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A Canadian ethicist offers a fresh approach to defending human dignity.
Human
dignity has fallen on hard times. Nearly 60 years ago, it was the
bedrock of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But now
bioethicists, who are tasked with the protection of life, are
questioning whether or not it even exists. Not long ago, for
instance, the most quoted bioethicist in the world, Arthur Caplan, of
the University of Pennsylvania said that: "Dignity reflects a
moral status that moral agents assign to others. It is conferred on a
human being by other human beings. There is no inherent property that
confers dignity on a human being."
This is not a radical point of view. In fact, amongst bioethicists, it is probably the dominant point of view. There are exceptions, but they are not popular in the media. Take Leon Kass, who must have one of the most intelligent and insightful minds in American public life. He served for several years as chairman of the President's Council for Bioethics where he strongly opposed cloning, even so-called therapeutic cloning. Although he marshalled cogent scientific arguments against it, he was ridiculed for contending that "repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it". It is significant that the leading professional journals -- Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Ethics, the American Journal of Bioethics -- are edited by utilitarians and libertarians and regularly feature defences of IVF, euthanasia, "directed human evolution", and so on.
How gratifying it is, then, to discover Margaret Somerville, a bioethical voice which is respected and consulted by the media, and which staunchly defends human dignity against corrosive "isms". She is an Australian who is the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law at McGill University in Montreal. In 2006, she was invited to air her views in the Massey Lectures, a prestigious series sponsored by CBC Radio in Canada, and these have recently been published as The Ethical Imagination. This book shows that she is deeply concerned about the IVF industry, opposed to euthanasia, and most controversially, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage in a country where it is already legal. Yet her opinions are regularly sought out by the media.
Unhappily, too few people acknowledge the deep moral seriousness of bioethical debates. Compared to global warming, the obesity epidemic, and Hollywood strikes, embryos and euthanasia are also-rans. Consequently, most of us go with the flow and end up supporting the whacky views of the professionals. But Somerville somehow manages to rouse people from their bioethical slumber and stirs their consciences. So her book deserves the close attention of anyone who treasures human dignity.
By no means can Somerville be pigeonholed as "Christian" or "conservative". Her own religious convictions do not emerge in The Ethical Imagination and her freewheeling approach to metaphysics must rattle conservatives. As a left-brain person myself, I quaked when she suggests that "there can be equally valid but different versions of the truth about something, rather than one person or body having the full and exclusive truth and others having no access to it". At first blush, too, her notion of the "secular sacred" sounds eccentric and paradoxical. Personally, I feel more confident within a scaffolding of ethical principles, definitions and syllogisms. Somerville's right-brain, intuitive approach can be unsettling. But it is persuasive, and over and over again in this slim volume I found myself applauding her insights.
Her first concern is to establish that our pluralistic societies need to establish common ethical principles. But her "shared ethics" is not a least common denominator, or moral relativism in mufti. It means discovering what everyone agrees is inherently wrong, not just on the basis of reason, but also of imagination, spirituality, creativity and reverence for the "secular sacred". So "shared ethics", it turns out, is basically a right-brain approach to the traditional concept of "human nature".
If pigeonholes are required, perhaps Somerville slots in with the post-modernists. Central to post-modernist thinking is unyielding hostility towards the devouring rationalism which claims that logic and science exhaust reality. Loopy PoMos are a dime a dozen, but there is a healthy post-modernism impulse which stoutly resists the temptation to measure everything by a single yardstick, whether it be profit, technological progress, empirical verification, or even logic. It attempts to recover a sense of wonder before the natural world, the wonder that Aristotle regarded as the beginning of philosophy. Somerville's belief that we do not own the world, but hold it in trust is one of the strongest themes in The Ethical Imagination. This image expresses it clearly:
"As I was correcting a draft of this chapter, I was flying from Montreal to Beijing over the High Arctic. I looked out the window of the airplane and thought, What a beautiful and amazing world! Please, don't let us mess it up. Our natural world includes us humans, and arguably the most important aspect of our world not to 'mess up' is our very own nature. The new technoscience gives us the power to do that... Ethics is fundamentally about not 'messing it up' -- not only for ourselves, but especially for future generations."
