Abstract
In this essay, I present an Islamic ethico-legal perspective on the relationships between social responsibility and the state’s provision of healthcare as part of a continuing dialogue between academics, policy stakeholders, and representatives of religious communities about the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO 2006). I briefly recount the notion of human rights in an Islamic moral universe and then proceed to describing conceptual analogues within the Islamic tradition for the principles of social responsibility and community obligation. I use these to construct an argument for the state’s obligation to provide a certain type of healthcare to its citizenry. I next relate two real-world examples of Muslim stakeholders operationalizing the Islamic ethos of community obligation regarding health through servicing the religious needs of Muslim patients. By incorporating both theological and applied ethics in this commentary, I hope to bring into view the concordances and discordances between the Islamic ethico-legal tradition (in theory and practice) and the theoretical underpinnings of human rights doctrine and its related bioethics discourses.
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Acknowledgments
Parts of this work have been previously published in as “Social Responsibility and the State’s Duty to Provide Healthcare: An Islamic Ethico-Legal Perspective” by the same author in Developing World Bioethics 2017. The citation is provided in the reference list below.
I would like to thank Fr. Joseph Tham and Dr. Alberto Garcia Gomez and the UNESCO Chair for the kind invite to participate in the conference that motivated this paper. I also want to acknowledge Dr. Dan Sulmasy for his careful review and editorial comments on a previous version of this manuscript, Taha Abdul-Basser for his review of the Islamic ethico-legal reasoning and concepts described herein, and all the colleagues and interlocutors at the UNESCO meeting who spurred critical revisions of this essay.
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Padela, A.I. (2018). Social Responsibility and the Moral Obligation Toward Providing Healthcare: An Islamic Ethico-legal Analysis. In: Tham, J., Durante, C., García Gómez, A. (eds) Religious Perspectives on Social Responsibility in Health . Advancing Global Bioethics, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71849-1_14
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