Comparing Structures rather than Rulings: A Hermeneutic Framework for Medical Ethics in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Abstract

Comparative studies of religious medical ethics have tended to place rulings beside rulings, producing collections of responsa, ecclesial statements and fatwas without a common analytical structure. This study proposes and applies an alternative procedure: comparison of the normative structures that generate rulings. It advances three methodological instruments, namely a ten-axis grid applied uniformly to each tradition, a rule of institutional symmetry governing which pronouncements may legitimately be set against one another, and a distinction between disagreement over value and disagreement over the characterisation of a fact. Applying these instruments to Judaism, Christianity and Islam discloses a shared architecture in which the normative discourse is organised into a layer of value and a layer of description upon which value is predicated. Contemporary biomedical transformation operates predominantly upon the second layer and upon the instruments, institutions and vocabulary of interpretation rather than upon founding principles. The finding is bounded: in currents that treat scripture as directive rather than binding, transformation has reached the level of principle itself.