Renowned ethicist and McGill Professor Margaret Somerville will give the 2006 Massey Lecture at the Mount Royale Centre today. Presented by CBC Radio One and McGill University, the Massey Lecture is a prestigious annual event designed to bring scholars to Canadian universities in order to discuss issues of political, cultural or philosophical importance.
In a week-long, national series entitled The Ethical Imagination, Somerville will explore the ethical challenges presented by modern scientific advancements including genetic engineering, stem cell research and robotics. Somerville, the founding director of the McGill Centre for Ethics and Medicine, emphasized the “enormous gravity” with which society must approach such revolutionary innovations.
“If you consider that we humans are the product of 850 million years of evolution… it is a pretty dramatic power which we now hold in our collective human hand,” she said.
A follow-up to her book The Ethical Canary, the lecture addresses the need to establish a common value system to respond to new scientific realities.
“We need to learn how to find a shared way to approach these things, otherwise we’re just not going to succeed,” Somerville said.
Somerville believes that a deep respect for all life and the human spirit is essential to this global process. She also emphasized the need for discourse on the issue saying that because we “can no longer use religious language, we need a new poetry to address these issues.”
In addition to examining the modern dilemmas presented by developments in fields such as reproductive technology and robotics, The Ethical Imagination will also explore ways in which society can utilize what she has named the “old virtues” of trust, courage integrity and compassion to respond to modern challenges.
Stressing that her goal is not to give her audience answers or convert people to a specific set of beliefs, Somerville hopes that students who attend her lecture will come away from the lecture with more questions than they came with.
She detailed her duties as raising issues, spreading ideas and assisting in what she deems an ongoing journey that everyone needs to join.
Somerville holds the Samuel Gale Professor of Law position in the Faculty of Law and is also a professor in the Faculty of Medicine. An Australian-born Canadian citizen, Somerville has served as a consultant for international institutions such as the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, the joint UN program on AIDS and the United Nations Secretariat in Geneva. She has been awarded many honours throughout her career, including the 2004 UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science.
Somerville is the forty-fifth Massey lecturer since the series’ inception in 1961. After speaking in Montreal, she will spend ten days lecturing in St. John’s, Calgalry, Vancouver and Toronto. Initiated by University of Toronto’s Massey College, the lecture was originally held exclusively at University of Toronto. In 2002 the event expanded into a traveling lecture series hosted by universities throughout Canada.
Famous past lecturers include Stephen Lewis, Noam Chomsky, Northrop Frye, Michael Igantieff and Martin Luther King, Jr. The lectures are broadcasted on CBC’s Radio One show Ideas and can be purchased on cassette or in print through CBC.
The Massey Lecture will be held at 8:00 p.m. at the Mount Royale Centre, located at 2200 Mansfield Street. Tickets are $10 for students and seniors, $15 for adults. They can be purchased either at the door or in advance by calling Admission Network at (514) 790-1245.
