Editorial

By Paul Schratz

It’s little wonder Margaret Somerville got booed when she received an honorary degree from Ryerson University earlier this year.

The McGill University ethicist represents something truly threatening to today’s culture of moral relativity. In her new book, The Ethical Imagination, Journeys of the Human Spirit, Somerville conducts a search for “a shared ethics” that exists apart from religion. This of course is frightening for those who think real morality is relative and their work in banishing religion from the public square is finished.

In Somerville’s eyes, it’s essential that we find values we hold in common, especially in an interdependent world where we face terrorists and tyrants and where “a crisis somewhere is necessarily a crisis elsewhere.”

The book is based on Somerville’s CBC Massey Lectures Series, which starts Monday, Oct. 11, and travels to universities across Canada, including UBC on Tuesday, Oct. 17.

Her search for shared ethics also comes coincidentally as Canada’s bishops attempt to address the issue of religion in public life.

At their plenary meeting in Cornwall, Ont., Oct. 16 to 20, the bishops will tackle the thorny issue of Catholic politicians who don’t apply their faith when it comes to the laws of the country.

Legislators routinely claim they ought to check their faith at the door of the legislature, all because our community is no longer bound by shared religious values.

Somerville makes clear that she doesn’t buy the secularist argument that religion has no place in the public square. She accepts that “religion cannot function in the public square in the same way as it did in the past.” However, she rejects the popular starting point of science as the secular religion that everyone can agree on. She instead proposes a new approach toward finding our “collective imagination” and binding ourselves together.

For one thing, large numbers of people consider religion an important part of their lives; therefore religion must be accommodated “as part of the process of finding a shared ethics.”

Much of the modern world dismisses religion as nothing more than a collection of myths, but even myths can be “metaphorically true” and often reflect answers to important questions we and others have asked about life. In fact, they are often “the only way to communicate the truth they represent.”

Not only does Somerville build a logical case for religion as a part of every ethical debate, she also succeeds in isolating the natural ethical principle at the heart of every religious argument. What’s more, these natural principles can’t be banished with lazy appeals to the separation of Church and state.

One needn’t be a person of faith, for example, to recognize that nature itself makes a compelling argument against “same-sex marriage.” Because marriage is an inherently procreative relationship, recognizing same-sex relationships “necessarily negates the norm, and with that, children’s rights in this regard.”

For Somerville, it’s essential that when someone proposes altering that which is natural, whether in its biological or its cultural components, there must be a presumption in favour of respecting the natural state unless it can be shown that intervention or altering it is justified.

Her warning bells about the disposal of embryos created in vitro, about embryonic health and sex selection, and about cloning, are all the more incisive coming from a secular perspective.

On the right of children to know the identity of their biological parents, for instance: “It is one matter for children not to know their genetic identity as a result of unintended circumstances. It is quite another matter to deliberately destroy children’s links to their biological parents, and especially for society to be complicit in this destruction.”

Her book concludes with hope for a return of virtues, applied to a future world, with the virtue of trust being central: how, she asks, can we hold “human life on trust for future generations....”?

In her final pages she quotes St. Augustine, who said, “Hope has two lovely daughters: anger and courage; anger so that what must not be, may not be; courage so that what should be can be.”

Somerville does her best to illustrate that hope, in the process reminding us that the truth of our faith remains true, even when religion has been banished from public view.