Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
Human reproductive cloning
The modern era’s broadest consensus: refused by Rome, by the fiqh academies, by mainstream responsa, and by secular councils — on dignity, lineage, safety, and the ethics of the species, respectively. The full register entry
Catholic
Condemned
Cloning is refused as a manufacturing of human life contrary to the dignity of procreation (Dignitas personae, §28): the clone is designed to a specification, and a person may not be made to another’s blueprint.
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas personae (2008), §28
Islamic
Condemned
The fiqh academies refused reproductive cloning at their 1997 Casablanca session and after, citing the confusion of lineage and the integrity of God’s creation, while permitting plant and animal cloning and cell research under conditions.
- Islamic Fiqh Academy, resolution on cloning (1997)
Jewish
Condemned
Mainstream responsa refuse reproductive cloning on grounds of safety, identity, and the child’s open future, while recording minority arguments that a clone is simply a delayed identical twin — a natural event the tradition already accepts. The refusal is ethical, not metaphysical panic.
- Elliot N. Dorff, Matters of Life and Death (1998)
Secular and naturalist
Condemned
The President’s Council and most secular bioethics bodies recommended prohibition on safety and on the ethics of manufacture; the secular case was made in the language of human dignity (Habermas’s ethics of the species) precisely where its authors could not use theology.
- Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (2001)