Text and Tradition in Contemporary Jewish Bioethics

Abstract

Modern Jewish ethics may be defined as the effort to develop positions on contemporary moral problems continuous with the values and norms expressed in the Jewish religious tradition. As such, doing Jewish ethics involves two distinct, but related, projects. Jewish ethicists must provide a means, first for identifying values and norms within the Jewish tradition, and then for applying them to contemporary problems.1 Jewish ethicists can choose among various ways of doing this, and in this essay I will explore some of these options. Using issues in medical ethics as a basis for comparison, I will illustrate the differences among three basic models for doing modern Jewish ethics. I contend that the differences among these approaches derive from a more fundamental difference in the way Jewish ethicists understand the very nature of their tradition. All modern Jewish ethicists have a theory, explicitly or implicitly, of what their tradition is and how to continue it; it is this theory which guides their interpretation of classical Jewish sources and so defines their positions on contemporary problems in bioethics. While I focus here on issues in biomedical ethics, it should be noted that the basic methodological differences I will highlight are in no way unique to this sort of moral problem.