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Science & the Human Person article

Neuroscience and the Religious Self


The field of Neuroscience is changing our understanding of the way we live, move and have our being. When I studied Neuroscience many years ago, the brain was considered to be a three-pound organ of gray and white matter.  Once it reached adult size, it was believed that the brain remained unchanged throughout adult life.  Injury to the brain was considered irreversible due to the impenetrable blood brain barrier.  A mechanistic view of the brain as an integrated series of parts made the mind-brain problem virtually insoluble.  The French mathematician, Rene Descartes, reasoned that the mind is distinct from the material brain in the same way that the soul is distinct from the body.  The separation of mind from brain led to the understanding of self as a “thinking subject”:  cogito ergo sum.

In the last twenty years discoveries in Neuroscience have raised many questions for philosophers and scientists alike, as primary assumptions in the field regarding the immutability of the brain have proven to be incorrect. Two points, in particular, have been repealed: first, that the adult brain is fixed and cannot generate new neurons; and, second, that the function of brain structures are determinate. Scientists are now discovering that the brain can change.  The brain’s potential for modification is known as “neuroplasticity”—that is, the brain has the ability to adapt, grow new neurons, and develop new connections, even in adult life.  Rather than being fixed and immutable, scientists are realizing that we are wired for creativity and novelty.

In his 1994 prize-winning book, Descartes Error:  Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio revealed the interplay between emotions and cognition in the construction of self, a revolution insofar as mind, consciousness and self were thought to be distinct from body and emotions. Damasio showed that emotions provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition and are required for the self-processes undergirding consciousness: feelings are essential for rational thought.  In his recent book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Damasio suggests that feelings are the basic elements in the formation of the protoself and core self; hence, a change in emotional life, for example, due to brain injury, can induce a change in self.

Damasio’s work has led to a new understanding of “mind” that is not so much a higher level of brain but a flow of information throughout the entire nervous system, including the body, senses, emotion and environment.  The notion of mind as information suggests that most of mind is outside of our awareness at any given time.  It is more like a field of information that, at every moment, orients the emotional and cognitive self in tandem with the environment through integrated levels of consciousness.  The old adage, “mind over matter” no longer holds true.  Rather, the material world is as much as part of mind as the thinking self.

The idea that mind includes the material world and that the brain can change in response to the environment is further supported by studies on Buddhist monks after long periods of meditation. Andrew Newberg, a pioneer in the area of Neurotheology, has shown that the practice of meditation enhances blood flow, as well as function, in an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus, an evolutionary newcomer that mediates our experience of empathy, social awareness, intuition, compassion, and our ability to regulate emotion. This structure sits in the front of the brain and wraps around the front part of the corpus callosum, the thick network of neurons that bridges the two hemispheres together. The anterior cingulate mediates communication between the amygdala, one of our most primitive brain structures, and the prefrontal cortex, that is, between emotions and cognition. Newberg has shown that meditation integrates or centers emotional and intellectual life, increasing blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, evoking compassion, sympathy and care for others. Meditation strengthens the cingulate to be more effective in shifting one’s focus on positive values, for example, on love, peace and compassion.

On the other hand, anger shuts down communication to the prefrontal cortex as mediated through the anterior cingulate. Emotion and fear take over in determining behavior; anger therefore interrupts the functioning of the frontal lobes.  Newberg writes: “Not only do you lose the ability to be rational, you lose the awareness that you’re acting in an irrational way. When your frontal lobes shut down, it’s impossible to listen to the other person, let alone feel empathy or compassion.” Bridging our primitive emotional response areas with our highly evolved prefrontal cortex allows the anterior cingulate to mediate how we perceive ourselves and our actions in relation to others and to the rest of the world, and beyond.  Because the function of this circuit is enhanced by meditation, Newberg believes, “there is a coevolution of spirituality and consciousness, strengthening circuits that allow us to envision a benevolent, interconnecting relationship between the universe, God, and ourselves.” The neuroplasticity of the brain and the positive role of meditation on the emotional brain points to a dynamic interplay between brain, mind and ethical orientation.

Neuroplasticity and neurotheology are changing the way we view the human person.  Advances in brain research will be among the most significant in the 21st century.  What will be the role of religion in light of the changing brain?  Three points are worth noting: 1) The self is not fixed but mediated by repeated patterns of information—hence even the religious self can change by altering the fields of information; 2) Prayer and meditation can focus the brain on positive values such as peace, justice and compassion; 3) The more the brain is exercised for a particular function, the more it develops cells and connections for that function. Considering these points in terms of interreligious dialogue sheds new light on the importance of dialogue. Strengthening lines of communication may not only be educational insofar as we learn about the other; rather, we may now suggest that new brain is forming.  By sharing beliefs and values through continuous dialogue, new neural connections are sprouting.  As the Canadian psychologist Don Hebbs claimed, “those who fire together wire together.” Each choice we make creates a focus for the brain and guides neurons to talk to each other, creating new connections or reinforcing old ones. Training the brain for a world of peace is now within our reach.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin posited a convergence of world religions as the way forward toward Omega. The convergence of religions through ongoing dialogue will lead to new neural networks and, we might say, new religious brain.  Neuroplasticity coupled with sustained dialogue suggests that a new type of religious person will emerge in the future.

 

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Ilia Delio
Ilia Delio, OSFis Director of Catholic Studies and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. Delio’s research concentrates in science and religion, with a focus on transhumanism, nature and ecology, and evolutionary theology. Her book, The Emergent Christ (Orbis, 2011) explores the meaning of Christian faith in light of evolution. Her new book The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis, 2013) was released this spring.
Field Notes article

Muslim Attitudes Towards Evolutionary Science


Photo Credit: Via Tsui. Dinosaurs at the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museum.

Despite the combative relationship that some Muslims had with modern science during the colonial period, science still embodies the hope for the “future recovery” of Muslim societies, argues historian of science Ahmad Dallal. In order to come to grips with the human person in the context of modern science, I have little doubt that Muslims ought to seek a satisfactory theological engagement— particularly with the philosophy of modern science. Absent such a substantive engagement with the historical tradition, as well as a philosophically informed Muslim theology, I can hardly see a way forward. Otherwise, one inevitably faces the bewildering prospect of Muslim conversations repeatedly re-inventing the wheel over science with no hint of even an emerging moral and intellectual consensus.

