Introduction to Part I: Normative Bioethics in Religious Traditions

Abstract

The five chapters on religious bioethics show how Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism and Buddhism have developed normative answers to bioethical issues. Throughout these chapters, the emphasis is not on the religious traditions’ concrete responses to particular bioethical issues. Whenever such responses are analyzed in the chapters, this is part of the analysis of that religious tradition’s approach to normative bioethics in general. The descriptions make clear that within each of the studied religious traditions, the adopted method towards normative bioethics, or, sometimes, a plurality of methods, has nurtured bioethical diversity within these traditions. Still, that diversity has not led the traditions to the conclusion that normative bioethics is impossible. In most instances, within religious traditions, diversity rather seems to have acted as a stimulation to further refine both concrete responses to particular bioethical issues as well as fundamental development of the basis or methods that sustain these arguments.