The four principles of Western medical bioethics, i.e., autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice, published by Beauchamps and Childress in their seminal ‘Principles of Biomedical Ethics’, are understood as universal. However, Non-Western governments argue that they refer to Western cultural contexts, neglecting specifics of Non-Western, for instance Islamic, civilizations. This paper addresses the claim of bioethical universality of both the West’s and Iran’s Shīʿī Islamic bioethics. We describe the historical development and the normative sources of Western and Shīʿī bioethics, i.e., common morality, the ontogeny of human morality and Shī’ī Islamic religious foundation. Both concepts support nonmaleficence and justice yet diverge with respect to beneficence, autonomy and normative justification. The Iranian screening program for ß-thalassemia major exemplifies the differences in both concepts. We conclude that nonmaleficence and justice are universal moral rules based on the ontogeny of morality. Beneficence can be characterized as a universal moral ideal. In contrast, autonomy, appreciated in the West, is neither justified by common morality nor the ontogeny of morality and has no equivalent in more communitarian-oriented societies. It thus fails to quality as a universal norm.

The coexistence of radically resistant body theology and unrestricted demands for submission in Rom. 12 and 13 presents a unique and unsettling dilemma for feminist and postcolonial exegetes and theorists. With a critical discussion of postcolonial hybridity theory and a turn towards – and back to – performativity this paper pushes the deviant metaphoricity in Rom. 12 from a shadowy existence to the centre stage and thereby redevelops Pauline concepts of perpetual bodily transformations as a challenge to reified body ideologies. We demonstrate how the marginalized, subjugated and colonized body experience of St. Paul becomes a resource for opening, materialized and pervasive stimuli that go beyond essentializing identitarian and excluding body configurations.

We discuss the concept of a ‘body’, the individual body as the lived experience of the body, the social body, shaped by the tensions between the demands of a social/moral order and the egocentric drives, and the body politic, as an institutionalized and disciplined body. We describe the body as it was perceived in Classical Greek Antiquity at the time when the Hippocratic Oath was first conceived, and any changes that may have occurred by Late Antiquity, using the concept of a body-world as represented by everyday life, the arts, politics, philosophy, and religion. This ‘recreated’ body-world elucidates how a person of Classical or Late Antiquity perceived her/his body via their ‘lived-in’ world and relates it to medical and philosophical thinking about the body as well as to concepts of health and disease. We demonstrate how the institutional structures of the Roman Empire and the Church influenced the way a body was understood, how the administrative and governmental needs led to the first developments of Public Health, and how the Christian understanding of the body as the body and spirit of Christ changed the attitude towards suicide, euthanasia, and abortion. These changes are reflected in the understanding of bioethical thinking and affected the interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath.

(2020). Ideology and the Future of Progressive Social Movements. Politics, Religion & Ideology. Ahead of Print.

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