Currently, the Muslim conversation over complex evolutionary science is often reduced to positivist explanations derived from the duty-based ethics (fiqh) trove of Muslim teachings. Alternatively, one may confront forms of Qur’an proof-texting that would make classical exegetes turn in their grave and cause informed audiences to roll their eyes.  The growing Muslim creationism industry can, without blushing, find convenient scriptural verses to reject or confirm virtually any aspect of a modern scientific cosmology.

In this context, I take theology to mean a plausible explanation of not only the facts of science, but also how Muslims come to terms with the larger presumptions that evolutionary biology and physics make about human origins. Clearly, the language of the Qur’an was embedded in the grammar of a seventh century cosmology. In a previous blog, I pointed out how Muslim scholars, such as the eighteenth century Shah Waliyullah of India and others, showed an awareness of the cultural mind of prophets and how they and their revelations were intimately connected to their environments and contexts.

When one reads the works of an author like Waliyullah, one gets a sense he is unearthing a theological anthropology to understand how the human was imagined in Muslim theology—a task far removed from apologetics or an attempt to turn the tradition into a blunt instrument.  Therefore, Waliyullah could confidently explain why prophets used the vocabularies of their day and appropriated the cosmologies of their times in their revelatory pronouncements.

Damian Howard S.J.’s Being Human in Islam is an excellent study documenting Muslim attitudes towards evolutionary science. With an eye for the theological and philosophical, Howard shows how Muslims have had agonistic theological, political and philosophical encounters with the substance of evolutionary science. Howard helpfully summarizes the multiple Muslim perspectives on, and encounters with, the philosophy of evolutionary science into four positions: attempts to find a naïve compatibility between Islam and evolution—especially in the hands of the Egyptian religious reformer Muhammad Abduh; the radical rejection of evolution by traditionalists like Iranian-American academic Seyyed Hossein Nasr; the critical reconciliation proposed by advocates of the Islamization of knowledge, pioneered by the Palestinian-American scholar Ismail al-Faruqi; and the work of creative assimilationists who drew inspiration from the French philosopher Henri Bergson.

Bergsonian assimilation, as Howard calls it, found partners in the pre-partition Indian philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal, and the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi. Bergsonian assimilationists, such as Iqbal, introduced a Muslim metaphysical perspective into the conversation with Bergson’s ideas. What made Bergson attractive to Muslims was his success in integrating “science and spirit within a single worldview”, which actually accorded spirit the upper hand, and then “wrapping the whole within an evolutionary framework,” writes Howard.

In a previous blog Abdulaziz Sachedina identified usul al-fiqh—normally translated as legal theory, but best described as a moral-theology—as one of his sources of tradition. Historically, this discipline exhibited a complex interweaving of Greek philosophy in the writing of the earliest proponents of this genre. There were, of course, also others who despised the philosophical elements that emerged in the discipline.  In my view, the critical appropriation of Muslim moral theology, if leavened with a robust contemporary philosophical anthropology, could serve as a starting point for a conversation, which seeks to develop resources to inform a Muslim social imaginary in an age of evolutionary science.

This is, of course, a risky business, since for some Muslims at least evolution is antithetical to the very concept of a Muslim imaginary. Why? Well, in an evolutionary schema the advent of human life is conceived as random, and a millennium of Muslim theology tried to find order, purpose, and hierarchy in nature and human life. Therefore, a much more detailed conversation and in-depth study is required in order to rebut the claims of those who advocate Islamic creationism.

But as every Muslim high school and college student nowadays knows, evolutionary biology is fairly persuasive while mosque sermons that portray God as a puppeteer can cause intellectual anxiety among their informed audiences. I am in agreement with those who argue that intelligible “God-talk” can hardly be convincing if it converses with a cosmology lacking intellectual legs, or, for that matter, if “moral-talk” ignores the facticity and complexity of the empirical realities of life rendering our inherited moral traditions quaint at best.

The cosmology of modern science, therefore, ought to be taken seriously. Ilia Delio reminds us of this, citing the Spanish-Indian Catholic theologian Raimon Pannikar who said that when we divorce theology from cosmology then we no longer have a living God, but an idea of God. In other words, we fail to experience God. Hence, minimal coherence between faith claims and the lived experiences of humans ought to be intelligible. Yet, the way Muslims experience God might be different in the ways Catholics, or some Catholics experience God. Dialogue between these traditions will, therefore, make a major contribution to this conversation—a conversation which I look forward to engaging with further.

 

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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Field Notes article

Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Consumerism: Considering the Social Impact of ARTs


No one should be surprised that Iran is in the technological position that Robert Tappan describes in the first paragraph of his recent post on The Use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies [ARTs] in Iran.  After all, when we compare the GDPs of Muslim countries in the Middle East during the last several decades, Iran trails only Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the 1980s and 1990s brought a new wave of consumerism to Iran—a wave which, in my view, was rightly protested by the more traditional members of that society.

In most cultures, this kind of consumerism leads to a significant drop in birth rates.  Though this trend has been a well-documented and serious problem for the economies and social welfare systems of Western Europe, Russia, and Japan for some time, in most recent years it has become true of the Muslim world in the Middle East—and even more dramatically true of Iran. Between 1975 and 2005, Iran’s fertility rate declined by a stunning 70%. Understandably, the Mullahs and government officials have worked overtime to try to curb this development, which many rightly connect with the arrival of Western style consumerism.

Tappan has expertly shown how part of the response of Iran’s religious leaders to infertility involved the unusual move to permit ARTs, even those involving third party egg and sperm donors, and also third party gestational carriers. He also highlighted many different serious problems with ART use in Iran, including problems related to the commodification of gametes and women’s bodies. My previous post for Contending Modernities attempted to show how our understanding of ARTs—along with many of our American ideas about reproduction more generally—have succumbed to the logic of commodification and consumerism, and how our culture is much worse for it.

Given the relatively recent arrival of Western style consumerism, the last thing that Iran needs to do to promote healthy population rates is fall into the trap of seeing re-production as just another kind of market transaction. Embedded within this understanding—which soon becomes a violent social structure of sin that exploits the vulnerable—are the very consumerist ideas which led to the dramatic fall in birth rates in the first place.  Children are understood to be mere tools of our will rather than welcomed into our lives (or not) as pure gifts from God.

Middle-Eastern Muslims, in general, have done a better job than most in highlighting the idolatrous dangers of Western market capitalism and consumerism. Many are hyper-aware of how this social structure exploits vulnerable populations (especially the poor and women—and even more so, poor women) and fast-tracks inequality. I have admired the willingness of many Muslim cultures to set up social structures of resistance to American-style consumer culture, and I hope Iran finds it within itself to resist the particularly nefarious aspect of consumerism which impacts understandings of reproduction.

Islam brings with it not only a powerful concern for the poor and those on the margins of society, but also a strong sense of the submission of the human will to the will of God, particularly when it comes to having children. The more that we insert the fallen human will into the picture—particularly when our choices take place within the social structure of sin we call consumerism—the more our reproductive and other social problems will multiply.

As the working group members of Contending Modernities think together how about Catholics and Muslims can work together on issues of bioethics—with particular reference to how social structures impact and shape these issues—the problem of consumerism looms large.  But it also provides us an opportunity: not just because this social structure impacts both Muslim and Western cultures are our deepest levels, but because our religious traditions have much to offer when it comes to resisting consumerism—especially given our common focus on vulnerable, marginal populations.

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Charles Camosy
Charles C. Camosyis Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University. Camosy’s research engages with bioethics, Catholic social teaching, moral anthropology, and the intersection of Christian and secular ethics. Camosy is author of Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization(Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Too Expensive to Treat?: Finitude, Tragedy, and the Neonatal ICU(Eerdmans, 2010).
Field Notes article

Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Parenthood in Islam: A Response to Thomas Eich


In his recent blog post, Thomas Eich asks if particular issues of medical ethics are “really only about the issue at hand, as is usually claimed in the course of such debates?” “How strong is the presence of other factors in these debates,” he continues, “which are not directly linked to the medical technology under discussion?”

Eich is, of course, referring to the reductionist assumptions that some Muslim ethicists make about sexual mores followed in a “morally corrupt” West versus those adhered to in a “virtuous East.” Sure, some authors do moralize in an impoverished East vs. West, or clash of civilizations, mode. Similarly, Sunni authors play the game of trying to upend the views of Shi`i ethicists without providing compelling ethical arguments. All of this is to be deplored, of course.

If Eich provided details as to how he thought German bioethical reasoning overlapped with the Egyptian cases Sherine Hamdy discussed in her book, then such an intervention would have disrupted the unhelpful West vs. East binary discussion in bioethics across faith traditions.

In my view, the main story of Eich’s discussion of heterologous or donor insemination, known as in vitro fertilization (IVF), is the emerging notion of a new construction of the understanding of the family. From Eich’s presentation it becomes clear that most Shi`i authorities work with a dual ethical template. Firstly, they rely on a template of genetic parenthood by identifying offspring with their genetic parents — namely those who are the donors of eggs or sperm, who are considered to be the “biological parents.” They uphold this dimension strongly. Sunni authorities inexplicably view donor gametes as a form of adultery, while Shi`i authorities do not view it with this level of moral severity. Assisted fertilization is not adultery in their view. Secondly, Shi`i ethical thinking nudges us in the direction of coming to terms with the concept of “social parents” who raise offspring born out of assisted reproduction (donor) fertilization procedures. Hence, two sets of parents, “genetic or biological parents” and “social parents”, affirm both forms of parentage. In other words, in assisted reproduction, parentage becomes a hybrid of both genetic and social constructions of parenthood. In some way, the emergent idea of “social parents” opens the door to adoption, and a new way of approaching an issue that has always posed a problem for Muslim ethicists.

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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Field Notes article

The Use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Iran


An American radiologist surprised that Iranians have access to the same type of medical technologies. An American undergraduate student who sheepishly admits he never knew that Iran had cities until he saw Tehran during a film in class. Such stereotypes about Iran are all too common. The reality, however, is quite different, with Iran scoring advanced developments in science and technology ranging from the hotly debated issue of nuclear power to the lesser-known development of assisted reproductive technology (ART).

Iran, though not alone among Muslim-majority countries with active fertility clinics, is unusual in its acceptance of third-party reproductive techniques, including the use of donor eggs and embryos, as well as surrogacy. This may be all the more surprising since the Islamic Republic’s laws have been brought in line with Islamic law, and the legal use of such new technologies must be approved by the nation’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei — a religious scholar. So while other, predominantly Sunni, countries permit ART between a husband and wife but forbid the use of a third-party, permissive fatwas for the use of egg and embryo donors, and surrogacy, have been granted by some of the Iranian Shi`i scholars, and these practices have been given civil-legal approval (or tacit approval through silence).

Infertility affects Iranians at the same, or perhaps higher, rates than it does the rest of the world. Whether a case of infertility stems from complications arising from other medical conditions, environmental factors, the increasingly delayed average age for marriage, or other factors, Iranians struggle with the psychological pressures, and familial and social expectations that are inherent in this issue. The religious jurists aim to alleviate the suffering of their followers by granting such fatwas. The clinicians, also eager to ease the troubles of their patients, provide the procedures. However, the larger ethical debate about the costs and benefits of third-party involvement in ARTs has been mostly ignored. The jurists’ fatwas typically lack discussion or presentation of any moral foundation, and instead illustrate the scholar’s concerns for typical juristic matters such as from whom the child will inherit or around whom they must maintain more stringent modesty in dress and comportment. The clinicians, using the fatwas, then engage in ethical deliberations, though they are largely limited to the procedural concerns of the clinic — such as determining limits on the number of eggs a single woman may donate, or whether to allow anonymous or known donation.

Other aspects of third-party ARTs that might normally be considered in Western bioethical discourses have so far fallen outside the purview of either the jurists or the clinicians. Although effort has been made to help prospective parents overcome their infertility while simultaneously granting the child a sound lineage (an important religious and social matter in Islam), other considerations for the child are largely overlooked. Even as some jurists argue that such lineages in the case of third-party donation are religiously permissible, we have to wonder if this will be sufficient to protect the child’s rights from scrutiny and infringement throughout her life, or will she be subject to bias? Can children receive genetic health information about their donor parents? Will gametes and embryos become mere commodities? What is the fate of surplus embryos generated as part of a couple’s treatment? What about issues of coercion? Many jurists permit the individual to sell eggs and embryos, and to charge for serving as a surrogate. Research shows most donors and surrogates receive financial compensation, but there is no organized bioethical discussion of the potential coercion of women into what can be difficult, painful, and dangerous processes.

