Relations between moral-right-politics in the Western and Islamic world of thought: A bioethical discussion

Biopolitics, which corresponds to a radical change in the understanding of the relationship between the traditional ruler and the ruled, has become the form of policy making in today's nation-states. The developments in science and technology threaten the classical existence of man and the social order, and at the same time these developments strengthen the state's dominion over the body as never before. The ethical dilemmas arising from scientific developments about human existence and the relationship between rulers and ruled may be too complex to be solved by classical theories such as teleological and deontological ethics. In addition, scientific and technological advances promised by the Enlightenment and guided by reason did not lead to the ultimate salvation of humanity, and the two world wars, the use of atomic bombs, the ethnic genocides and the destruction of the environment traumatized confidence in reason and science to an unimaginable degree. This trauma about the Enlightenment reason leads ethical theories to adopt a suspicious and critical approach to all kinds of scientific and technological developments, and even the idea of limiting and, if necessary, inhibiting science through biopolitics dominates ethical theories in order to avoid the historical catastrophes to reoccur. This study questions the possibility of alternative bioethical and biopolitical solutions for overcoming this tension between science and ethics and between rulers and ruled stemming from the basic assumptions of the Western reason and science. In order to construct a new bioethical approach that can form the background of alternative biopolitics, the relations between the rulers and the ruled, the transformation of legislative processes in the context of the person-society-state, and the impact of morality/ethics on this transformation in the history of Western and Islamic thought were analyzed through problem-oriented reading of history. This study assumes that the Islamic world of thought contains the core of a new ethical-bioethical understanding that, can solve stagnant tensions between science and ethics, ruler and ruled created by the traumas experienced in the Western civilization/society. The study proposes alternative bioethical and biopolitical approaches based on the concepts of the "gradual potentiality of the embryo", "wasilah/means" and "fortune/ foreordination", as well as a new understanding of the concept of "ethics of responsibility", which will contribute to a universal ethic through local contemplation. In addition, this study presents alternative approaches to fundamental ethical questions such as human nature, human dignity and human rights, the distinction between man and person, the beginning and end of life, which are also fundamental themes of classical and practical ethics, through local contemplation.