BIOMEDICAL ETHICS: MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES ON GENETIC MODIFICATION

Technology pertaining to genetically modified foods has created an abundance of food and various methods to protect new products and enhance productivity. However, many scientists, economists, and humanitarians have been critical of the application of these discoveries. They are apprehensive about a profit‐driven mentality that, to them, seems to propel the innovators rather than a poverty‐elimination mentality that should be behind such innovations. The objectives should be to afford the most benefit to those in need and to prevent hunger around the world. Another major concern is the safety of genetically modified food. Muslims, as well as those in other religious communities, have been reactive rather than proactive. Muslims must connect scientific knowledge and ethical behavior based on faith. In Islam, there is no divide between the two. God has commanded us to seek knowledge and make discoveries to better our lives and our environment. We are trustees of this world and everything in it. The poor, the sick, and the wayfarers have a right to be fed and cared for. God reminds Muslims continuously that the earth and all the heavens belong to God; therefore, no one should feel hunger, no one should suffer or be prevented from sharing this bounty.     

JUST WAR THEORY,HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION,AND THE NEED FOR A DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION

The primary purpose of government is to secure public goods that cannot be achieved by free markets. The Coordination Principle tells us to consolidate sovereign power in a single institution to overcome collective action problems that otherwise prevent secure provision of the relevant public goods. There are several public goods that require such coordination at the global level, chief among them being basic human rights. The claim that human rights require global coordination is supported in three main steps. First, I consider Pogge's and Habermas's analyses as alternatives to Hobbesian conceptions of justice. Second, I consider the core conventions of international law, which are in tension with the primacy of state sovereignty in the UN system. Third, I argue that the just war tradition does not limit just causes for war to self‐defense; it supports saving innocent third parties from crimes against humanity as a just reason for war. While classical authors focused less on this issue, the point is especially clear in twentieth‐century just war theories, such as those offered by the American Catholic bishops, Jean Elshtain, Brian Orend, and Michael Walzer. Against Walzer, I argue that we add intractable military tyranny to the list of horrors meriting intervention if other ad bellum conditions are met. But these results require us to reexamine the “just authority” of first resort to govern such interventions. The Coordination Principle implies that we should create a transnational federation with consolidated powers in place of a treaty organization requiring near‐unanimity. But to be legitimate, such a global institution must also be directly answerable to the citizens of its member states. While the UN Security Council is inadequate on both counts, a federation of democracies with a directly elected executive and legislature could meet both conditions.     

A JEWISH CONCEPTION OF HUMAN DIGNITY

This paper depicts the meanings of human dignity as they unfold and evolve in the Bible and the Halakhah. I posit that three distinct features of a Jewish conception of human dignity can be identified in contrast to core characteristics of a liberal conception of human dignity. First, the original source of human dignity is not intrinsic to the human being but extrinsic, namely in God. Second, it is argued that the “dignity of the people” has precedence over personal autonomy and liberty, which are core liberal pillars. The third characteristic pertains to the potential conflict between personal autonomy and liberty, and God's commandments. The theoretical analysis of human dignity is then examined in light of several Supreme Court decisions in Israel during the 1990s. I illustrate that Jewish religious and secular‐liberal conceptions pull in different directions in the rulings of liberal and religious Justices in Israel.     

THE ETHICS OF LAND RESTITUTION

Many indigenous communities were dispossessed of their land during the period of colonial rule. This long process resulted in forced demographic removals and perennial poverty. Nowadays these communities, especially Third World groups, seek redress of this situation through legal processes of land restitution. This process is met by resistance from landowners in these countries, the colonial powers of old, as well as from big corporations that benefited from the dispossession. The investigation undertaken in this article addresses the ethics of land reform from a Christian ethical perspective. The policy of land restitution in South Africa is used as a case study, but the results of this research are also applicable to other parts of the world where land restitution is considered. The article first evaluates the biblical teachings of land and land reform and their implications for modern ethics. In the light of these issues, the article addresses the question of whether land ownership can be considered as a fundamental human right. The article also focuses on the legality of expropriation and dispossession of land for the purposes of restitution. Moreover, guidelines for fair and legal restitution within the context of Christian ethics and legal philosophical principles are proposed.     