A deeply poetic appreciation of the world leads her to have a "presumption in favour of the natural" which underlies many of her misgivings about the technology which threatens to dominate modern life. It is "a way of implementing respect for life and for the human spirit". For anyone who follows bioethical debates, this is a new kind of language, one which awakens readers to the dangers of a diminished humanity. "We have lost complexity, spirit, and mystery, and replaced them with mind, will, and technology. The problem is not that the latter are bad or worthless; it's that they are necessary but not sufficient to living a fully human life." With this as a starting point, many bioethical questions are far more easily unravelled. Somerville deals thoughtfully with a number of them in The Ethical Imagination: IVF, transhumanism, cloning, genetic engineering, a child's right to a mother and father, and same-sex marriage, amongst others.
Somerville has been criticised for lacking philosophical rigour by some who would otherwise agree with her conclusions. This is not surprising. The "secular sacred" is a blunt instrument for unpicking the finer threads in the tapestry of modern perplexities. But such critics ought to bear in mind that bioethics is more rhetoric than philosophy. At its worst, bioethics is the sophistry of mediocre ideologues; at its best, it challenges us to acknowledge the deepest truths of the human condition. Margaret Somerville practices the latter kind. Canada is lucky to have her as a leading participant in its public square.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
What do you think? Sound off! Our guidelines: be concise; stay on-topic; and don't lose your temper! Comments close after 2 weeks. So far there have been 21 comments
Dear Prof. Somerville, I've ordered yet The Ethical Imagination (orig. edition…) — but I wish a wide reception to the forthcoming French translation!
Many thanks to you both for engaging with me in this discussion - and especially thanks to Michael Cook whose words triggered it. It has furthered my insight into the issues which I am attempting to explore. Delaing with them sometimes feels like "trying to nail Jello (jelly) to a wall" (as my North American colleagues describe it) and that feeling is compounded when the approach one takes is partly right-brain informed, as Father Gearhart rightly recognizes my approach is.
I believe in multiple ways of "human knowing" and that reason, while an extraordinarily important human way of knowing, is in fact a secodary verification mechanism that we need to use to make sure our other ways of knowing (they include moral intuition, imagination and creativity, examined emotions, human memory (history) and so on) have not gone "off track" and misled us. Taking the approach I do has, however, left me open to comments such as one of my colleagues made to me recently, that I was "dangerously on the edge of total flake". But that's a risk that I believe I must take, while trying to guard against its realization (and it's true that we must be highly alert to the threats of making serious errors that other ways of knowing can lead to).
I've long argued with utilitarian rationalists - for instance Peter Singer at Princeton and, most recently, in responding to Richard Dawkins' and his "The God Delusion". In my opinion, it's their adamant refusals to recognize the existence or at least the merit and value of any way of knowing other than purely logical, cognitive, rational mentation, that is central to the conclusions they reach on ethics and the positions they advocate. I am trying to show that while their "pure reason based" analysis is necessary and has value, it is not enough if we want to implement the full and rich "human ethics" that we need to guide us wisely into the future.
Finally a note to Philaretes: A French edition of The Ethical Imagination will be available in March 2008. It's being published by Liber, Montreal, although, as you are fluent in English, it might be preferable to read the original, especially as I include in it quite a lot of poetic material. (One reviewer described the book as "Zen like" - pace Father Gearhart!)
My distinction between the ethical and the political levels was certainly too sharp. Maybe this is partly because of my difficulty to express myself properly in english, and partly because of the current state of the debate in my country — where all sorts of dubious "moral claims" tend to blur important political values.
But I'm convinced that the ethical and the political are intertwined, and that we need to uncover the ethical basis of our most relevant political values. Or, rather than basis, it would be more accurate to speak of the "moral atmosphere" which make the political meaningful and sensible. (As far as France is concerned, this is a task particularly incumbent on those who don't share the individualistic ethos of the mainstream Right, and feel distressed by the inconsiderate endorsement of it by many on the Left.)
I am not going to insist on using terminology like "supernatural" with people who loath it, even though I believe it has important philosophical content that helps to clarify what transcendent human value means. I am happy to entertain alternative concepts and terminology if it can point unambiguously and coherently in a positive direction.
