Ethical Imagination or Ethical Reasoning?

There is no literature on the ethics of ethicists—they are simply presumed to be ethical.

(Somerville 2006, 5)

The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit is a compilation of the Massey Lectures of 2006, delivered by Margaret Somerville. Co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto, the purpose of the series, according to the book’s inside cover, is “to provide a forum … where major contemporary thinkers [can] address important issues of our time.” With the publication of the book, Somerville’s Massey Lectures are disseminated even further.

In Canada, Margaret Somerville functions as a “public intellectual,” along with others such as Thomas Homer-Dixon, Janice Gross Stein, and Mark Kingwell. She appears frequently on radio and television, and her views about ethical issues are cited in the press.¹ Academics like Somerville represent the university to the public and purport to offer original and provocative yet scholarly and well-researched ideas. Unlike some academics, public intellectuals establish a relationship with the community beyond the university. They talk not only to their academic colleagues but to society—at least, to the portion of society that is willing to engage with theoretical and scholarly ideas. The Ethical Imagination offers an opportunity to assess Somerville’s role as public intellectual and how well she carries it out.

Somerville claims to be interested in community. She speaks of “our shared (or collective) human imagination” (2006, 11), and she states that she is seeking a “shared ethics” (191). This is a worthwhile if very ambitious goal; but not many other ethicists are part of her community, and she has little presence in the philosophical discipline. Although she frequently quotes theologians and priests, there are few references to philosophers. When she does speak of the work of philosophers, the citation is often to a radio program (Charles Taylor [206]), or a magazine article (Roger Scruton [108]), and not to scholarly books or articles. Many of her ethical references are to her own published work.

Perhaps interactions with other philosophers are not necessary to her work. Perhaps what is important is the role Somerville plays vis-à-vis her interactions with the public. In what follows, I shall focus on four major flaws in The Ethical Imagination, which demonstrate, I believe, that the public is being seriously misled by the suggestion that Somerville is an ethicist who has something significant to tell us about morality.

Inconsistency Among Her Main Ethical Claims

As an ethicist, I find it is quite common to encounter people who are hostile to ethicists in general and, sometimes, to oneself in particular. These people … perceive ethicists as ‘moral police’ telling them what and what not to do, and seriously curtailing what they see as their rights and freedoms.

(Somerville 2006, 22)

Somerville’s right-wing views on such issues as same-sex marriage (100–101) and abortion (186–87) are no secret. In The Ethical Imagination, she is forthright about her view that marriage should not be available to same-sex couples (although civil unions are allowable) and that “at least” some abortions are “inherently wrong” (189). Other reviewers have pointed out some of the specific problems in these ideas (e.g., Schafer 2006). Here I shall identify a more general problem: a lack of consistency among her claims and a consequent post hoc attempt to justify them.

One of Somerville’s animating principles is “deep respect for all life” (2006, 2). Unfortunately, the meaning and implications of “respect for life” are never clearly defined. The phrase appears to imply that embryos and fetuses are equal in moral status to children and adult human beings. For example, respect for life accords fetuses significant ethical entitlements: “If respect for life is … recognized as an equally important value [equal to respect for human dignity], the claims of the fetus become much more central and a choice has to be made between the conflicting rights of the woman and the...