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.