The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit

Every day we hear news about medical or scientific breakthroughs and the complex ethical issues they raise. Feats that were never before possible including cloning, genetically modifying food, mapping human chromosomes and using animal organs for human transplants have opened up a Pandora's box of ethical questions. Technology is advancing at such a rate that the issue is not so much what we can do but rather whether we will do it. According to Margaret Somerville, a leading international authority on medicine, ethics and the law, society must set ethically acceptable limits on scientific advances. In this controversial, timely and much-anticipated book, Professor Somerville sheds light on the urgent ethical and legal questions that vie for our attention. Along the way, she calls upon us to recognize the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives and the metaphysical reality that gives meaning to life.

History

Somerville, Margaret

World

Penguin Global

Riverlands of the Anthropocene (Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies)

Australia & Oceania

Routledge

Water in a Dry Land: Place-Learning Through Art and Story (Innovative Ethnographies)

Water in a Dry Land is a story of research about water as a source of personal and cultural meaning. The site of this exploration is the iconic river system which forms the networks of natural and human landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. In the current geological era of human induced climate change, the desperate plight of the system of waterways has become an international phenomenon, a symbol of the unsustainable ways we relate to water globally.  The Murray-Darling Basin extends west of the Great Dividing Range that separates the densely populated east coast of Australia from the sparsely populated inland. Aboriginal peoples continue to inhabit the waterways of the great artesian basin and pass on their cultural stories and practices of water, albeit in changing forms. A key question informing the book is: What can we learn about water from the oldest continuing culture inhabiting the world’s driest continent? In the process of responding to this question a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers formed to work together in a contact zone of cultural difference within an emergent arts-based ethnography. Photo essays of the artworks and their landscapes offer a visual accompaniment to the text on the Routledge Innovative Ethnography Series website, http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/. This book is perfect for courses in environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, and qualitative methods.

Water in a Dry Land (Innovative Ethnographies)

Reference

Water in a Dry Land is a story of research about water as a source of personal and cultural meaning. The site of this exploration is the iconic river system which forms the networks of natural and human landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. In the current geological era of human induced climate change, the desperate plight of the system of waterways has become an international phenomenon, a symbol of the unsustainable ways we relate to water globally. The Murray-Darling Basin extends west of the Great Dividing Range that separates the densely populated east coast of Australia from the sparsely populated inland. Aboriginal peoples continue to inhabit the waterways of the great artesian basin and pass on their cultural stories and practices of water, albeit in changing forms. A key question informing the book is: What can we learn about water from the oldest continuing culture inhabiting the world’s driest continent? In the process of responding to this question a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers formed to work together in a contact zone of cultural difference within an emergent arts-based ethnography. Photo essays of the artworks and their landscapes offer a visual accompaniment to the text on the Routledge Innovative Ethnography Series website, http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/. This book is perfect for courses in environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, and qualitative methods.

This brand new title in the market-leading at a Glance series provides a highly-illustrated, visual introduction to the key concepts of population-level disease prevention. Accessible, double-page spreads help you understand and appreciate the determinants of health which impact on healthcare services and their effectiveness. Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance features high-yield information on all the topics covered at medical school, including:   Measurement of population health   Epidemiological concepts of cause and association, surveillance, and risk   Use of epidemiology in clinical decision-making   Epidemiology of major health problems such as cardiovascular disease and cancer   Health promotion   Basics of health economics   Basics of health policy, needs assessment, and evaluation   Also featuring self-assessment questions to help test learning, this new title will provide an invaluable resource for medical and healthcare students, junior doctors, and those preparing for a career in public health.

Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance

Science & Math

Kumaran, K.

Anderson, Rob

Biological Sciences

Wiley/Blackwell

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? Touching on such controversial subjects as our growing acceptance of new reproductive technologies and the genetic modification of plants and animals, she argues that only if we are willing to undertake a journey of the human imagination will we be able to see, understand, and relate morally to the world around us, allowing us to develop an ethics to guide us.

The Ethical Imagination (Massey Lectures)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Cbc Radio Canada

Every day we hear news about medical or scientific breakthroughs and the complex ethical issues they raise. Feats that were never before possible, including cloning, genetically modifying food, mapping human chromosomes, and using animal organs for human transplants, have opened up a Pandora's box of ethical questions. Technology is advancing at such rate that the issue is not so much what we can do but rather whether we will do it. Margaret Somerville, a leading international authority on medicine, ethics, and the law, demonstrates that society must set ethically acceptable limits on scientific advances. In this controversial, and timely book Somerville sheds light on the urgent ethical and legal questions that vie for our attention. Along the way, she calls upon us to recognize the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives and the metaphysical reality that gives meaning to life. The Ethical Canary is a major contribution to the debate about the hottest issues in ethics today, from one of the world's leading authorities.

The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit

Philosophy

McGill-Queen's University Press

Renowned ethicist Margaret Somerville tackles some of the most contentious issues of our time and proposes a brilliant new kind of ethical language and thought to help us deal with them. 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? Touching on such controversial subjects as our growing acceptance of new reproductive technologies and the genetic modification of plants and animals, she argues that only if we are willing to undertake a journey of the human imagination will we be able to see, understand, and relate morally to the world around us, allowing us to develop an ethics to guide us.

The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit

Death Talk: The Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide

Death Talk asks why, when our society has rejected euthanasia for over two thousand years, are we now considering legalizing it? Has euthanasia been promoted by deliberately confusing it with other ethically acceptable acts? What is the relation between pain relief treatments that could shorten life and euthanasia? How do journalistic values and media ethics affect the public's perception of euthanasia? What impact would the legalization of euthanasia have on concepts of human rights, human responsibilities, and human ethics? Can we imagine teaching young physicians how to put their patients to death? There are vast ethical, legal, and social differences between natural death and euthanasia. In Death Talk, Margaret Somerville argues that legalizing euthanasia would cause irreparable harm to society's value of respect for human life, which in secular societies is carried primarily by the institutions of law and medicine. Death has always been a central focus of the discussion that we engage in as individuals and as a society in searching for meaning in life. Moreover, we accommodate the inevitable reality of death into the living of our lives by discussing it, that is, through "death talk." Until the last twenty years this discussion occurred largely as part of the practice of organized religion. Today, in industrialized western societies, the euthanasia debate provides a context for such discussion and is part of the search for a new societal-cultural paradigm. Seeking to balance the "death talk" articulated in the euthanasia debate with "life talk," Somerville identifies the very serious harms for individuals and society that would result from accepting euthanasia. A sense of the unfolding euthanasia debate is captured through the inclusion of Somerville's responses to or commentaries on several other authors' contributions.

Death Talk: The Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide, Second Edition

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.

Bird on an Ethics Wire: Battles about Values in the Culture Wars

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Books by Somerville, Margaret