Discussion of ART in Iran calls for a deeper exploration of bioethical considerations and perspectives than has been provided thus far in the jurists’ discrete rulings on the mere permissibility of an act, or in the clinicians’ engagement with specific cases. However, it would be wrong for Western bioethical principles, cases, or concerns to be adopted outright without regard to the religious and social concerns and traditions of Iranian Muslims. Instead there is a need for a more profound engagement with Islamic theology. How can the tradition be plumbed for guidance on broad notions of love, marriage, family, and reproduction? Articulating these motivations can inform a more nuanced process of ethical reflection for all of those involved in the decision-making process.

A project like Contending Modernities provides additional resources and incentives to consider from a comparative perspective. The Catholic tradition has taken quite a different tack in responding to ART, with a much more restrictive stance on the use of these technologies. How might Catholic moral reflection on ART inform Muslim thinking on the matter—not just in Iran in the case of third-party involvement, but among Muslims worldwide, since all contemporary scholars of both major schools of thought (Sunni and Shi`i) accept the use of ARTs between husband and wife?

 

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Robert Tappan
Robert M. Tappan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. His areas of interest include Islamic ethics, theology, and law, with a particular emphasis on exploring Shi`i scholarship on Islamic biomedical ethics. He has published several book chapters and encyclopedia articles on Islamic views of ethics, assisted reproductive technology, biomedical ethics, and health care. 
Field Notes article

Islamic Discourses on Assisted Reproductive Technologies


Several years ago I attended a workshop in Switzerland where scholars from several European countries, as well as religious representatives from Niger and the Middle East, discussed issues relating to assisted reproductive technologies. I remember one particular exchange vividly. I wanted to inquire as to the opinion of the Chief Judge (Qadi) of a major Middle Eastern City on the issue of heterologous insemination. While I already knew that Sunni normative statements consider it forbidden, it is partly allowed and practiced in Shi’i Iran and there is a certain degree of “insemination tourism” from non-Shi’i regions of the Middle East to Iran. So I asked the Chief Qadi what he thought about that. He replied: “Just because people do it, it does not make it allowed.” And then he continued that children born out of heterologous insemination are to be considered illegitimate children and therefore no legal tie can be established between the child and the husband of the child’s mother. End of debate. And in a sense, he is right of course. The discussion may sound like a typical abstract normative discussion. Couples who travel to Iran for heterologous insemination often simply do not tell anybody, and when the child is born it is automatically registered as the child of the mother’s husband.

Reproductive Technology and the Shariah

Recently, I read Morgan Clarke’s Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon. A significant section of the book is devoted to analyzing Shi’i normative positions on heterologous insemination and embryo adoption. Usually the positions of scholars such as Ayatollah Khamenei draw attention, because he considers all of these constellations to be valid if the act of transfer of sperm, oocyte, or inseminated oocyte takes places within a normative framework lending legitimacy to that act. This framework can be the so-called temporary marriage (mut’ah), where a man and a woman enter into a marriage contract specifying a fixed timeframe upon which the marriage will automatically be dissolved. This is often considered as a specific Shi’i legal construct, with Khamenei’s position usually viewed as being somewhat path breaking. However, Clarke argues that Khamenei is not breaking with anything here. Rather he uses a set of traditional concepts of Shi’i normative thinking in order to create legitimacy for the specific acts under discussion. Rather, it is legal scholars such as Ayatollah Hakim who are to be considered revolutionary, for arguing that heterologous insemination is forbidden and mut’ah is not considered a “solution” here, and that if it takes place the “children conceived out of wedlock” have full legal ties to their biological fathers.

I think that Clarke makes a very important point here. His observation — with which I fully agree — links the IVF-issue to the question the rights of children born out of wedlock (awlad al-zina), which is a much larger and very political problem in contemporary Middle Eastern countries. The position of these children (and their mothers, of course) is, generally speaking, very vulnerable due to the fact that the biological ties between a child and their biological father are usually only considered legally relevant if they match with a legitimizing framework — i.e. that the man and the woman were married at the time the child was conceived. If this is not the case then the situation is very difficult because the child has no father, legally speaking. The resulting problems may range from questions of child support to issues of the child’s citizenship, which is often linked to the legal father’s nationality. The big exception here is Tunisia, which passed legalization in the 1990s stating that biology determines fatherhood. In other countries, different solutions for the most pressing problems were put into practice — however, the basic legal concept remained in place.

Minority Opinions

The former Dean of Shariah faculty at Cairo’s famous al-Azhar University, Dr. Raf’at Uthman, is one of the few contemporary Muslim legal scholars who argues that an exclusively biological father-child tie creates legal obligations. Undoubtedly this is a minority opinion, as are the historical normative precedents which he refers to (the position taken by 14th century scholars Ibn Taimiya and Ibn al-Qayyim). What I find particularly interesting here is the fact that Uthman’s position became influential in the final recommendations of the second conference of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America held in Copenhagen in 2004. The document largely subscribed to Uthman’s opinion — although with considerable hesitation.

What I find so interesting in this is that the framing of the recommendations explicitly restricted the whole focus of the question to “Muslims living in the West”. I think that this is partly a reflection of the widespread assumption that extra-marital sexual relations are something “Western”. This brings me back to Clarke’s book. He also shows, through the case of Lebanon, how debates about IVF can also be read as a process of negotiating identity within the binary of the perceived morally corrupt West and a comparatively virtuous East. In the concluding section of his book he quotes informants (medical doctors) on genetic tests saying that “[i]n the vast majority of cases… people were not necessarily seeking out these tests to establish someone’s social identity” (p.204). Rather, many requests for genetic testing had their background in a marital dispute in which, for example, the husband accused his wife of adultery. “More than being about relationships between parents and children, it seems here, matters of biological relatedness are about relationships between men and women, the trust between them, and their claims to being genuinely moral persons”, Clarke concludes (p.205).

Prioritizing the Interests of the Child or the Adult?

