Bioetica e diritto: Esperienza nel diritto ebraico

Abstract

Hebrew law - Ham Istrael - of Israeli people is the law of a tormented population, running away from Egypt and slavery. We are talking about a population that has always had to fight for its own self-determination, carrying a culture that is different from neighbour countries but still featured by a special autonomy: everything relating to everyday life is strictly connected to the environment. For starters, we have analysed the sources of Hebrew law, mainly Torah ones. The hebrew word Torah, derivating from the verb jarah ‘to teach, to train’, expresses the meaning of teaching, guiding. It is not a preceptive system that is normatively and juridically binding, but a complex of behavioural instructions. In particular, written Torah, Torah shebiktav, is the instruction that G.d has given to Israel on Mt. Sinai and contained in Pentateuch. Istraeli wisemen believed that, beyond this revelation, Moses had received another oral instruction: the oral Torah, Torah shebe’alpeh. Hebrew law sources are useful in order to better understand the theme we are about to study: bioethics. The term bioethics has acquired a growing diffusion and has earned a well defined epistemological meaning, so that it’s mainly connected to ethical problems related to scientific and tecnologic developments. Bioethics is wrongly defined as ‘ethics of live’, but, in reality, it is that field that operates a strict reference to that part of ethics that determines the boundaries between lawful and unlawful set by the development of scientific knowledge and technological conquers in biomedic and social-sanitary contexts. The term ‘biolaw’, instead, is of more recent coining, and has has a quick spreading on a national and international level. It is important to specifyt that with ‘biolaw’, a term that tends to approach bioethics, we don’t have to refer to the ‘right to live’, because it is a complex of behavioural and social rules that need to be adopted when it comes to bioethics. It is commonly believed that biolaw is the consequence and result of bioetics, because the scientifictechnical development binds to juridically rule all uncommon techniques.... [edited by Author]