| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores how professional participants involved in contemporary Turkish bioethics reason about the relevant moral issues associated with biomedical technologies, with a particular focus on infertility treatment, embryo research, and abortion. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews with multiple professional experts, including physicians, religious scholars known as ulama, and bioethicists, it explores what constitutes a Muslim way of moral reasoning in Turkish bioethics. Through my empirical research, I investigate how moral reasoning is performed and reflected upon by professionals involved in Turkish bioethics. In addition to qualitative methods, I use a genealogical approach to discuss the complex networks of power that underlie Turkish Muslim moral reasoning. The genealogical approach enabled me to make a microanalysis of the power relations operating in the microcosm of Turkish bioethics. By combining an empirically grounded understanding with a genealogical approach, this dissertation argues that different moral reasoning produced by different discourses in Turkish bioethics is structurally related to the broader site of agencies and powers such as ‘European’ science, legal regulations, religious and moral authorities. Accordingly, the dissertation examines how these agencies and powers contribute to the formation and the development of diverse discourses as manifested through medicine, religion and philosophy in Turkish bioethics. The dissertation shows that Turkish Muslim moral reasoning displays a dynamic concept of ethics that is far from being rigid and canonical, despite the challenges posed by modern scientistic and capitalist worldviews. It also discusses the ways in which professional status and environment influence the ways in which professional ethical practice is informed and shaped. It argues that engagement within the scientific academic milieu fosters a greater propensity for abstract and theoretical moral reasoning than regular interactions with individuals in the wider community. Finally, although this study does not comprehensively outline all the ways in which Turkish Muslims do bioethical reasoning, it finds strong indications of a distinct historical and intellectual trajectory of moral reasoning that places significant emphasis on individual situated care concerns. | en_GB |