Ethically, I think this points to a fundamental question of the apparently abstract discussion about ways of constructing lineage as a social tie as well as a legal tie. Maybe the question could be roughly phrased as “Are all these discussions really about the children? Or, perhaps, are they much more about the adults?” This is not a question exclusive to the Middle East or Islamic normativity, of course. Relatively few people know that the legislation in Germany, for example, resembles the Sunni normative view at least in one particular constellation. As in many other legal systems, in Germany a child born into a marriage is automatically considered the husband’s. If a DNA test proves that the biological father is somebody else, but the spouses do not want to change the way things are, the genetic father does not have any legal rights concerning his child. The validity of this regulation was confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights in 2012. The German commentator Heribert Prantl, writing for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, considered this a good decision, essentially because it was linked to specific cases in which adults could not “sort things out themselves” and find a compromise, and that the overarching aim should be to ask what is good for the child rather than what is good only for the adults. I think he has a point here.

Contextualizing Questions of Bioethics

To sum up, I consider it necessary to contextualize questions of medical ethics and to explore the broader societal debates that are negotiated through discussions concerning issues of high ethical relevance, such as IVF. Are particular issues of medical ethics really only about the issue at hand, as is usually claimed in the course of such debates? How strong is the presence of other factors in these debates, which are not directly linked to the medical technology under discussion? An example would be the aforementioned binary of a morally corrupt West and a comparatively virtuous East — a binary, which can be detected every now and then in the documented public debates on bioethical issues by Muslim religious scholars in the Middle East — and the impact of such framing on perceptions of bioethical discussions. While it has become commonplace for statements about something being “Islamic” or “(Middle) Eastern” to be critiqued as essentialist and orientalist, I argue that discussion of “the West” is equally problematic in regards to bioethics. “Western bioethics” is often used to describe an essentially US-centric approach, with a very strong focus on medical issues — completely overlooking other bioethical traditions in countries such as Germany, France or Great Britain. In this respect I learnt a lot from Tom Banchoff’s recent book Embryo politics. Similarly, in her book on Organ transplantation in Egypt, Sherine Hamdy raised the point that certain criticisms by Muslim religious scholars of particular medical practices can also be dominant in bioethical deliberations in countries such as Germany. Breaking with the habit of over-simplifying and generalizing bioethical traditions might then contribute on an ethical level to the discussion of specific issues, by raising the awareness that such discussions can easily slip into negotiations of identities rather than addressing the particular issues under discussion. Especially when it comes to the question of the best interests of children, I consider this to be of major ethical relevance.

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Thomas Eich
Thomas Eichis Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Professor Eich is trained as a social historian of the 19th century Middle East and classical Arabic and Islamic studies, with a longstanding interest in bioethics. He is author of Islam und Bioethik (Reichart-Verlag, 2005)
Field Notes article

A Response to Damian Howard, SJ


As I read Damian Howard’s comments in his recent blog entry, I started to engage in my own self-critical assessment.  In my previous blog entry I may have given the impression of being a thoroughgoing supporter of rationalism in order to provoke Muslim exclusivist legal-juridical discourse to consider a more universalist, text-based argument that suggests a default secularity of Islamic religious thought.

With the absence of the “church” and ecclesiastical body, even the juridical sources have intrinsically accepted the default separation of human-divine and human-human jurisdictions in the overall orthopraxy of Muslim tradition.  Close reading of my endnotes will suggest my overwhelming reliance on the tradition to derive correlation (mulazama) between revelation and reason.  I regard myself an active traditionalist who firmly believes that the multivalent nature of the tradition itself calls for reason-based hermeneutics to demonstrate its relevance in changed times and places.  I affirm time and again that revelation cannot be mono-dimensional because it claims its scriptural validity as long as there is human life on the planet.  Hence, human intellectual endeavors should not aim at unseating the tradition (I take this to be the entire revelatory sources in Islam); rather, whether jurists or theologians (both are in large numbers in Islam) one must undertake to rediscover the divine purposes by searching for the universal aspect of a specific ruling in the Tradition (i.e., the Quran and the Sunna).

This universal aspect is extractable right in the heart of Islamic legal methodology: the usul al-fiqh, which in its entirety depends on the morality of a case to derive its interpretive strategy.  Thus, the principle of “No harm, no harassment” is a traditionally derived principle from the Tradition, which superbly correlates with a rational judgment that one should cause no harm to anyone nor should one reciprocate harm with harm.  In the academic venture of two studies on human rights and bioethics, I have demonstrated the critical role that the tradition plays in guiding reason to derive universal rulings that can be applied across the traditions and even in secularly derived public space with its own public reason.  What Howard describes about Catholic tradition is naturally so in Islam.  Muslim jurists could not have derived their list of “dos and don’ts” from the scripture alone.  Their outreach in the area of ordinary language and its ability to rationally derive solutions to the pressing contemporary situations is visible in the juridical corpus.

The questions that Howard asks are natural, and although I can go on scribbling a long response, I need to take our discussion one step forward.  I don’t take religion in the modern sense of belief located in the private domain of an individual, deep inside her being.  Rather, in the Islamic sense I take it to include belief, practice and attitude — a total worldview.  Hence, I may have given an unintended impression of tension between spiritual and temporal in my approach to Islamic tradition.  Near Eastern cultures rule out a narrow approach to religion that continues to dominate conceptions of religion in the post-Enlightenment era.  The function of a theologian-practitioner like myself is not only to engage in new retrieval and interpretation of the tradition by taking into account the historical exegetical literature that provides the necessary link to the past, as well as opportunities to evaluate the present state and stature of inherited tradition; it is also to engage in self-critical assessment of the present orthopraxy that ignores the essential revelatory exposition of the practice that must remain constant to provide legitimacy to the claim of membership in the faith community.

The Qur’an never accepted faith as sufficient in itself to achieve salvation.  It required action to validate the inner commitment that came with the belief in one God and the prophetic agency of Muhammad.  I am anchored on the ground at a vantage point of knowing the tradition in the text and its practice in the community.  To restate my stance in this debate, I am an active “traditionalist”, not a “liberal” modernist.  I practice and encourage the practice through spiritual and moral development in the community.  Like my own teacher, Dr. Ali Shariati, I am a practicing Muslim in search of ways to make the knowledge about my tradition relevant to the times without losing sight of authenticity that provides me necessary credibility to carry on my work both in academia and in the community.

