Big questions in public debates: nature and the beginning of life

This lesson asks you to explain how some big questions of philosophy matter to your community and the wider society. The museum offers two cases from the debates the curriculum names, the environment and abortion, as its records of Islamic thought state them. It does not set out the present public debates, so your class will bring them. The abortion record is one tradition's classical legal account; secular medical, legal and ethical positions, other religious positions and Canadian law are for your class. ¹

For each record, find the question about people, nature or life that a public debate would turn on, and ask what an answer to it would change in a public policy.

Read the one sentence on which the jurists agree, and see what it uses to mark the point. The record of abortion, drawn from the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence, says that as a term ijhad is the expulsion of a foetus before its time ². It then says that after ensoulment, at about a hundred and twenty days, abortion is forbidden by consensus ³. The agreement is stated through a stage, ensoulment, with a count of days beside it. The record does not say how the jurists reached either the stage or the count. A student who wants to see the question as a philosophical one should first ask what a stage is and what a count of days is a count of.

Before ensoulment, the encyclopaedia reports, the jurists differ. Some allow abortion only for an excuse, as the Hanafis do; some allow it at the earliest stage, as one Hanbali view does; and the Shafi'is forbid it once the drop has settled ^{4 5}. The three positions use three kinds of marker: a condition of the case, a stage of the pregnancy, and the state of the drop. The record gives each school's position and not its reasons, and it states no ruling of its own. The reasons would have to be read in the schools' own books.

Each record rests on one modern work. The positions above come from the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence, which the record summarises in a few sentences. The record of environmental protection rests on Muhyi al-Din Afifi Ahmad, who holds that the pollution of water, air and soil threatens the safety of persons and societies, and that international conference resolutions went unimplemented ⁶. He presents Islam as taking care that people make good use of their natural environment and coexist with it in a way that preserves its constituents ⁷. The record adds that this is the author's reading, attributed to him.

In debates on abortion, the markers named in the record are a stage, a count of days, a condition of the case and the state of the drop. Which of these kinds of marker could people who disagree about the underlying question still share in a public debate, and what is the strongest objection to your answer?

• Abortion (ijhad): the jurists' positions by school, as the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia reports them.
• Environmental protection in Islam: one author's reading of the relation between people and their environment, attributed to him.

Read environmental protection in Islam and abortion. For each, write the big question in one sentence and name one community that the answer would affect.