Şeyma Yazıcı

The shortage of organ donors poses a major challenge, often leading to patient deaths due to the lack of transplants. Additionally, transplant recipients face lifelong immunosuppression, which brings further health risks. The use of stem cells and biomaterials to develop bioinks for bioprinting technology holds the potential to create personalized tissues and organs that closely replicate the size and structure of their natural counterparts. This could provide a revolutionary solution to the organ shortage crisis. Even though the technology has not yet reached the stage of fully functional organs, it is becoming more accessible with the advent of affordable bioprinters and bioinks. As this technology develops, bioethicists are working with biomedical researchers to address the ethical issues that arise before its widespread therapeutic use. Nevertheless, the role of religion in these bioethical discourses remains relatively unexplored. This paper examines the bioethical issues surrounding bioprinting, with a particular focus on Islamic bioethics. In this study, we examined key bioethical issues within the Islamic framework, including the purpose of the technology, its safety, the use of stem cells and animal‐derived biomaterials, and its commercialization. Additionally, we argued that certain organs, particularly reproductive organs, require deeper examination from an Islamic bioethical perspective, given the sensitive nature of reproduction and its wide‐ranging social, cultural, and moral implications. The bioprinting of reproductive organs could have significant impact on parenthood, lineage, and familial structures and may give rise to intricate challenges concerning marital and inheritance rights, thereby necessitating careful consideration of the ethical and legal implications.

Based on a question posed by global philosophy of religion project regarding the absence of literal attribution of omnibenevolence to God in the Qur’ān, this paper aims to examine how to understand perfect goodness in Islam. I will first discuss the concept of perfect goodness and suggest that perfect goodness is not an independent attribute on its own and it is predicated on other moral attributes of God without which the concept of perfect goodness could hardly be understood. I will examine perfect goodness by a specific emphasis on the attribute of justice as one of the conditions to be satisfied by a perfectly morally good being. In so doing, I will appeal to the distinctions made among great-making properties by Daniel Hill, and Al-Ghazālī’s definition of justice by applying them to God’s moral attributes. I will argue that justice has a crucial role in maximality-optimality balance between great-making properties and it seems quite difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of goodness without justice. Having said that, I will claim that the conceptual frame I suggest sheds light on why omnibenevolence is not literally attributed to God in the Qur’ān. Then, I will briefly show how the divine attributes mentioned in the Qur’ān and the discussions about divine names and attributes in the Islamic tradition supports the understanding of perfect goodness I defend. Consequently, I will try to show that far from indicating that the Islamic concept of God doesn’t involve perfect goodness, the Qur’ān establishes the proper meaning of perfect goodness by focusing on its constitutive attributes, and thus provides us with a sound conception of it.

William L. Rowe poses a dilemma between God’s freedom and essential moral goodness by arguing that God cannot satisfy the arguably accepted condition for libertarian freedom, namely, ability to do otherwise. Accordingly, if God does a morally good action A freely, then there is at least a possible world in which God refrains from doing A and thereby does the morally wrong action. And if God does a morally wrong action in one of the possible worlds, he ceases to be essentially morally perfect. I will argue that Rowe’s conclusion is based on a specific possible world semantics, and we might avoid Rowe’s conclusion with an alternative understanding of modality. In doing so, I will examine the conception of modality proposed by al-Ghaza ̄l ̄ı in which the possibility of a state of affairs does not entail its actuality in at least one possible world.