BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Covering Familiar Ground of Social Issues : THE MORAL IMAGINATION; Confronting the Ethical Issues of Our Day <i> by Edward Tivnan</i> Simon & Schuster, $24, 334 pages

Recently I attended a large dinner party at the home of a friend. After dinner, half of the guests retired to the living room, while the others continued their conversation around the table. I went with the living-room group.

About a half-hour later, someone from the dining room wandered into the living room and announced, “They’re discussing the existence of God.”

To which someone piped up, “Has any new ground been broken?”

I have been chuckling about this ever since, and I mentioned it to a law professor friend, who scolded, “New ground is broken and trampled on every day.”

These snippets echoed repeatedly in my head as I read “The Moral Imagination” by Edward Tivnan, a book that painstakingly and lovingly lays out the arguments, sub-arguments and sub-subarguments for and against some of the major political and moral questions of our time: abortion, suicide, euthanasia, capital punishment and affirmative action.

Tivnan hopes that by undertaking this project, he will be able to clarify the issues, shed new light on them and point a way to their resolution. He is also aware that this laudable goal is not likely to be achieved. He writes:

“There are good arguments on all sides of all of these issues; it just depends on who you are, where you are from, and what your view of life is.”

Consider abortion. Some people think abortion is a form of birth control. Other people think abortion is infanticide. What more can be said? There is no knockout argument, and few people, if any, are ever persuaded by the other side.

Capital punishment? Some people think capital punishment is a barbaric form of state-sponsored murder. Others think it is an appropriate penalty for particularly heinous crimes.

We have argued--it seems like forever--over whether the death penalty is or is not a deterrent, and there seems no way of resolving that question. Not surprisingly, those who oppose capital punishment say the evidence “proves” that it is not a deterrent. Those who favor capital punishment say the evidence “proves” that it is. And on and on.

Affirmative action? Some say that it violates the principle that people should be rewarded only on the basis of their own individual merit. Others say that merit is a code word for a set of arbitrary criteria under which white males succeed and others are left behind. Affirmative action is needed to level the playing field.

Can any new ground be broken in these arguments, or is it always a matter of rehashing the same old stuff?

Tivnan, a writer with a Ph.D. in philosophy, does more rehashing than breaking new ground. To be sure, he does a very good job of presenting all sides at their strengths and is evenhanded in doing so. But in the end, readers who have followed these issues will find a good deal here that is familiar.

Tivnan is certainly aware of the problem. In the section on suicide, he writes, “Is suicide really the ultimate sign of human freedom or merely an affront to God and the community? Or do all suicides have to be a little bit crazy because it is impossible to make a ‘rational’ decision about something no one really knows anything about--what it is like to be dead?”

At the end of each section, Tivnan drops his neutral stance and presents his own thoughts and conclusions about the issue under discussion.

Struggling with the very difficult questions he has posed, he acknowledges that his views are unlikely to change the minds of those who disagree with him, particularly those who hold their views most zealously.

Tivnan recognizes that these issues are so intractable because they engage fundamentally different world views, and he worries that they threaten the very idea of democracy itself.

He correctly observes that democracy is based on the notion that if the body politic discusses an issue long enough and with sufficient goodwill, a consensus will emerge. So far, however, there is no evidence of a consensus on these matters.

This would have been a better book if Tivnan had focused on the implications of insoluble moral problems for a democratic society and less on going over the arguments for and against the issues. To his credit, he is fascinated by ideas, and he knows that ideas matter. But these ideas are not fresh.