A RECONSIDERATION OF KIERKEGAARD'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE HUMAN OTHER: The Hidden Ethics of Soteriology

In this article, I embark on an analysis of Søren Kierkegaard's view of human otherness in strict correlation to his Christian philosophy. More specifically, my aim is to show that Kierkegaard's thought is essentially informed by a decisive appropriation of the soteriological category of sin which has momentous implications for Kierkegaard's views of selfhood and intersubjectivity. The main argument is that both Kierkegaard's negative evaluation of human otherness and his acerbic indictments of any collectivist interference in salvific matters cohere with his appropriation of the doctrine of the Fall. At the same time, I show in what sense Kierkegaard deems human alterity to be indispensable to one's spiritual self‐becoming expressed through the Christian imperative of loving the other as neighbor. Seen thus, agape, while supplementing Kierkegaard's creationistic psychology, actually becomes the necessary restorative opposite of sinfulness in the self's encounters with the distinct uniqueness of the human other.     

THE RIGHTS OF MUSLIM WOMEN: A Comment on Irene Oh's The Rights of God

This review of Irene Oh's The Rights of God focuses on women's rights in Islamic theory and practice. Oh suggests that religious establishments, and the texts they disseminate, often press believers to recognize and reject social problems, such as racial and gender discrimination. Islamic scholars and texts have played a more ambiguous role in efforts to recognize women's rights within Muslim states. Modernist intellectuals have used Islamic texts to support the advancement of women's rights, but members of the more conservative religious establishment have typically curbed or rejected these efforts. Muslim women themselves have established various responses to the question of Islam's compatibility with women's rights. While some embrace the value and compatibility of both, others reject the propriety of either Western conceptions of rights, or the Islamic tradition, as harmful for women. Muslim reformers and feminists have much to learn from comparative studies with other faith communities that have undergone similar struggles and transformations.     

Evolution, Sociobiology, and the Atonement

This essay views Christian doctrines of the atonement in the light of evolution and sociobiology. It argues that most of the doctrines are false because they use a false premise, the historicity of Adam and the Fall. However, two doctrines are not false on those grounds: Abelard's idea that Jesus' life is an example and Athanasius' concept that the atonement changes human nature. Employing evolution's and sociobiology's concepts of the egocentric and ethnocentric nature of humanity and the synergy between genes and environments to produce a "nature," this essay shows that these two doctrines can be amalgamated to make sense of the atonement in the late twentieth century.     

Human Nature: What We Need to Know about Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

The Western worldview that now dominates the planet embodies beliefs about human nature that are inconsistent with our evolutionarily evolved natures. Its "logic" at best ignores and at worst creates the symptoms of the modern world, which if uncorrected predict severe crises in coming centuries: population growth, environmental destruction, economic collapse, and increasing social violence. In contrast, there are numerous communities today creating alternative solutions based on different understandings of human nature and human needs: cooperation rather than competition; meaningful social identity; and respect for and trust in the autonomous behavior of all persons. There exist optimistic future models.     

Laterality effects in the spinning dancer illusion: The viewing‐from‐above bias is only part of the story

The ‘silhouette illusion’, representing the silhouette of a female dancer pirouetting about her vertical axis, is a bistable stimulus created by Japanese web designer Nobuyuki Kayahara. Although the dancer can be perceived as spinning either clockwise or counterclockwise, the clockwise rotation is usually preferred. Troje and McAdam (i‐Perception, 2010, 1, 143) showed that this clockwise bias can be attributed to the tendency to assume a viewpoint from above rather than from below, given that the dancer is portrayed from a vantage point that is not perpendicular to the axis of rotation. Here, we tested whether another possible factor contributing to the observers’ interpretation of this bistable stimulus might be the tendency to perceive movements of the right rather than the left foot. We confirmed both the viewing‐from‐above bias and our hypothesis. The bias to perceive movements of the right leg might be a generalization to lower limbs of a perceptual frequency effect already observed for upper limbs. Such a perceptual and attentional bias towards the right hand/foot could account for the greater ability to predict the outcome of sport actions when observing right‐ rather than left‐limbed movements, and thus the left‐handers' and left‐footers' advantage observed in a variety of interactive sports.