Michael Cook | Thursday, 6 December 2007
The Ethical Imagination
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.
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Comments (21)
margo somerville said...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.
Australia | Monday, 17 December 2007 at 9:23 am
Fr. Larry Gearhart said...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.
-- | Monday, 17 December 2007 at 9:49 am
Philaretes said...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.)
France | Tuesday, 18 December 2007 at 6:45 am
margo somerville said...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!)
Australia | Tuesday, 18 December 2007 at 10:01 am
Fr. Larry Gearhart said...-- | Tuesday, 18 December 2007 at 10:37 am
Philaretes said...Dear Prof. Somerville, I've ordered yet The Ethical Imagination (orig. edition…) — but I wish a wide reception to the forthcoming French translation!
France | Wednesday, 19 December 2007 at 5:59 pm
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