In 1968, the German-born Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas published an essay titled “Contemporary Problems in Ethics from a Jewish Perspective” in the journal of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, then as now the leading organ of Reform Judaism. The article was among the first to discuss the potential challenges posed by advances in biotechnology to Jewish ethical principles. Now available online for the first time, the essay remains highly relevant today:
If it is true that both religion and morality originally drew sustenance from a sense of piety which cosmic mystery and majesty instilled in the soul—a sense of being excelled in the order of things by something not only physically beyond our reach but also in quality beyond our virtue; if the wonder and humility before nature had something to do with a readiness to pay homage also to norms issued in the name of an eternal order—then there must be some moral implication in the loss of this sense. . . . If reverence or shame has any share in the hold that moral laws may have on us, then the experience of technological power, which expunges reverence and shame, cannot be without consequences for our ethical condition. . . .
But, it may be objected, if nature has lost man’s respect and ceased to be an object of his reverence, one might expect his respect for himself to have risen in proportion. Man must have gained in metaphysical status what nature has lost—even what God has lost: man has stepped into His place as creator, the maker of new worlds, the sovereign re-fashioner of things. . . .
But [then] we come before the paradox . . . that with his very triumph man himself has become engulfed in the metaphysical devaluation which was the premise and the consequence of that triumph. For he must see himself as part of that nature which he has found to be manipulable and which he learns how to manipulate more and more.
We have seen before how, through modern science, man lost the [biblical] attribute of “image-of-God,” as he is not only the subject but also the object of his own scientific knowledge—of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc. What we must see now is that he is not merely the theoretical object of his knowledge and of the consequent revision of the image he entertains of himself; he is also the object of his own technological power. He can remake himself as he can remake nature. Man today, or very soon, can make man “to specification”—today already through socio-political and psychological techniques, tomorrow through biological engineering, eventually perhaps through the juggling of genes.
Read more on Tikvah: http://tikvahfund.org/library/contemporary-problems-in-ethics-from-a-jewish-perspective/