Indian secularism,dialogue and the Ayodhya dispute

Indian secularists compound difficulties for the emergence of a genuinely secular society by relying on an exclusively constitutional rather than a dialogical approach to settle India’s religious disputes as manifested in Ayodhya and elsewhere. There are, however, intellectuals who favour dialogue with religious communities to strengthen secularism but are afraid of suggesting dialogue with contending parties on contentious issues like the Ayodhya dispute for fear of legitimising religious fundamentalism. As a result, the notion of ‘contentious dialogue’ is avoided even while the need for dialogue is recognised. Instead of religious grievances getting resolved through law, they get embroiled over a period of time and result in the rise of religious fundamentalism and terrorism, thereby deepening the crisis of secularism. In the Ayodhya dispute, communities encouraged by the secular state have followed a legal approach to the settlement of their religious grievances since 1950. While the dispute languished in court, the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992, the emergence of religious terrorism and the riots in Gujarat in 2002 followed. All these developments are in some way interrelated and need a broad and holistic counter-strategy. Only a dialogic approach will induce communities to comprehend the interconnected nature of problems arising from the Ayodhya dispute and make them seek solutions outside the law. This paper proposes a model of reconciliation based on the themes of recognition of intrinsic faith, negotiation with extrinsic elements of each religion and sacrifice. This dialogical approach ought to be carried out by a non-sectarian political society that must involve ruling and opposition parties, NGOs, lawyers, administrators and contending religious organisations in order to seek a realistic solution to the Ayodhya dispute in the larger and long-term interest of a secular polity in India.     

Honoring the Bios in Lutheran Bioethics

Abstract:  A Lutheran bioethic honors the body by being anti‐Gnostic (and finding moral wisdom in the body's limits), by being anti‐Pelagian (and requiring the reshaping of our disordered desires), and by being anti‐Sadducean (in affirming that the new creation, though continuous with and fulfilling the old, also transforms and perfects it in ways that go beyond the earthly life we know). Such an approach to bioethics is illustrated here through discussion of the way in which new reproductive technologies may distort our understanding of the relation between the generations, thereby losing sight of the bios in bioethics.     

Moral knowledge: some reflections on moral controversies, incompatible moral epistemologies, and the culture wars.

An authentic Christian bioethical account of abortion must take into consideration the conflicting epistemologies that separate Christian moral theology from secular moral philosophy. Moral epistemologies directed to the issue of abortion that fail to appreciate the orientation of morality to God will also fail adequately to appreciate the moral issues at stake. Christian accounts of the bioethics of abortion that reduce moral-theological considerations to moral-philosophical considerations will not only fail to appreciate fully the offense of abortion, but morally mislead. This article locates the bioethics of abortion within the theology of the Church of the first millennium, emphasizing that abortion was prohibited, whether or not one considered the embryo or fetus to be ensouled.     

Contributors to this issue

Frances Bower
Pauline Everest
Donald E. Kalsched
Jean Knox
Joseph Redfearn
Joy Schaverien
Robert A. Segal
Sonu Shamdasani
Anthony Storr     

How Can Ethics Support Innovative Health Care for an Aging Population?

The rapidly expanding aging population presents an urgent global challenge cutting through just about every dimension of worldly life, including the social, political, cultural, and economic. Developing innovations in health and assistive technology (AT) are poised to support effective and sustainable health care in the face of this challenge, yet there is scant (but growing) discussion of the ethical issues surrounding AT for older persons with dementia. Demands for ethical frameworks that can respond to frontline dilemmas regarding AT development and provision, and how the needs of aging persons themselves are defined throughout this development process, are increasing. This article suggests that fulfilling the promises of AT to provide effective and ethically informed solutions may demand shifting away from standard bioethical analyses that centralize the principle of respect for autonomy. An autonomy-centric paradigm is dubiously equipped to theorize the foundational ethical issues in dementia care and to effectively guide AT development and implementation. An agency-centered approach to dementia care, which could engage more adaptively with the perspectives and choices of older persons themselves while offering strong support to AT research and stakeholders, may offer an attractive alternative.     

