To read Margaret Somerville is to be exposed to terms, ideas, and questions that, at the dawn of the new millennium, seem initially archaic. Words like “ethics,” “morality,” and “evil” seem, in our modern world, better suited for Sunday school. With The Ethical Canary, however, Somerville not only exposes readers to these terms, she makes them central to an examination of current health technologies and the issues they raise, both as complex issues in their own right and as bellwethers (canaries in our societal mine shafts) of our moral and ethical health.

Somerville, an ethicist at McGill University, examines a range of health technology issues, from topics as seemingly straightforward (and perhaps even passé) as infant male circumcision and abortion to such avant garde science as human cloning and the socially complex questions surrounding euthanasia and the fair provision of health care. Somerville strives at all times to keep humanity, not new technology, in the foreground. Her key guidelines in assessing any technology’s ethical nature – that “we must always act to ensure profound respect for life, in particular, human life” and that “we must protect and promote the human spirit” – are a manifesto for ethical living in a secular society.

Despite the almost breezy straightforward style of Somerville’s prose and the clarity of her arguments, The Ethical Canary is a difficult, slow book to read. It forces the individual reader to confront and examine received and accepted beliefs, to extrapolate from their own preconceptions, and to justify themselves to themselves – or admit their ethical fallibility should they fail to do so. In this, The Ethical Canary is a crucial book at a critical time – essential reading for anyone attempting to make sense of the rapidly changing world around them.