1. McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law
EMBEDDING ETHICS IN THE ACADEMY
UNIVERSITIES AS SOCIETAL ETHICS FORUMS
Safeguarding Values and Ethics in Higher Education:
A Shared Responsibility
MARGARET SOMERVILLE
AM, FRSC, A.u.A (pharm.), LL.B. (hons), D.C.L.,
LL.D. (hons. caus.), D.Sc.(hons. caus.),
D.Hum.L. (hons. caus.), D.Sac.L. (hons. caus.)
Ethics and Values in Higher Education in the Era of Globalisation:
What Role for the Disciplines?
IAU 2010 International Conference
24‐26 June, 2010
Mykolas Romeris University
Vilnius, Lithuania
Copyright © 2010 Margaret A. Somerville
Not to be copied or cited without permission of the author

2. PART I :ASSUMPTIONS
Leaders set “ethical tone” of an organization
Young people more open to learning about
ethics
Freedom of speech, values, belief and
conscience within the academy critical to its
being an open forum for freely debating,
affirming, challenging, creating or destroying
values

3. Assumptions cont’d....
Enormous pressure in universities to adopt
politically correct values and moral relativism
New technoscience raises unprecedented ethics
issues ‐ must embed ethics from inception
“Doing ethics” requires use all our “human ways
of knowing”, not just reason
Must teach ethics in multiple ways, both direct
and indirect

4. PART II
Three topics especially relevant to ethical
challenges within higher education:
Basic steps involved in “doing ethics”
Need to use the full spectrum of our “human
ways of knowing” in “doing ethics”
Unprecedented ethical issues raised by new
technoscience.

5. Steps in “doing ethics”...
i). Identify all ethically relevant facts.
Good facts are essential for good ethics
ii). Identify all values relevant to those facts
iii). Identify any conflicts of values
iv). Prioritize conflicting values
v). Ethically justify the priority adopted

6. Use all “human ways of
knowing”...
Include
“Human memory” ‐ history ‐ learn from past
Imagination, especially moral imagination,
what might expect in future
Examined emotions
Commonsense
Experiential knowledge
Ethics
Reason ‐ very important, but not only
Reason
important way

7. Valid warning that “dangerously on the edge of
total flake”
but equal danger if “dangerously on the edge of
pure rationality”
Paradoxically, scientific research now proving
importance of “other ways of knowing” to ethical
decision making:
Shows people with damage to emotional centres
of their brains can’t make good moral decisions
and people with problems in frontal lobe
function make “overly utilitarian decisions” when
deciding about ethics.

8. The new technoscience ...
Technoscience presents
unprecedented challenges to fundamental
human values and ethics and conflicts spill into
society as a whole
Ranges from human embryo stem cell research;
cloning; and creating artificial sperm and ova; to
artificial intelligence; robotics; synthetic biology;
nanotechnology; and “dual use” research ‐
possibility of terrorism
Major 21st century values issues will centre on this
science; what we decide will set “ethical tones” of
our societies

9. Ethical questions raised include:
Is there an essence of our humanness we must
hold on trust for future generations? If so,
what is it?
What are children’s rights with respect to their
genetic origins, e.g., is it ethically acceptable
to make a baby between two women?
Are we, as transhumanists believe, on our way
to a post‐human future where humans will be
an obsolete model?

10. Should we reprogram embryos’ aging genes
to increase the average human lifespan to
200 years?
How can we find some “shared ethics”?
What do we owe ethically to future
generations?
Can the future trust us?

11. To answer need comprehensive and sophisticated
analysis at
micro (individual), meso (institutional), macro
(societal) and mega (global) levels
We hold the essence of life, itself, in the palm of our
collective human hand in a way no humans before us
have ever done; we can redesign life, including
human life.
We can change the 4.8 billion years of evolution that
has resulted in us and all other life on earth, in a
nanosecond.

12. With great power comes great responsibility
towards present and future generations
To fulfill that responsibility requires that our
decisions be ethically sound.
That requires teaching university students ‐
our future leaders and decision makers ‐ to
act ethically.

13. To find ethics needed to guide
us..
Need be conscious of
dangers of false certainty
must build into decision making structures
an ethics of uncertainty
dangers of being simplistic
must build in an ethics of complexity
impact our decisions will have on future generations
must build in an ethics of potentiality.

14. Concepts that could help fulfill an
ethics of potentiality include:
The “precautionary principle” currently most
commonly found in environmental ethics
“Anticipated consent” ‐ if we can’t reasonably
assume that someone affected by our decision –
e.g., future generations ‐ would consent if present,
it’s not ethical to proceed
“Trust” change from “blind trust” ‐ “Trust me
because I know what is best for you” –
to “earned trust” ‐ “Trust me because I will act in
your ‘best interests’ and show that you can trust me”

15. CONCLUSION