The Ethical Imagination

Dr. Charles Busada PHI151 - Introduction to Ethics The Ethical Imagination: Assignment: Listen to CD (twice) and complete questioner. This lecture is located at http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey.html Ethicist Margaret Somerville is the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, where she holds the Samuel Gale Chair in the Faculty of Law and is a professor in the Faculty of Medicine. As a consultant to numerous government and non-governmental bodies, she has worked with the World Health Organization, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNESCO. She has received a number of honorary doctorates in law and is the recipient of many awards, including the Order of Australia. In this timely, topical, and cogently argued lecture and book, Somerville asks: “What does it mean to be human today, when mind-altering scientific breakthroughs are challenging our fundamental ideas of ourselves, how we relate to others and the world around us, and how we find meaning in life?” She is concerned about the threat to society posed by terrorists and tyrants with whom we have fundamental value conflicts, and by the new techno-science: genetics (plants and animals), reproductive technologies, artificial intelligence, and nano-technology. She also believes, contrary to the beliefs of many others, that religion should find a place in the public square, but holds that it cannot function there in the same way as it did in the past. She proposes that it is only through our willingness to undertake a journey of the human imagination -- by heeding our stories, myths, and moral intuition -- that we can truly see, understand, speak about, and relate to the world around us, and thereby develop an ethics to guide us. The main thesis of The Ethical Imagination is that “profound principles of human ethics” can, from now on, be arrived at by a process of “overlapping consensus” that results from a debate involving stake holders that can lead to a shared ethics. Summerville believes that a shared ethics, must be used as a starting point in the search for the ethical concepts and values that the various groups in society already share. Furthermore, she claims that in order to facilitate the marriage of science and our philosophical-spiritual heritage, we need reason and imagination. These are indeed necessary if we are to understand not only material realities but realities that can be apprehended by the mind and are not perceived directly by our senses. These latter realities include being, knowing, truth, good and evil, and God as the uncreated, eternal first cause. Dr. Somerville’s shared ethics is a marriage of divine revelation and natural law (understood as divine law as seen by the light of human reason) and an ethic of humanbased morality (consensus ethics). It is of interest to note that some principle-based ethicists regard natural moral law, not as reason’s understanding of divine law, but as analogous to the physical laws of science. This is a materialist, and perhaps pantheist, approach to morality. Dr. Somerville hopes that finding shared universal truths will result in increased societal respect for individuals, relationships, community, all life, freedom, creativity, imagination, play, and the search for meaning. Nevertheless, in her

perspective, a quest for the universal, absolute, metaphysical “Truth,” is a “barrier to finding a shared ethics.” She notes that empirical science, based on intellectual abstraction from the evidence of the senses and on measurement and experiment, informs us of truths about material realities, including the biological nature of man. It cannot tell us anything about the spiritual nature of man. That can only be known through divine revelation and by metaphysical reflection. 1. Dr. Summerville claims that “science and technology confront us with some of the most challenging and unprecedented ethical questions in the world today. These issues encompass what it means to be human, how we relate to others and our world, and how we find meaning in life.” John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, said that “Philosophy... is the practical integration of an answer to the question of how one ought to act as a human being, and what is involved in thinking truly and acting rightly. This integration is achieved through rational abstract reflection: the examination of the concepts derived from our engagement with reality by which, through holistic interpretation, one arrives at rational truths, including ones relevant to answering questions about the existence and nature of mind, soul, and deity.” Do you think that Summerville would agree or disagree with Haldane and why or why not? I want a thoughtful answer, using examples from this lecture: One paragraph: 2. Technology now provides the capacity, by nuclear transfer cloning, to combine two ova or two sperm (so that two men or two women could have a shared baby). It soon may have the ability to create a synthetic sperm or ova from adult stem cells for use by samesex couples. Alteration of an embryo’s germ cell line changes not only the embryo, but also all of his or her descendants. Is this inherently right or wrong? One paragraph: 3. Technology may soon provide the capacity to create a chimera—a human-animal combination; and of a cyborg—a human-machine combination; as well as a ‘transhumanist,’ a post-human species of unprecedented physical, intellectual and psychological capacity, through the use of the “info-, bio-, nano-, robotic, and artificial intelligence technologies.” Consider if these technologies disrespect human dignity intrinsic to the human being. Your opinion: One Paragraph.