My one particular comment on his latest posting is that I would not place the ethical and political considerations on different levels, as he suggests. I believe they (and other perspectives relevant to shared societal values) are, and should be in our secular societies, inextricably intertwined - that is dealt with concurrently on the same level. One of the "spades/shovels" which we need to use in "in digging further in the political ideals we share as fellow citizens" is the ethical one. It's when we fail to do that that our values are in most danger.
1) Is society to grant equal rights to every citizen?
2) Is free choice to be protected and promoted as long as nobody gets harmed?
3) Is scientific research to be freely conducted, and protected from political interference?
4) Is a form of compensation due to a social group that has suffered lasting and severe wrong in the recent past?
These questions have in common to be practical and political ones. Moreover, a positive (no doubt in need for qualification) answer to all of them partly defines what it is to live in a free society. Now, of course, the serious question is: how are we to proceed further? how are we to redefine our generalantasize a kind of Christian republic, but to rediscover the basics of our common life. answers so that they can provide a practical orientation?
While I strongly sympathise with Prof. Somerville's proposal, I think that another line deserves exploration too. The line consists in not jumping too fast to another level, the ethical, to find positive guidance, but in digging further in the political ideals we share as fellow citizens, and in trying to pay them a more consistent attention than we do.
In an issue like abortion, it would be a first step to duly protect the choice of the women who want to have a baby, and to offer them a real alternative to abortion if they don’t feel able to raise a child, for any reason.
Regarding stem cell research, we should try to reconcile it with our awareness that there is more than an analogy between research oriented production of embryos and, say, slavery and other forms of human instrumentalization that we consider as objectionable.
These are only sketchy suggestions, and I wish I could articulate them more properly. Bottom idea is: the troubles our societies suffer in these areas are not a consequence of our democratic ideals, but of their present confusion. What we need is not to fantasize a Christian republic, but to rediscover the basics of our common life.
Fortunately, I find rather unconvincing Father Gearhardt’s statement that it is a negative answer to the 4 questions he lists (no doubt some others could be added) that « accounts for the general acceptance of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, etc. ». It can’t be so. Ok, maybe this can correspond to the way a radical « secularist » intellectual would justify its commitment to abortion, etc., say in a university seminar or during an argument with his or her colleagues. Maybe.
But, first, there are quite a good lot of professed agnostics, and of people who simply would be at loss to state their personal answer to these 4 questions, who nevertheless oppose strongly to abortion, or embryonic stem cell research, etc.: to deny this fact, or to overlook it, is a dangerous concession to the radical secularists (surely there are some of them) who try to rally all those who don’t recognize themselves in religious radicalism.
Second, this is definitely not the way we argue in the public square. If I had to list the questions the answer to which grounds our convictions in the important matters mentioned, a random selection could be:
(my comment is too long: to be continued…)
My experience of many secularists is that while they do not believe in any supernatural reality, they do accept a metaphysical one. In The Ethical Imagination, I used the term the "human spirit" to describe this reality. Its a term I use in a religiously neutral sense, in that it can be accepted both by people who are religious and those who are not, and, if religious, no matter what their religion.
By it I mean the intangible, immeasurable, ineffable reality that all of us need access to in order to find meaning in life and to make life worth living; that deeply intuitive sense of relatedness or connectedness to all life, especially other people, to the world, and to the universe in which we live; the metaphysical – but not necessarily supernatural - reality which we need to experience to live fully human lives. It's through the human spirit that we can experience transcendence - the sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves -which we can and need to experience whether or not we are religious. The human spirit is one manifestation of a belief that there is "something special" about being human.
Religious people validate and give meaning to their experience of transcendence through their religious beliefs. But I would suggest that others can do so through a belief that there is "something special" about being human. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas calls the universal characteristic of humans that they search for morality an "ethics of the species" or "[human] species ethics". He believes that the search for morality is programmed into us and is uniquely human - that is, morality is secularly based, but is not just a matter of social construction or personal preference. I prefer to call this same phenomenon "human ethics". The important point, however, is that recognizing that whether we come from a religious or a secular base we can agree that it is fundamentally part of being human to search for ethics, and that, I propose, can help us to agree on what is ethical and what is not.
