Progressive or conservative?

Surrogate motherhood is not legal in Switzerland. Like other bioethical issues, it marks a deep division between conservatives and progressives. This is an opportunity to attempt a definition of these terms, a few months ahead of the federal elections.

First, we need to get to grips with definitions: what is progressivism? What is conservatism? The debate could be endless, but in the light of the political issues being debated today in a great many countries, one way of characterizing this divide is to identify progressivism with political liberalism (to be distinguished here from economic liberalism), at least if we take into account one of its main axioms: individual freedom is inviolable, as long as it does not harm that of others, with all the theoretical and practical difficulties that such an assertion poses.

The debate around