ABSTRACT
Many prominent Jewish scholars have taken it upon themselves to address questions of bioethics, drawing upon the vast resources of the normative Jewish tradition. The rise of bioethics has effected a profound change in discourse about ethics in the Jewish community. Bioethics shifted ethical concern toward the more specific normative questions that arise in the wake of new medical technologies and away from abstract discussion of general principles or the analysis of the logic of general ethical language. Bioethics has brought "hard cases," which had usually been relegated to the suspect discipline of "casuistry," to the center stage of ethical discourse. In dealing with the bioethical revolution in society at large, more traditionalist thinkers in the Jewish community, precisely because they are rooted in a normative base that, for them, has remained fundamentally intact, rushed to the fore to become the spokespersons for the community. In the Jewish community can adopt an authoritative, traditionalist, approach or a natural rights approach.