Moreover, I strongly suggest that it is of extraordinary importance at present that we help as many people as possible to accept that there is something special about being human and that that requires us to protect the essence of our humanness. A major argument in support of the position that there should be few if any restictions in the areas Father Gearhardt lists at the end of his comment, especially those involving new technoscience, is that there is nothing special about being human and, therefore, we are free to intervene on our humanness simply as we choose. Many people who are not religious have strong moral intuitions and reasons against the latter and those who are religious need to make common cause with them. Arguing, as Father Gearhardt does, that such beliefs are only possible when founded on a supernatural base is I suggest, with respect, harmful to establishing that common cause and the protections of our humanness, in all its varied and multiple expressions, that we so urgently need.
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Philartes' example of same-sex marraige and his point about it - that the calls for it should cause us to ask ourselves how we can honour the just claims of homosexual people - is an excellent one and I believe goes to the heart of the approach we should take in searching for a shared ethics.
I have been publicly involved in the same-sex marriage debate in Canada since its inception there and know how complex it is. Many homosexual people who are in favour of same-sex marriage (and we should note not all of them are, for a variety of reasons which merit contemplation) believe that its recognition is a very powerful statement about the horrible wrongs and discrimination that have been inflicted on gay poeple - and that legal recognition of same-sex marriage will help to ensure these wrongs do not continue in the future. So the question is how can we ensure that without harming, as same-sex marriage does, the rights and protections traditional marriage provides for children?
In short, whatever our views on the morality of homosexuality, and even if we have settled ones that it is wrong, there are wrongs done to homosexual people that they justly claim must be condemned and the question is how best to do this. As with all social ethical values issues this is a complex matter that cannot be adequately addressed in a few sentences. There is now a substantial literature - a proportion of it sophisticated and ethically, legally, and philosophically nuanced, although some is intensely adversarial, pure advocacy and blindly ideological - that can be consulted. Personally, for what it's worth, I believe that legal recognition of civil partnerships is the preferred course.
The same kind of analysis that results from asking what people's just claims are in calling for very liberal laws on abortion or euthanasia can be - in fact, needs to be -undertaken in relation to those issues.
1) Does a human being have free will?
2) Does a human being have an immortal soul?
3) Does a human being share transcendent qualities with God?
4) Does a human being have transcendent, or merely instrumental, value?
The answer to question 1) through 4) must all be in the negative if all one relies on is the physical properties of the universe, denying the presence of something spiritual, like a non-material soul. Appreciating the fact that even free will is impossible under these presumptions requires a somewhat lengthy discourse on mathematical physics. The short of it is this: under conditions of a metaphysical presumption of mere materiality, a human being can be modeled as a stochastic cellular automaton. In such a case, all human choice is "programmed."
Secularists, therefore, are ultimately reduced to seeking instrumental value in a human being (President Bush's appeal to a snowflake analogy notwithstanding). This accounts for the general acceptance of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization techniques, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, etc. When all value is instrumental, all moral philosophy is utilitarian (or pragmatic). Society is then ruled by the general principle: allow whatever makes people happy, as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. In such a society, fundamental human rights inevitably clash, with no grounds for resolution of competing claims beyond whatever is imposable by fiat.
If I can try and interpret a little further Prof. Somerville's arguments, I would say that they are better understood if one doesn't focus exclusively on the global judgement passed upon a certain kind of act or practice — like abortion or lie, to mention two "settled" matters in the Church's teaching.
I mean that there is more to ethics than only finding what is morally ("objectively") good or bad. One can be concerned also with the way he "feels" about a situation, with the proper "moral response" to an event or to an action. One may be perfectly clear about the morality of the matter, and yet in need to improve his way of feeling or thinking about it. And this is where "diverse articulations of the truth" can be helpful or even necessary.
So, my point is not that one should be willing to redefine again and again his general moral positions (at the risk of loosing any clear moral position in the end), but rather that, "settled" as may be a moral issue on the general, or theoretical level, there is still large room for contrasting views and "articulated" vision.
