Description

The place and role of ethics in the making of law and public policies raise several questions that are central to important contemporary debates ranging from human rights to applied ethics. At the heart of these debates two main points are often highlighted: the definition and scope of ethics. For, laws and public policies are not made without their ethical assumptions.

What is the interplay between ethics, law and public policies? This question includes the extent to which a certain action can be categorized as (im)moral, the basis for such categorization, and the extent to which it can apply to everyone. This presentation will explore these questions with a special focus on Islamic bioethics as an example of an applied ethics that is rooted in religious ethics.

About The Speaker

Dr. Ayman Shabana is Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q). Prior to joining SFS-Q, he taught at several institutions including the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Florida International University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, his MA from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and his BA from Al-Azhar University in Egypt.

He teaches and writes on several topics including Islamic legal history, Islamic law and ethics, human rights, and bioethics. He is the Principal Investigator of a three-year project (2012-2015) on Islamic bioethics funded by a grant from Qatar National Research Fund’s National Priorities Research Program and the recipient of the Research Excellence Award at the 2012 Qatar Annual Research Forum. During the academic year 2013-2014 he was a visiting research fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School.