Two Shi‘i Jurisprudential Methodologies to Address Medical and Bioethical Challenges: Traditional Ijtihād and Foundational Ijtihād

The legal‐ethical dynamism in Islamic law which allows it to respond to the challenges of modernity is said to reside in the institution of ijtihād (independent legal thinking and hermeneutics). However, jurists like Mohsen Kadivar and Ayatollah Fa?lalla have argued that the “traditional ijtihād” paradigm has reached its limits of flexibility as it allows for only minor adaptations and lacks a rigorous methodology because of its reliance on vague and highly subjective juridical devices such as public welfare (ma?la?a), imperative necessity (?arūra), emergency (i?tirār), need (?āja), averting difficulty (‘usr) and distress (?araj), hardship (mashaqqa), and harm (?arar) without interrogating the fundamentals (u?ūl) of ijtihād. In contrast, in the “foundational ijtihād” model theology, ethics, intellect, epistemology, linguistics, hermeneutics, modern sciences, history, cosmology, anthropology, and the sources of Islamic legal theory (u?ūl al‐fiqh) interact with one another to obtain resolutions that are just and non‐discriminatory.     

How Civil Society Organisations Changed the Regulation of Clinical Trials in India

ABSTRACT

In 2005 India changed its pharmaceutical and innovation policy that facilitated a dramatic increase in international clinical trials involving study sites in India. This policy shift was surrounded by controversies; civil society organisations (CSOs) criticised the Indian government for promoting the commercialisation of pharmaceutical research and development. Health social movements in India fought for social justice through collective action, and engaged in normative reasoning of the benefits, burdens and equality of research. They lobbied to protect trial participants from structural violence that occurred especially in the first 5–6 years of the new policy. CSOs played a major role in the introduction of new regulations in 2013, which accelerated a decline in the number of global trials carried out in India. This activism applied interpretations of global social justice as key ideas in mobilisation, eventually helping to institutionalise stricter ethical regulation on a national level. Like government and industry, activists believed in randomised controlled trials and comparison as key methods for scientific knowledge production. However, they had significant concerns about the global hierarchies of commercial pharmaceutical research, and their impact on the rights of participants and on benefits for India overall. Pointing to ethical malpractices and lobbying for stricter ethical regulations, they aimed to ensure justice for research participants, and developed effective strategies to increase controls over the business side of clinical research.     

Islamic Bioethics and Animal Research: The Case of Iran

Despite growing interest in Islamic bioethics, little work has been done on research ethics in Islam, and even less on animal research ethics. This essay explores religious and scientific insights into the lives of animals used as research subjects, particularly in Iran. The inner lives of animals and their relationship to their Creator as relayed by the Qur'an, ethological research on animal minds, and neuroethical reflection on painience (the ability to feel and process pain as noxious [injurious] and explicitly hurtful) are brought together to question the current, relatively unrestricted use of research animals in Iran. The essay concludes that Islamic sources and the desire of Iranian clinicians to treat laboratory animals in line with them could poise Muslims to take the lead in developing alternatives to animal research. Further, recent suggestions that human and animal research guidelines and protections should be brought closer together are examined in light of these findings.     

Religiosity,Secular Participation,and Cultural Socialization: A Case Study of the 1933–1942 Urban English Cohort

The nature of secularization is of enduring interest in the social science of religion. Numerous recent papers have established downward cohort trends as characterizing religious change. We examine potential mechanisms by assessing cultural participation and secular engagement during the formative period of one cohort. We provide estimates of active and nominal religiosity, nonreligion and religious belief for those born between 1933 and 1942, using multiple surveys fielded between 1957 and 2018. We model the association between religiosity and secular cultural and social participation for this cohort in 1957, then examine how cultural socialization in childhood relates to religiosity in their later adulthood using surveys fielded between 2005 and 2007. Increased secular competition is found to be associated with less active religiosity. These trends were underpinned by an ethic of increasing autonomy for the young. We conclude by affirming the link between increasing secular competition, long-run modernization, and changing cultural socialization.