This chapter explores three questions: Is humankind changing? Is contemporary healthcare contributing to this change? And, if it is, should it be? Using human height as a case study for natural and induced changes in human features, the chapter engages religious and bioscientific knowledge to address the are we question and initiates a multidisciplinary and multilevel Islamic bioethical discourse over the role of medicine to tackle the should we question. The chapter begins by examining transhumanism’s relationship with biomedicine and healthcare, and by highlighting distinctions between therapy, enhancement, and alteration. Next it introduces the “disease” of idiopathic short stature, illustrating how disease states are socially and culturally constructed in order to facilitate an ethical analysis of medicine’s role in influencing bodily change. Using parts of Chapter 2’s epistemic framework, it next critically evaluates scientific and scriptural evidence regarding changes in human height over time. The final section delves into the moral limits of medical practice by bringing together different genres of Islamic bioethical literature and covering ethical guideposts such as the theological notion of altering God’s creation. The chapter concludes by proposing an intervention that links various Islamic moral sciences to theoretical, practical, and applied bioethical deliberation processes.

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Is Human Height Changing, and Should Medicine Intervene? Transhumanism, Biomedicine, and Islamic Bioethics

  • Aasim I. Padela

摘要

This chapter explores three questions: Is humankind changing? Is contemporary healthcare contributing to this change? And, if it is, should it be? Using human height as a case study for natural and induced changes in human features, the chapter engages religious and bioscientific knowledge to address the are we question and initiates a multidisciplinary and multilevel Islamic bioethical discourse over the role of medicine to tackle the should we question. The chapter begins by examining transhumanism’s relationship with biomedicine and healthcare, and by highlighting distinctions between therapy, enhancement, and alteration. Next it introduces the “disease” of idiopathic short stature, illustrating how disease states are socially and culturally constructed in order to facilitate an ethical analysis of medicine’s role in influencing bodily change. Using parts of Chapter 2’s epistemic framework, it next critically evaluates scientific and scriptural evidence regarding changes in human height over time. The final section delves into the moral limits of medical practice by bringing together different genres of Islamic bioethical literature and covering ethical guideposts such as the theological notion of altering God’s creation. The chapter concludes by proposing an intervention that links various Islamic moral sciences to theoretical, practical, and applied bioethical deliberation processes.