 

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Abdulaziz Sachedina
Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ph.D., is Professor and IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His research and writing focuses on the field of Islamic Law, Ethics, and Theology (Sunni and Shiite). More recently, he has concentrated on social and political ethics, including Interfaith and Intrafaith Relations, Islamic Biomedical Ethics and Islam and Human Rights.
Field Notes article

Opening a Conversation with Abdulaziz Sachedina


I am very grateful indeed to have been able to take the time over the summer to read two of Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina’s books: Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Principles and Application and Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights. Each book was a fascinating read, and they have left me not only impressed with his huge erudition but also anxious to ask some questions about what he envisages as his project for the modernisation of Islam (a loaded expression which he may not like!). So in the interests of brevity, let me summarise first of all some of what I take to be Sachedina’s core programme before posing six questions which I hope he will be able to answer in a subsequent blog.

It is often said that whereas theology is the master-discipline of Christianity, fiqh (jurisprudence) is the core intellectual project of Islam. In that sense, Islam and Judaism share a certain aire de famille. In the modern age, this poses quite a problem for Islam. Shari’a law is derived in large part from textual sources (i.e. the Qur’an and the hadith) which appeared in a particular context. Now, if you live in a markedly different context — say that of 21st Century Europe or America — you have to undertake some serious interpretive work to apply those revealed texts if you want to be able to say to yourself with any confidence that you have been faithful to the intention of the divine legislator. Such an interpretative enterprise requires the use of reason.

A Catholic Christian would find this a very natural thing to do. On the whole, we don’t expect to derive detailed “dos and don’ts” from the pages of scripture. Instead, we tend to extract moral principles and values from scriptural teaching and then apply them in a concrete situation. It’s that move away from the concrete and particular to a conceptual, abstract level which the discourse of law tends to resist.

Sachedina is not the only Muslim to criticise his own religious tradition for over-stressing the category of law. Particularly in his survey of the way in which contemporary Muslim scholars have tried to apply the revealed texts to complex bioethical questions which Muhammad’s contemporaries would not even have been able to dream of, Sachedina expresses impatience and calls for a new Islamic discipline equal to the task of helping Muslims to discern God’s will and to obey it: a discipline he calls Islamic social ethics.

This goes hand in hand with a call for Muslims to pay greater attention to reason, echoing the approach of the old school of theology called mu’tazilism which assigned an important role to the human capacity to work out what God would want of His creatures without always having recourse to revelation. Sachedina also shows a certain exasperation with what he calls the seminary discourse, which I take to be a reference to the traditional Sunni and Shi’i law schools which train experts in Islamic law. This is down to their reluctance to ask deep questions about what is really at stake in complex ethical problems. Instead, they are prone to apply concepts of dubious relevance without a sufficiently rigorous analysis of the context either of the original revelatory text or of the contemporary moral problem. A really interesting example he cites, interesting for a Catholic that is, is with regard to IVF and the question of “spare embryos”. Traditional approaches to this question, he argues, are shallow and unconvincing because there is no traditional ethical discourse which allows the moral status of an embryo to be analysed.

I find all of this exceedingly interesting and, as a Catholic, rather promising, both in terms of a step forward in the way Muslims approach complex ethical questions and because of the possibility this holds out for deeper dialogue and engagement between Muslims and Christians on moral matters. After all, if moral solutions are only to be found in laws derived from stories about prophets and holy people, all we can hope to do is to compare narratives and regret the lack of shared sources. Dialogue withers away. But ethical principles, the practice of the virtues, the discussion of ends and means etc. lend themselves to extended reflection and discussion. Dialogue becomes meaningful and obviously fruitful. So it is in a highly sympathetic spirit that I ask the following questions in an attempt to explore the implications of what Sachedina is proposing.

1. What, in his opinion, is fundamentally at stake in this new “ethical turn” in terms of an underlying commitment to the powers of reason? Can we really hope to know what is good for us even without revelation? If not, what is the role of revelation?

2. And is there a theological corollary too? If human beings can determine, even up to a point, the good in terms of their own human flourishing, is a Muslim entitled to believe that God always wills that flourishing and so can be said to endorse the results of correct ethical reasoning? If so, on what basis might a Muslim make that claim?

3. The change he seems to be proposing is of huge significance. What is driving his project? Is it the conviction that Islam has to come to terms with a dominant culture, that of modernity, which does its intellectual work in the terms of ethical discourse? Or is fiqh-centredness an essential shortcoming of the way the religion has developed and which can now be addressed thanks to purely contingent contextual factors?

4. I am intrigued by his impatience with “seminary discourse”; in some ways it echoes the salafi approach which asks Muslims to put aside the accretions of the traditional law schools and return to the original sources of Islam, though in Sachedina’s case it is a recovery of rationalism that is sought. Still, as a Catholic I rather value tradition — not for sentimental reasons, but because of its capacity to problematize and complexify, to tame and to incorporate the fruits and insights of reason. I tend to see any puritanical wishing-away of tradition as naïve. So here is a big question: might there be a need within contemporary Islamic thought for a deeper theoretical understanding of the value and role of tradition?

5. When I speak to Muslim intellectuals about the rationale behind that crucial option the Sunni world took to marginalise free-floating reason as a source of law, they usually point to the way in which mu‘tazilism was exploited for political purposes by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma‘mun. For us Muslims, they say, rationalism is associated with oppression, not freedom. So, I just wonder, how does a rationalist Muslim (if Sachedina accepts the epithet) deal with this ancient reservation.

6. And finally, a question that leads on from that: what of the place of obedience in Islam? I get the impression that for many Muslims obedience has a positive religious value and significance. They don’t just do what God wants them to do but it is important that they do it because it’s what God wants. In other words, there is an element relating to one’s intention. My concern with any kind of religious rationalism is that it is a secularising move in that it renders the remembrance of God redundant. So again, what does Sachedina make of that?

