Margaret Somerville – The Link Between Spirituality and Morality

Margaret Somerville defines spirituality as “first of all amazement, then awe, then wonder, and sometimes immense joy, and a feeling of transcendence” and holds that the human spirit is essential to ethics. She wonders, based on the science of epigenetics, if we have a gene for spirituality. If so, how do we switch it on? She worries that the human spirit is under threat from the new science, and makes the case that, in order to safeguard human spirituality, the resulting new or future possibilities need to be constrained by ethical limits.