Republican bioethics

INTRODUCTION It has become a sort of common knowledge that bioethical thinking in Israel – and bioethical practice in the form of legislation or judiciary decisions – takes place along the liberal/religious communitarian axis. The two poles of this axis are seen either as poles in conflict (Shapira 2014) or as contributing to an original, autochthonous, corpus of bioethics that integrates conflicting values (Sigal 2014). Those who see the two poles as conflicting consider that the main ethical assumptions and rules emerging from both traditions are in opposition: sanctity of life vs. individual autonomy, solidarity and the community’s responsibility for each one of its individual members vs. self-definition and freedom of choice (Shapira 2014: 305). Thus, a compromise between the values of the Jewish religious tradition (and other minority groups’ religious values) and those that belong to the liberal Occidental culture is necessary (Shapira 2014: 305). Gil Sigal (2014) also registers the tensions between a Jewish religious value system and what he depicts as the Anglo-Saxon one. However, Sigal considers that the tension allows for the emergence of an autochthonous bioethical system (where Jewish values must be more central than the “Anglo-Saxon” ones) that reflects the specificity of the Israeli (understood by Sigal as solely Jewish) community. Prof. Shimon Glick also seeks an original Israeli Jewish alternative to an Occidental bioethical “common sense” in which individual autonomy trumps any other value. He argues for the principle of the infinite value of human life, and for the long-standing Jewish communitarian claim that “[N]o man is an island” and that “[A]n individual’s death is not just his or her private and personal affair only, but diminishes the entire community” (2001: 160). Moreover, many of the concrete discussions on bioethical questions in Israel are framed within the liberal/Jewish communitarian polarization, such as questions about the beginning and end of life, reproduction, patients’ rights, or force-feeding hunger strikers.