Krishna Kandiah, director of Sanctuary Foundation, responds to comments by author Matthew Syed in The Times newspaper around “mindless compassion…leading us towards the end of our civilisation”

The Times’ columnist Matthew Syed has decided it’s time for us to rethink compassion. In his attempt to provide a moral case for the Government’s plans to reduce disability benefits – which appear to cast people that rely on them as lazy liars and sneaky scroungers – he suggests we need to recalibrate our moral compass when it comes to compassion. The future of our civilisation, he says, depends on it. 

Syed writes: “What we really need is a moral recalibration, particularly in an age of rising military conflict. We need to rethink what we mean by compassion. We need to rethink what we mean by ‘essential’ services. We need to rethink foreign aid when we are giving money to nations with space programmes. We need to rethink human rights and, perhaps even more importantly, individual responsibilities…In short, we need to… (Register to read the rest of the article)