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Damian Howard
Damian Howard SJis Lecturer in Theology at Heythrop College, University of London. His research engages with Islamic theology and contemporary Islamic thought, drawing parallels and contrasts with the concepts and experiences that shape the Christian tradition. He is the author of Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview(2011), which examines the impact of the evolutionary worldview on Islamic conceptions of human identity.
Governance, Citizenship, Rights & Obligations article

A Conceptual Family: Secularism, Equality and Toleration


The doctrine of secularism has run into deep trouble, and a number of eminent political philosophers tell us that we have entered a post-secular world. This world is presumably one that has recognised the pervasiveness of religion in personal and collective life. It has also recognised that any given society contains a number of communities that subscribe to different notions of the good. But plural societies are likely to disagree on how the state should deal with the fact of difference, and how different religious communities should deal with each other. The problem is intractable and defies easy solution. Does secularism need to be written off and dismissed as a historical stage, because the precondition of secularism — a secularised society — has gone missing?

Suppose that we, taking our cue from the Indian experience, reverse accepted understandings that the secularisation of society is an essential pre-requisite for secularism, and assume that the two concepts — one social and the other political — may be independent of each other. Is it is possible to institutionalise the political doctrine of secularism in a deeply religious society as India has done? Perhaps, provided we also recognise three implications: One, political secularism is more, not less, important in societies constituted by a number of religious communities; Two, in democratic societies the fundamentals of political secularism have to be derived from the core principle of democracy — that is equality; and three, political secularism is not a stand-alone concept — if the first companion concept of secularism is equality, the second is toleration.

Secularism, equality and toleration belong to a family of concepts that can possibly help us address the malaise of a post-modern world in which religion has made a resurgence, and the belief that religion’s influence had passed has been exposed as one of the little vanities of modernity. Perhaps the Indian experience of secularism can offer valuable lessons on how plurality can be managed and accommodated within a framework of a secularism based on equality and toleration. Let us see.

Secularism as Equality of Religion

In India, the connection between secularism as equality of religion and secularism as toleration was historically fashioned. In the 1920s, at the very time that Gandhi set out to forge a major mass movement that could take on colonialism, the politicisation of religious identities had seriously hampered the project of building a Pan-Indian freedom struggle. Gandhi looked for a principle that could bind people of different faiths together and weld them into a mass movement. This principle he found in the doctrine of sarva dharma sambhava, which can be read as ‘equality of all religions’ or that ‘all religions should be treated equally’. In the aftermath of independence — the other side of which was the bloody partition of the Indian sub-continent — India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the quintessential modern, converted to the Gandhian concept of secularism. In his convocation address to the Aligarh Muslim University shortly after independence, Nehru enunciated three principles of secularism: One, secularism is not anti-religion but stands for freedom of religion or irreligion for all; Two, the Indian state will honour all faiths equally; and three, the state shall not be attached to one faith or religion, which by that act becomes the state religion. The creed of secularism thereby discouraged political aspirations that one group had the right to stamp the body politic with its ethos because it is in a majority. Conversely, the doctrine discouraged fears that a religious group could be disadvantaged precisely because it was a minority.

The understanding of secularism as equality of religion has been validated by the Supreme Court of India. On various occasions the court has ruled that the state does not owe loyalty to one religion; it is not irreligious or anti-religious, it gives equal freedom to all religions, and the religion of the citizen has no bearing upon the way her social and economic problems are tackled. Gary Jacobsohn, who has carried out a close reading of the various arguments offered by the Supreme Court during the Bommai case in 1994, isolated the dominant theme in these arguments as “equal treatment of religions, often referred to in Indian tradition as sarva dharma sambhava”. He quotes Justice Reddy of the Court who stated in one case that ‘Secularism is… a positive concept of equal treatment of all religions” (p.146-7).

The Necessity of Toleration

More significantly, Gandhi realised that legal principles alone do not make for a secular society. The principle of secularism as equality has to be conjoined with the principle of toleration. Secularism as equality flows from the fundamental right to equality of status and of opportunity. However, a society that lives by the language of rights alone is likely to be a sadly impoverished one. The language of rights needs to be supplemented by other rich traditions that can bring people together, and encourage them to see each other as equals. In this endeavour, shared histories, mythologies, languages, symbols and religion can play a significant role. For Gandhi, commitment to formal or legal equality without an understanding of why people and religions are equal — and why tolerance of opinions, beliefs, and ideologies is necessary — will prove empty.

Interestingly, Gandhi’s argument for toleration was an epistemological one, anchored in his theory of knowledge. Human beings, he reasoned, are seekers after knowledge, which Gandhi equated with the truth. The problem is that we simply do not know whether what we know is the truth, and whether it is the whole truth. The Athenian philosopher Socrates (469BC-399BC) was of the same opinion. Socrates addressed one of the staple problems in philosophy: how do we know that we know? The answer is that we can never know whether we know. All we can be certain of is that there is a limit to knowledge.

This is exactly what Gandhi believed. He did not deny the existence of truth, which he identified with knowledge — truth is absolute and transcendental, but human beings cannot possibly know what the absolute truth is. For the truth espoused by King Harishchandra, who renounced everything he possessed for the sake of the truth, is not the same as the truth of Hussain, who sacrificed his life for the truth. These two truths are equally true, albeit partially so, but they may or may not be our truth.

A Shared Search for the Truth

Gandhi, in effect, tells us that the one ultimate truth is manifested in the shape of many truths — however, each of these many truths is but an incomplete version of the ultimate truth. The proposition that human beings can but partially grasp the nature of the ultimate truth yields the following political postulate: The nature of Gandhi’s truth enjoins all human beings to seek to discover the ultimate truth along with others, in and through dialogical interaction or a shared search for the truth. More significantly, if persons have the capacity to know some portion of the ultimate truth, but not the entire truth, then no one person or group can claim superiority over another on the ground that their truth is the ultimate truth, and that other truths are false or travesties of the real thing.

On the contrary, we should realise that just as our truth is dear to us, others truths are bound to be dear to them. This realisation leads slowly but surely towards respect for plurality of beliefs, toleration and nonviolence. Violence is the outcome of the certainty that only we know what the truth is.  The moment we realise the partiality of our own knowledge, we have to eschew violence. Toleration is the outcome of the knowledge that we know as much or as little as our neighbour. We cannot therefore judge or evaluate, or regard the said neighbour as inferior. We are equal participants in the search for truth. Equality and Toleration are companion concepts of secularism insofar as they inform the concept.

India does not inhabit a post-secular world — we continue to commit to political secularism, and we also continue to understand the significance of religion. I do not deny that the biography of secularism in India is sadly flawed. What is important, however, is that attempts to derail secularism have been resisted by civil society groups, and for the most part the judiciary, who are committed to secularism as equality and secularism as toleration.

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Neera Chandhoke
Neera Chandhoke is a National Fellow at the India Council of Social Science Research. She was previously professor of political science at the University of Delhi. Her books include State and Civil Society: Explorations in Political Theory (Sage, 1995), Beyond Secularism: The Rights of Religious Minorities (Oxford University Press, 1999), and The Conceits of Civil Society (Oxford University Press 2003.
Field Notes article

Bridging Bioethics and Social Ethics


Reading Camosy and Hamdy’s pieces together calls to mind Lisa Sowle Cahill’s critique of the prevailing narrative concerning religion and bioethics in the United States. The elements of the story are by now familiar: The progressive marginalization of religious thinkers and religious language, the wane of “medical ethics” and the birth of clinical bioethics, the triumph of principlism, and the elevation of patient autonomy to the near exclusion of all other moral values. The battle is often cast, especially by those for whom religion is the shunned hero, as a conflict between “thick” and “thin” moral geographies: a deep metaphysical account of human flourishing and a teleological view of nature and history versus agnosticism about the Good coupled with a self that is constituted entirely by the exercise of free choice and the maximization of rational self-interest.

For Cahill, however, this way of characterizing the troubled relationship between religion and bioethics in modernity ignores the fact that secular moralities rest just as heavily on assumptions concerning nature and the human as do religious moralities:  “Science, economics, theology, and liberal democratic political norms all depend on analogous world views that define human nature, human meaning, human goods and goals, and the good society. All invoke symbols of ultimacy that capture the imagination, covert desires, direct practical reason, and motivate action.”  “The real conflict [therefore] is not between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ moral languages and views of the good, but between competing ‘thick’ worldviews and visions of ultimacy.”

The Distinct Contribution of Religious Communities

Religious traditions can and should provide resources for challenging the extremes of liberal individualism and exposing the religions of science and the market at work in constructing and mediating choices—all kinds of choices—about the development, use, and distribution of biotechnologies. As Charles Camosy notes, both Catholicism and Islam hold views of the meaning and significance of human procreation that suggest why treating decisions related to initiating or terminating a pregnancy as “just another consumer choice” is deeply troubling. Even if we acknowledge that views about sexuality, reproduction and the family are contested within those traditions—there is not unanimity, for example, on questions related to gender roles, same-sex relations or the morality of interventions such as contraception and assisted reproduction—the belief that bringing a child into the world, a being with inherent dignity, is a participation in some measure in divine creation stands as a powerful counter to temptations to objectify children or instrumentalize reproduction. Religious voices play an important role in calling out the often-intertwined logics of science and the market and their impact on patterns of access and exclusion.

But I agree with Cahill’s second point: rather than retrenching in the hope of finding some prophetic sweet spot in the bioethics public square, religious communities today should see their distinctive contribution in advocating for the poor, working for just access for the world’s people to the advances of science as well as basic human goods, and providing the means and the motivation to embody a preferential option for the poor in pragmatic solidarity.  Both Catholicism and Islam have strong traditions of social ethics, with a core concern for the effects of poverty on human development and human dignity.  Social justice commitments have long been enacted by religious communities in spiritual practices like the corporal works of mercy. The Catholic Church is one of the world’s largest providers of services to the poor (everything from medical care to food, education and shelter).  But Sherine Hamdy rightly observes that bioethics, including most of what would be called theological bioethics, has paid scant attention to issues of social justice—questions such as unequal access to scientific advances, global marketing of pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies, local and global disparities in vulnerability to disease and untimely death, and the impact of environmental degradation on health and well-being—and even less to the far-reaching impact of economic and political decisions on health outcomes.

Bridging Bioethics and Social Ethics

The interesting question is why bioethics so seldom talks with social ethics.  One reason, as Hamdy’s example shows, is that despite a growing global consciousness, bioethics still takes the West and its clinics and bedsides as its point of departure.  That locus defines not only what moral principles might come into play and how they might be weighed, but what counts as a moral issue in the first place. Until the range of voices informing debates in bioethics is expanded to include voices from the global South, we are unlikely to see genuine sustained attention to the pressing questions of public health and just access to medical care germane to resource-poor areas.

At least in the United States, Catholic bioethics has tended as well to focus on the same narrow set of “life” issues privileged by the Catholic bishops (abortion, contraception, embryo research and euthanasia).  The result is that the Church’s message on social justice is often muted or drowned-out. Current debates over the Affordable Care Act illustrate this well.  Because of the energy expended arguing over coverage for contraception, one hardly recalls the Catholic Bishops’ long-standing support for universal access to health care (or for that matter, the lived commitment to the poor represented in the care long provided by Catholic hospitals). There are also political dimensions. Although there is ample evidence of the serious effects of environmental toxins on fetal development and children’s health, toxins to which low-income families are more likely to be exposed, conservative religious leaders have often backed administrations with abysmal environmental records because of common cause on abortion.

We are unlikely to see the long-overdue conversation between bioethics and social ethics until we begin to acknowledge the costs of political choices and until the range of what counts as a “life issue” is expanded to include things like the effect of environmental policies on children’s health, the relationship between for-profit marketing and development of drugs and access to affordable treatment for AIDS, TB and malaria, and the role of poverty, gender-discrimination and violence in undermining the conditions for childbirth and child nurture for many women and children.

Finally, I suspect that bioethics seldom talks with social ethics because the latter requires a commitment to action for social change. If Cahill is right, religious communities are uniquely positioned to take on today’s urgent issues of global health because of their traditions of reflection on the nature of a just society, their symbolic and liturgical resources, and their global networks of hands-on service and advocacy. But genuine, pragmatic solidary requires sacrifice. Most of us will only seldom, if ever, find ourselves facing the moral decisions that are the stuff of quandary ethics. But we make choices everyday about how we will relate to the environment, how we will participate in the global markets, and which of our government’s policies we will endorse.

 

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Maura Ryan
Maura Ryan is the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, and Vice President and Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs at the University Notre Dame. Her primary interests are bioethics and health policy, feminist ethics, and fundamental moral theology.