Interaction between Islamic and Secular Bioethics: A Philosophic Approach

Abstract

Although nowadays science and technologies including biomedical sciences are interestingly developing, ethical requirements of such developments are not considered in Islamic world based on regional and Islamic dimensions. International bodies who are dealing with ethics of science and technology also are not fully aware of religious requirement of bioethical issues in Islamic countries. On the other hand, developing a comprehensive ethical theory in bioethics needs precise and deep deliberation in ideological and philosophical underpinnings. To start such reflection a suitable way which we used in this article would be a comparative study in ideological and meta ethical differences and similarities between Islamic and secular bioethics. Thus this article tries to explore ideological differences in the first part such as differences on attitudes toward the creator or origin of the universe, differences on attitudes toward the whole universe and difference on the attitudes toward this world properties and tradition. Then we will turn to anthropologic differences including dereferences on attitudes toward human creation, different dimensions of human life and After-Death life and the last set of differences which we will discuss are meta ethical differences between Islamic and secular bioethics including on ethologic, epistemological and semantic differences. In the second port of the article, similarities, which most seems to be normative, are disused. Finally we concluded that acceptance of existing differences and similarities as facts are inevitable and would be a potential start point for a mutual dialogue between secular and developing Islamic bioethics as an independent theory.