human cloning

Judaism is the oldest of the western monotheistic faith traditions. Its primary source of authority is the Torah, the revealed will of God in the Hebrew Bible, and rabbinic commentaries on the Torah contained in the Talmud and Mishnah. Within the United States, there are four main Jewish traditions— Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and Reconstructionist— that collectively claim approximately 3% of the U.S. religious population. Jewish scholars have drawn on their authoritative sources and casuistical reasoning to make substantial contributions to biomedical ethics since its inception. Indeed, discussion of human cloning by Jewish scholars begins to appear in the late 1970s.

The Divine Mandate and the Self. Human beings have a command and challenge from God to use their rational, imaginative, and exploratory capacities for the benefit and health of humanity.

Judaism affirms that human beings have inherent worth as creatures created in the image of God, and the Talmud understands human beings as partners with God in the ongoing act of creation. In their unique role, persons receive a divine mandate for stewardship and mastery, which encompasses a very strong emphasis on use of medical knowledge and skills to promote health, cure, and heal.

Nonetheless, the divine mandate of mastery generates moral ambivalence in the tradition with respect to cloning. Cloning is troubling because of the prospect that the mandate to master nature will be transformed into mastery over humans. The Jewish understanding of the self entails that persons are more than their genotypes. Rabbi Jakobovits has highlighted the transcendent character of the person within Jewish thought: “...man, as the delicately balanced fusion of body, mind, and soul, can never be the mere product of laboratory conditions and scientific ingenuity.”

Jewish perspectives on cloning are also profoundly influenced by the eugenics programs carried out on European Jewry under Nazi Germany.

An Ethic of Responsibility. Judaism is committed to an ethic of responsibility or duty, rather than an ethic of rights. The overriding duty (with three exceptions), derived from the Torah and rabbinic commentary, is the preservation of human life. Given this presumptive duty, it is possible to support cloning when it is presented as a therapeutic remedy for a genetic disease or condition, such as infertility, that besets an individual or couple. However, many proposals for human cloning do not meet these conditions of underlying disease, therapy, and individual benefit.

One exception to the command to preserve life, the prohibition of idolatry, is relevant to an assessment of cloning. Human cloning raises a danger of self-idolization. Through sexual intercourse and the raising of children, human beings are confronted with the inescapable “otherness” of persons. This otherness enables the development of humility and the authenticity of “I-Thou” relationships. These characteristics curb human hubris and self-idolization (Dorff).

The ethic of responsibility is also expressed in Jewish norms of parenthood and the responsibilities of lineage. The more the processes by which one becomes a parent— conjugal relations, conferral of genetic identity, fetal gestation in a mother’s womb, birth, and raising a child— are separated from the actual creation of life, reservations and objections in Jewish thought D-29