The Human Person: Challenges for Science, Religion and Governance. An international Symposium

How is human personhood conceived in Muslim thought? It is, of course, impossible to frame such a vast question across the breadth of Muslim thought. But I will begin to explore this question drawing on the work of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). What are the crucial attributes about being a person? Is it to be a rational person? Or does it also involve the element of being a moral person, who requires some amount of choice in make moral choices. What is the moral authority of nature? What is the relationship between personhood and corporeality? My presentation will attempt an outline of a Muslim anthropology of personhood drawing on the work of Ghazali. Then I will also attempt to provide a framework for understanding the relationship between human beings, and technology, especially enhancements.

The breathtaking panoply of twentieth-century biomedical advancements made it possible to follow, and even sometimes manipulate, what is going on inside the mother's uteruses during the gestational period. These radical scientific developments have had considerable impact on grasping some of the very basic concepts in our lives such as health and sickness, life and death and even the very notion of human personhood.

During the period 15-17 January 1985, about eighty Muslim religious scholars and biomedical scientists participated in a seminar organized by the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences (IOMS) in order to examine the impact of these scientific developments on understanding (the beginning of) human personhood from an Islamic perspective. This presentation will delineate the main points of the beginning of life debate in the IOMS seminar and highlight the roles of biomedical and religious arguments in this debate.

While the scope of Islamic Jurisprudence (fiqh) covers, broadly speaking, two areas of human-God (‘ibadat) and human-human (mu’amalat) relations, ethics undergirds the entire value system of the religious law in Islam. Throughout its history Islamic jurisprudence has been guided by the normative system derived from religious texts that has enabled jurists at different times to provide fresh rulings by engaging in ethical analysis as well as textual hermeneutics of the foundational sources of these norms and apply them to the changed circumstances of everyday life of Muslim societies. The growing fatawa literature bears testimony to the ever expanding horizons of human need to be guided by the spiritual and moral values embedded in Islamic religious texts. In more recent years with the emphasis on secular ethics that denies any role to religious ethics to guide moral life of the people, Muslim legal scholars have begun to reexamine the fundamental aspects of Islamic ethics, and the ways in which Muslim jurists in the past have incorporated essentially religious-ethical dimension of Islamic thought in their legal methodology.

However, with a circumscribed role for human reason, traditional religious ethical discourse among Muslim scholars tends to be inadequate in terms of providing justificatory reasoning that undergirds secular ethics. Whether the jurists promote reason-based or revelation-based inquiry, they have, explicitly or implicitly, engaged in adapting ethical values in providing extraordinary solutions in medical practice and research. This paper undertakes to investigate critical relationship between law and ethics in Islamic religious thought as an important methodology in Islamic bioethics. In a number of new proposals for extensive legal methodology, the ethical dimension of Islamic thought is either conspicuously missing or poorly articulated. The study of Muslim rationalist or traditionalist theology is necessary for the emergence of extensive legal methodology. Modern issues related to neuroscience or human personhood can be resolved only when human rational capacity to make ethical decisions is acknowledged as part of the divine endowment for human perfection.

Islamic lineage regulations are rooted in religiously binding foundations. Paternity is tied to the notion of licit sexual relationship through the concept of firash (matrimonial bed). A legal husband is presumed to be the father of the children born by his wife during a valid and verified marital relationship. The paternity relationship in Islam relies on the concept of licit sex in the form of marriage, or in the past ownership of a female slave. While the definition of maternity is also related to the concept of licit sex, it is not entirely dependent on it, at least in the Sunni tradition. In cases of birth outside of marriage, for example, the maternal connection, unlike the paternal one, cannot be severed.

Modern genetic technologies have revolutionized inherited concepts of genealogy and kinship and enabled, for the first time, clear and (near) certain distinction between legal and biological paternity. Similarly, new reproductive technologies have introduced new models of motherhood through surrogacy and assisted reproduction especially by donor gametes. These developments have sparked renewed interest in lineage regulations, particularly in as far as impact of these developments on established norms and institutions are concerned.

While Muslim scholars and researchers emphasize the importance of legitimate sexual relationship in the determination of lineage, lesser attention is paid to subtle distinctions made by some classical jurists in the definition and conceptualization of genealogical connections. In these discussions formulations of genealogical connections rest on both formalist and objectivist statements about the human body, the marital bond, and filial relationships. The formalist-objectivist dichotomy/duality cuts across school boundaries and depends on the issue at hand. This presentation will focus on some illustrative debates pertaining to the concepts of firash, nikah, as well as the methods for the verification of lineage and the hierarchy of these methods. The presentation argues that this formalist-objectivist distinction alludes to a more complex conceptualization of lineage regulations than what is usually understood to be the standard Islamic one. Moreover, paying attention to this distinction leads to a deeper understanding of the modern discourse on this issue as well.

Especially after a secular Enlightenment focused on the human capacity for rationality and individual self-determination, the developed West has had what might be described as a ‘turn to the head.’ This general orientation operates with the assumption that what ultimately matters about human person can be found in a single organ — the brain — with some thinkers going so far as to claim that human persons are brains. All other aspects of the body, on this view, are to be understood as so much baggage, which can be discarded as accidental to who we really are.

But this view has run into puzzles and problems in recent years, particularly from challenges brought by philosophy of mind. For starters, if human persons are identical with our brains, then the classic thought experiments about brain transplants and downloads force us into radically counter-intuitive positions about personal identity. Furthermore, thinkers like Thomas Nagel and Alva Noe have argued that a fully-functioning, healthy brain is simply an inadequate explanation for many fundamental aspects of human existence, including consciousness. Nagel concludes that the materialist account of consciousness fails, and Noe claims that human consciousness must be understood as an “embodied” function of the human organism, holistically considered.

