Not to injure your neighbour

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A reflection and prayer to start the day with Canon Simon Doogan Good morning. One sultry Glasgow Sunday evening in August 1928, May Donoghue was treated by a friend at a café to a Scotsman’s ice-cream float. As she drenched her scoop of vanilla with ginger beer, out of the empty bottle slumped the post-humous remains of a snail. On her subsequent discharge from hospital, Mrs Donoghue’s claim against the beer’s manufacturer Mr David Stevenson secured both a place in legal history. The highest court in the land duly pronounced that the rule to love your neighbour would become in law you must not injure your neighbour. This marked a fundamental change of direction. Who is my neighbour, legally-speaking? Anyone, the court determined, so closely and directly affected by my act, that I might reasonably have them in contemplation. I was first introduced to the Donoghue v Stevenson case as a fresh-from-school law student most of 40 years ago. The fact that the modern approach to compensation for personal injury, product liability and professional negligence began life in chapter 10 of Luke’s Gospel caused me little pause for thought at the time. With the expansion of Jesus’ command to love our neighbour into a minimum-standard duty of care binding all of us, now it brings a lump to my throat. For one thing, it establishes a real-world responsibility and accountability between people who would otherwise be strangers. For another, it insists that thinking only of ourselves isn’t just greed or carelessness but a dereliction of moral duty – a denial of one another’s God-given humanity. Lord, make us less selfish and more considerate, the sort of people who don’t just look out for one another but hold each other to task when we don’t. Amen