PETER KNOBEL
Rabbi Irving Greenberg , a leading modern Orthodox thinker , whom David Ellenson identifies with the covenantal method, writing specifically in a bio-ethical context, defines the covenantal model using the metaphor of the partnership model. It is a partnership in the perfection of the world which takes seriously human value and dignity. Human freedom is real and not illusory. Greenberg emphasizes the human power working in concert with God to perfect the world. The greater the patient’s say in those matters which affect the patient’s life, the more God -like is the patient.”’ Using Genesis 1 and 3 Leon Kass , a leading bio-ethicist , argues:
Man has special standing because he shares in reason, freedom, judgment, and moral concern, and, as a result lives a life freighted with moral self-consciousness. Speech and freedom are used among other things to promulgate moral rules and to pass moral judgments, first among which is that murder is to be punished in kind because it violates the dignity of such a moral being. We note a crucial implication. To put it simply, the sanctity of human life rests absolutely on the dignity - the god-like-ness- of human beings.”
The life of a single human organism commands respect and protection, then, no matter in what form or shape, because of the complex creative investment it represents and because of our wonder at the divine or evolutionary processes that produce new lives from old ones, at the processes of nation and community and language through which a human being will come to absorb and continue hundreds of generations of culture and forms of life and value, and finally, when mental life has begun and flourishes, at the process of internal personal creation and judgment by which a person will make and remake
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