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Bird on an Ethics Wire
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Bird on an Ethics Wire

Battles about Values in the Culture Wars
By Margaret Somerville
Philosophy: Ethics & Morality
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9780773598157

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An exploration of the urgent need to rebalance individuals' unfettered freedom to choose, especially regarding birth and death.


Our physical ecosystem is not indestructible and we have obligations to hold it in trust for future generations. The same is true of our metaphysical ecosystem - the values, principles, attitudes, beliefs, and shared stories on which we have founded our society. In Bird on an Ethics Wire, Margaret Somerville explores the values needed to maintain a world that reasonable people would want to live in and pass on to their descendants.

Somerville addresses the conflicts between people who espouse "progressive" values and those who uphold "traditional" ones by casting her attention on the debates surrounding "birth" (abortion and reproductive technologies) and "death" (euthanasia) and shows how words are often used as weapons. She proposes that we should seek to experience amazement, wonder, and awe to enrich our lives and help us to find meaning. Such experiences, Somerville believes, can change how we see the world and live our lives, and affect the decisions we make, especially regarding values and ethics. They can help us to cope with physical or existential suffering, and ultimately put us in touch with the sacred - in either its secular or religious form - which protects what we must not destroy.

Experiencing amazement, wonder, and awe, Somerville concludes, can also generate hope, without which our spirit dies. Both individuals and societies need hope, a sense of connection to the future, if the world is to make the best decisions about values in the battles that constitute the current culture wars.
Details

380 Pages, 6 x 9

ISBN 9780773546400

November 2015

Formats: Cloth, eBook

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“Somerville has distinguished herself as a singular voice. Exhibiting what thoughtful, scholarly interjections in public debate ought to look like, this book provides a model for a younger generation of emerging public intellectuals.” James K.A. Smith, Calvin College and editor of Comment magazine
“This is a very important book for its thorough and critically alert discussion of beginning and end-of-life issues. While centred on representative case-studies or court judgments, principally from the Canadian context, the author skilfully enables its scope to be comprehensive in its treatment of principles and legal/ethical considerations from a range of disciplines. We are indebted to Margaret Somerville for her depth of scholarship, her generosity of spirit and her persistence and courage in going against the tide. An enlightening and valuable study.” Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics
Margaret Somerville is a professor in the Faculty of Law and Faculty of Medicine at McGill University.
Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 3

1 Should Religion Be Evicted from the Public Square? 13
2 Are Our “Values Conversations” Sufficiently Open
and Free? The University as a Test Case 46
3 Is the Concept of Human Dignity Useful, Useless,
or Dangerous? 87
4 Legalizing Euthanasia: Evolution or Revolution
in Societal Values? 117
5 Is Every Life Beautiful? 167
6 How Might a Problem - a Crisis Pregnancy - Be
Converted to a Mystery, the Gift of Life? 200
7 How Might the Involvement of “Applied Ethics”
in Law Affect Our Societal Values? Ethics as “First Aid”
for Law 229
8 What Questions Are We Asking in Contemporary
Cultural Values Conversations, and What Messages
Are They Communicating? 261

APPENDICES
A The Best Teacher I Ever Had Was My Father,
George Patrick Ganley 295
B Three Statements on Academic Freedom 303
C Use of the Concept of Human Dignity in Four
International Instruments 308
D The Declaration of Montreal 315

Notes 321

Index 347
Death Talk, Second Edition
Death Talk, Second Edition
By Margaret Somerville
9780773543768
$32.95 CAD
Paperback
Ethical Canary, The
The Ethical Canary
By Margaret Somerville
9780773527843
$27.95 CAD
Paperback
Transdisciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity
Edited by Margaret Somerville and David Rapport
9780773525450
$39.95 CAD
Paperback
Do We Care?
Do We Care?
Edited by Margaret Somerville
9780773518780
$29.95 CAD
Paperback
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