In popular discourse people often use the term ethics to describe the ways humans properly interact with each other, or the virtuous moral formation of the individual. One can see this in much of the discourse of Jewish ethics which often focuses on questions within bioethics, sexual ethics, and politics, among others. Even when Jewish ethics is expanded beyond these questions it is often used to address our relations to living things like animals and the earth. This panel expands the realm of Jewish ethics by asking about our obligations to categories beyond the living, namely the not-yet-conceived, the dead, and artificial intelligence. We ask together how might Jewish ethics help us better relate to beings that are not alive? Ultimately this panel argues that we must expand our moral language, concepts, and values in order to develop a Jewish ethics for the not-quite-human.
Ethics is sometimes thought to be narrowly a concern with our treatment of the Other, a living thing: the neighbor, the loved one, animals, the earth, or God. However Jewish ethics also has a robust understanding of our obligations to the no longer living, to the no-longer-human. Of course Jewish rituals around death and mourning are well known and well studied. What has received less attention is our moral obligations to the dead body itself. By studying the Jewish visual response to death, namely how Jews traditionally (do not) depict and gaze upon the dead, I argue that ultimately it is the ethical agent’s moral responsibility to render the dead invisible. The Jewish corpse, a no-longer-human being who is not quite an object, who can experience shame and contains the image of God, requires that it ultimately be erased from this world, no longer available to living eyes.
While recent feminist Jewish thought has used critiques of abstraction as a feminist tool to criticize the way that canonical figures in Jewish thought have theorized the “ethical relation," this paper will suggest that abstraction plays a key role in a range of experiences, including experiences of infertility. To do this, the paper will show that, like many other kinds of experiences related to childbearing and childrearing, experiences of infertility are deeply shaped by obligation, but these obligations are directed towards an Other who remains abstract—the hoped-for child. In this way, the paper challenges us to develop new tools for describing the important conceptual contributions that theorizations of parental experience can make to contemporary ethical discourse.
This paper explores the emerging phenomenon of AI-based simulations of the dead and the ethical issues they raise, particularly in a Jewish context. The capacity of AI to mimic styles from limited data offers potential therapeutic and memorialization benefits, yet also presents serious concerns. Central among these are questions of consent, privacy, the integrity of data-driven identities, and disruptions to the grieving process. Within Jewish tradition, the decentralized nature of authority and the reliance on historical precedent complicate the establishment of new norms. The author proposes two guiding principles—a right to be remembered and a right to be forgotten—and shows that these principles can be grounded in Jewish sources. Drawing on examples from twentieth-century and medieval Jewish history, the paper outlines how entirely new moral norms can be developed in response to unprecedented ethical dilemmas.