The broadly-understood traditions of Catholicism and Islam are well placed to build on these insights and resist the secular ‘turn to the head.’ In some ways, Islam is better positioned than Catholicism, having explicitly resisted the secular Enlightenment on many fronts, and developed an understanding of the human person which rejects its reduction to the brain. Both traditions are largely indebted to the moral anthropology of Aristotle, who argued that human persons are substances of a rational and relational nature — constituted by our being a certain kind of animal or organism.

This view not only obviously resists the reduction of the human person to the brain, but implies that one may be a human person even without a (functioning) brain. The United States has seen several recent high profile cases of human animals, functioning with homeostasis, who were described as “brain dead.” Though our Western secular law pushes towards describing brain death as “actual death”, two of these supposedly dead individuals were able to gestate prenatal children—and one actually brought a healthy baby boy to birth. Human persons — both before they have brains and (sometimes) when their brains are damaged or destroyed — maintain homeostasis as holistically-considered organisms, not through a single organ.

This moral anthropology has serious and far-reaching and critical implications for contemporary neuroscience’s reduction of the human person to the human brain. Indeed, this moment of uncertainly for those who have until now accepted the ‘turn to the head’ provide both Catholicism and Islam the opportunity to rejoin contemporary bioethical debates in a constructively critical way. These traditions offer an understanding of the human person which avoids the puzzles and problems of the contemporary secular discourse.

Neuroscience: Addressing Perdurable Questions of Humanity

Research in, and applications of neuroscience and neurotechnology are increasingly becoming an international enterprise. The past 10 years reveal the accelerated pace of both neuroscientific advancement, and investment of non-Western nations, corporate and venture capital companies, and actors in neuroscientific and neurotechnological research and development. Much of neuroscientific inquiry is directed at longstanding philosophical questions about the mind, morality, emotions, nature of being, and relationality. The body of neuroscientific information, and its ever-expanding influence and gravitas as a social force have challenged long-held notions about the basis of consciousness and the nature of the brain-mind-self relationship, and prompted re-examination of regnant concepts of ‘personhood’ and the person-in-society. As philosopher Fritz Jahr¹ noted some 80 years ago, philosophy poses questions, science provides answers, and an enlightened open society must alter and adapt philosophical – and ethical – principles in light of new knowledge.

Neuroethics: A Viable Meta-Ethics

Yet, as Latour recognized, scientific answers often serve to generate questions anew, and expand and deepen the nature of inquiry.² In this light, we ask what neuroscience can provide to and for the development and articulation of a contemporary ethics on an ever more pluralistic, yet interactive world stage? The field of neuroethics addresses these issues through its two foci: 1) studies of the neurobiological mechanisms of proto-moral, moral and ethical thought, emotions and behaviors – what our group refers to as “neuro-ecology”³ and 2) studies and engagement of the ethico-legal and social issues generated by neuroscientific research, use – and misuse – in medicine, public life, and global relations. We argue that if/when taken together, these foci obtain a meta-ethics that is naturalistically grounded, but not reductionistic in that it preserves the reality and importance of biologically embodied individuals who are psychologically sensitive and responsive to the socio-cultural ecology in which they are embedded, and as such may be tenable – and valuable – to guide the application of neuroscience to foster socio-cultural insights and understanding.^4-6

Toward International Relevance in Practice

Our current work aims to develop an internationally-relevant paradigm of/for neuroethics.^6,7 We offer a tentative model for an applied international neuroethics that relies on a version of Principlism, herein revised to reflect concepts of moral cognition, emotion and actions as informed by the neural and cognitive sciences. A ‘limited’ conception of global citizenship, acknowledging the contemporary bio-psychosocial human being as a ‘multiple situated self’, is the precondition for this neuroethical approach. In the main, it provides cosmopolitan concepts (i.e. - “global” constructs), that can be contextualized to bio-psychosocial realities in particular communities (i.e. - “local conceptualizations”), pro Dower’s notion of ‘communitarian cosmopolitanism’. By providing insight to the ways individuals engage resources, relate, regard each other, and respond to various circumstances, neuroethics may enable a view to “what” we are, and “why” we think, emote and act as we do, and in so doing could inform – if not guide – the norms, mores, ideals and ethos that affect “how” we act as individuals, communities, politics and society, writ both small and large.

References

1. Jahr F. 1927. Bio-Ethik: Eine Umschau über die ethischen Beziehungen des Menschen zu Tier und Pflanze. Kosmos. Handweiser für Naturfreunde 24(1): 2-4.

2. Latour B, Woolgar S. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Los Angeles: Sage.

3. Giordano J. 2011. Neuroethics: traditions, tasks and values. Human Prospect 1(1): 5-10.

4. Giordano J. 2011. Neuroethics- two interacting traditions as a viable meta-ethics? AJOB-Neuroscience 3(1); 23-25.

5. Giordano J, Benedikter R. 2012. Neurotechnology, culture, and the need for a cosmopolitan neuroethics. In: Giordano J. (ed.) Neurotechnology: Premises, Potential, and Problems. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press; p.233-242.

6. Shook J, Giordano J. 2014. A principled and cosmopolitan neuroethics: Implications for international relevance. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 9(1).

7. Lanzilao E, Shook J, Benedikter R, Giordano J. 2014. Advancing neuroscience on the 21st century world stage: The need for – and proposed structure of – an internationally-relevant neuroethics. Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine (In press).

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the JW Fulbright Foundations (JG), Clark Faculty Fellowship (JG), William H. and Ruth Crane Schaefer Endowment (JG), and funding from the Neuroethics Studies Program of the Edmund D. Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics.