature of the campaign and how her death might influence the result are a matter of conjecture. On this week's Moral Maze we're going stand back from that speculation and ask a much bigger question - has this referendum been good for us and good for democracy? The intense campaigning has been going on for many months now and comes hard on the heels of the Scottish independence referendum. Arguably, both have been characterised by trenchant, sometimes bitter and even abusive debate between two sides passionately and honestly committed to their positions. And, arguably, both referenda have left large parts of the electorate dissatisfied by a seemingly endless round of fact-free claim and counter-claim. Are our expectations unrealistic? Have referendums been, for all their faults, exercises in democracy that have engaged and inspired people in a way that party politics increasingly fail to achieve? Should we, like Switzerland, hold more of them? Is there a better way? Should we turn to technology and the internet for answers? 76% of people in the UK own a smart phone; with the growth of social media and online petitions there's a movement that believes the future of democracy is online, where it will engage more people in a wider variety of issues, putting more power directly into the hands of the electorate. Will e-democracy encourage more passionate engagement in issues and be a powerful force for progress? Can it cope with complex issues and complex societies with tens, or hundreds of millions of voters? Will we always need representative democracy to protect us from the tyranny of the majority, however that majority cast their votes? Chaired by Edward Stourton with Mona Siddiqui, Matthew Taylor, Giles Fraser and Claire Fox. Witnesses are Paul Hilder, James Bloodworth, Dr Philip Cunliffe and Tim Stanley.