Hasna Begum (Dhaka, 1935 – Dhaka, 2020) was a Bangladeshi philosopher, writer and feminist trained in analytic moral philosophy. She taught philosophy at the University of Dhaka for much of her career and worked to make the classics of moral philosophy available to Bengali readers.
Born in Dhaka on 24 February 1935, she studied at the University of Dhaka, earning her BA in 1968 and her MA a year later. She then took a PhD in moral philosophy at Monash University in Australia in 1978, where she became the first doctoral student supervised by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Her dissertation was titled Moore's Ethics: Theory and Practice. Back in Bangladesh she chaired the Department of Philosophy at Dhaka between 1991 and 1994, and she retired in December 2000.
Her work joins translation and original reflection. She rendered G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, Mill's Utilitarianism and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Bengali, and wrote essays on morality, women and society, and ethics in everyday practice. Her feminism is reflected in writings devoted to Begum Rokeya, a pioneer of women's education in Bengal. She also took part in international bioethics, serving on the board of the International Association of Bioethics from 1997 to 2005 and on the editorial boards of Bioethics and the Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics.
She died in Dhaka on 1 December 2020, from COVID-19, at the age of eighty-five. Her legacy lies chiefly in bringing moral philosophy to Bengali readers and in advancing feminist and bioethical debate in South Asia.
Key ideas
- Moore's ethics: her doctoral dissertation examined the thought of G. E. Moore, focusing on the link between moral theory and practice.
- Utilitarianism: by translating and circulating Mill's work, she engaged with debates on the consequences of actions.
- Morality and society: she held that ethical reflection must attend to concrete social conditions, especially the situation of women.
- Applied ethics: she treated moral philosophy as a tool for thinking through practical problems, including in bioethics.
Curiosities
Peter Singer's first doctoral student
At Monash she was the first doctoral student supervised by Peter Singer, according to the reference sources.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.