RELGST 1521 - ASIAN RELIGION PERSPECTIVES ON BIOETHICS

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
The preservation and enhancement of health and well-being has confronted us with ethical questions since the dawn of culture. The last fifty years, however, have seen an unprecedented development of medical sciences and biotechnology. The discipline of bioethics emerged as a response to both new ethical dilemmas, and others with a much longer history as well. While Christian theological works on issues like euthanasia and organ transplants had served as the basis for the young discipline of bioethics, Asian religions have only much more recently started to participate in the conversation. This course is an invitation to participate in history in the making as this course class introduces bioethics vis-à-vis four of the major Asian religious traditions. It presupposes no previous knowledge of bioethics and thus briefly introduces the basics before presenting the Asian counterpart. This is a comparative course whose main goal is to analyze and contextualize different religious perspectives on bioethical issues. The first part of the course discusses the development of bioethics, its principles and its historical relationship with religions in general in the “West,” China and India. The second part focuses on Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist ethical perspectives on the body, health and disease, and life and death. The third part discusses specific bioethical issues: euthanasia, abortion, organ donation and transplantation, and cognitive enhancement, from the perspective of Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian and Daoist traditions. The choice of these dominant topics obeys to the availability of sources that allows us to do a comparative analysis that would not be possible with other more recent issues. We approach these issues through lectures and discussion of academic texts, news, documentaries and films, which inform us about cultural and historical context, beliefs, practices, and personal experience. In the process we expect to learn how non-western religious traditions are responding to the challenges of controversial technologies and practices, and contributing to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be human and enduring existential riddles like suffering and flourishing.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SU3 Elective Basis

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