This can have important consequences on the way we act as citizenz, when issues like same-sex unions or abortion are at stake. In the long run, I think that the real challenge is to find "a place" for the serious problems that find an inadequate expression in the (wrong) claims of rights to same-sex marriage or abortion. It is one important thing to say: "No, you won't". It is another to find a convincing way to add: "Is this what you really want, or is it not rather this, which will prove in fact more helping and fair to what is just in your complaint?" And it's for this second thing that ethical imagination is badly needed.
(This was written before I could read M. Somerville nice comments).
This leads to an important point:If people who regard their beliefs as settled wish to convince others of the rightness of those beliefs, they must do so through persuasive arguments that do not simply fall back on the idea that this is "settled". Perhaps Father Gearhardt recognizes this, in part, in his statement that "Rehashing can eventually lead to understanding". But there is an element of condescension in that statement and certainly not a respect for openness to the idea that no matter how strongly one might believe, others might believe differently and both can think they are right. Living peacefully with such situations is a major challenge for making the interdependent, interconnected world in which we now exist one in which most people would want to live.
The question that needs to be asked by people with "settled" ethical values beliefs is whom are they trying to convince when they engage in a dialogue about these beliefs. If each other, they can speak from their tradition using its language and authorities. But such an approach is antithetical to convincing "outsiders" and to finding what they share with them in terms of values and ethics. The latter requires a more open stance and a more neutral language -- neither of which are inconsistent with maintaining a belief about the rightness of one's beliefs.
I am not exactly sure what Father Gearhardt means by saying "I do not think it is helpful, however, to characterize anyone's position as trivial", but if he means ad hominem attacks should be eschewed I agree completely. Currently, a very common form of such attacks in the secular public square is to label an opponent's view as "religious" and to dismiss them and their views simply on that basis without debating the content of the "religious" person's arguments. Indeed, in my experience, that approach is most frequently employed when those arguments are strong and persuasive and difficult to dismiss on any other basis. Or perhaps Father Gearhardt was giving a warning to religious people not to label secular arguments or their proponents as trivial. Again, I agree although in my experience, doing that is the rare exception.
What religious people need to understand is that there are secular arguments that they can present that would result in values being implemented at the societal level that do not contravene their religious beliefs. It is very important that they bring forward those arguments articulated in language that as many people as possible can understand, relate to and feel comfortable with.
Finally, an important issue in these debates on social ethical values issues in the public square that is frequently not identified is our choice of basic presumption to ground any given debate. In many instances in a secular society the basic presumption has changed or advocates are arguing it should be changed, from one being based on and consistent with religious values (for instance, a presumption in favour of respect for life and therefore against euthanasia) to one that contravenes those values (for euthanasia). That means that in some situations religious people can now have the burden of proof to make their case, whereas, in the past, the opposite was true. Contrary to a common argument encountered in such situations, that religion has no place in the public square in contemporary Western societies, religious people have the right to make their case - in fact I believe they have a responsibility to do so. All voices, including religious ones, have the right to be heard in a democratic society.
Nevertheless, I think it is also important to make two additional and critical distinctions. (1) The revelation of Jesus Christ is complete, even though our understanding of it is not. (2) The understanding of this revelation in the tradition of the Church is partly settled and partly unsettled. Therefore it is not, in Prof. Somerville's well-chosen phrase, "totally comprehensive."
Much of recent controversy revolves around matters that are settled, and that will never be radically revised by the Church's teaching authority, regardless of the energy and creativity adduced in opposition. This includes a number of very significant issues of natural law as well as revelation.
I do not think it is unhelpful to keep rehashing issues that are settled. Rehashing can eventually lead to understanding. I do not think it is helpful, however, to characterize anyone's position as trivial.
This encourages me to add a further reflection, which is that, in her case as in some others, I found much more "openness to a complex reality" in those who oppose same-sex unions than in those who protest against the very idea of this opposition. "Understanding" seems quite often to be the privilege of only one party, moralism and bigotry being on the other side.
In this context the last two sentences of Prof. Somerville's comment above are worth reading twice and meditated.
As far as major ethical and political issues are concerned, "ethical imagination" seems to be what we really need: we just can't keep on restating the same arguments over and over, but must prove ourselves to be more "embracing" and aware of moral complexity than the one-sided "moralists".
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