The “Bio” in Biomedicine: Evolution, Assumptions, and Ethical Implications

As biomedicine and its research and technologies globalize, they are accompanied by Principlism, the dominant Western bioethical theory. The Muslim response has roughly taken two tracks: (i) criticism of principlism as a neo-imperialistic attempt to universalize what is specific or (ii) harmonization of principlism with Islam by showing not only that the four principles (autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice) are universal, but that indeed Islam had, long ago, codified them in its ethico-legal tradition. In these debates, medicine and biomedicine are conflated and bioethics is reduced to principlism. This is problematic because biomedicine is but one medical system and principlism is one among several (feminist, religious, narrative, global) theories. This chapter examines some of the relevant critical questions to bring insights from the philosophy, anthropology, and sociology of medicine and of bioethics to bear on the current discussion on Islam and bioethics and the questions posed by the research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE).