Leon R. Kass

Preventing a Brave New World

In this chapter, Leon Kass, former chairperson of the United States President’s Council on Bioethics, discusses the ethics of human reproductive cloning. Kass begins by critically assessing the presumption that technological innovations in reproduction should be allowed. He then offers several different types of objections, both intrinsic and extrinsic, to reproductive cloning, including: it may have detrimental effects on cloned children and on society; it will open the door to designing children; it expresses and encourages problematic attitudes toward reproduction and parenting; and that it is hubristic. For these reasons, Kass argues that the repugnance response that many people have toward human reproductive cloning is appropriate. He further argues that human reproductive cloning should be prohibited, and that to accomplish this all forms of human cloning, including cloning for therapeutic purposes, need to be banned.

The Troubled Dream of Nature as a Moral Guide

Organization. Not only is illness Can Nature a part of our human nature, so too the correlation between Serve as a happiness and good health is more tenuous than the modern Moral Guide? mind has been willing to see. A greater attention to nature will help inoculate us against that silliest of all modern views: that our deepest values and institutions are nothing more than social constructs, dissoluble at will. It will help us locate the limits to human plasticity and medical progress. It will underscore the hard-won wisdom that more choice and more autonomy over against the power of nature do not necessarily increase the chances of gaining happiness. That is surely as helpful a point of departure as choosing between the fraternal twins of utilitarianism and deontology. m

Darwinism and Ethics

What bearing should Darwinism (that is, the theory of the origin of species, including the human species, by natural selection) have on ethics (that is, on our thoughts about how we as human beings should live our lives)? This question is but a recent and specific example of the age-old and general question about the relation between our knowledge of nature and our thoughts about ethics. This broader question, in turn, presupposes prior questions, both about the nature of nature and about the nature of ethics and the good for man. A full exploration of the former would carry us into questions about change, time, energy, cause, and, ultimately, about being itself. A full exploration of the latter would involve questions about justice, nobility, freedom, virtue, duty, happiness, pleasure, and, ultimately, about good itself. Both explorations would also necessarily consider the intelligibility of what is and what is good, as well as the powers and limits of the thinking mind to discover the intelligibly true and good.

A More Perfect Human: The Promise and the Peril of Modern Science

As nearly everyone appreciates, we live near the beginning of the golden age of biomedical science and technology. For the most part, we should be mightily glad that we do. We and our friends and loved ones are many times over the beneficiaries of its cures for diseases, prolongation of life, and amelioration of suffering, psychic and somatic. Since the latter third of the last century, most human beings living in technologically advanced countries have been living healthier and longer lives than even the most fortunate individuals in prior human history. Diphtheria, typhoid, and tuberculosis threaten us no longer; despite the lack of a definitive cure, half the people who are today treated for deadly cancers survive more than five years. The average Americans life expectancy at birth has increased from 47 in 1900 to 78 in 2000, and millions are now living healthily into their eighties and nineties. Thanks to basic research in neuroscience and new psychotropic drugs, the scourge of major depression and other devastating mental illnesses are finally under effective attack. We have every reason to look forward eagerly to new discoveries and new medical blessings. Every one of us should be deeply grateful for the gifts of human ingenuity and for the devoted efforts of scientists, physicians, and entrepreneurs who have used these gifts to make those benefits possible.

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

The exchange between Ramsey and Leon Kass is an important contemporary contribution to the critique of liberalism, a topic that has heated up with the growing awareness of multicultural concerns. Kass challenges the tradition of individual rights in contemporary ethical decision-making. “Friends of dignity,” Kass maintains, should be wary of the liberal tradition’s attempts to ground ethics in rights. Kass claims that there is more dignity in doing your duty and sacrificing on behalf of the other than in “standing on your rights.”

Teleology and Darwin’s the Origin of Species: Beyond Chance and Necessity?

Few books have turned men’s minds more than Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life. Yet where the turning will or should come to rest is still uncertain, for the full significance of Darwin’s ideas remain a subject of inquiry and controversy. Granting that Darwin was right about the fact of evolution — granting, that is, that all of nature flows, that nature is subject to “history” — it is by no means yet settled what difference this insight should make for our thinking about nature, about man’s nature and his place in nature, about the good life for man, or about God. In this essay, I will consider one of the disputed questions, one which may also be central for several of the others: the question of teleology, of the presence of ends or purposes in nature.

Cloning As Biohazard

“If we want to prevent the development of anthrax bombs, we do best to block the production of anthrax spores, not just their transfer to a weapons delivery system. Similarly, if we mean to be fully serious about stopping the cloning of human children, we should try to stop the process before it starts … not merely rely on efforts to prevent their transfer to women. …”

Change and permanence: Reflections on the ethical-social contract of science in the public interest

SummaryModern science, dedicated since its 17th Century origins to the mastery and possession of nature for the relief of mans estate, is a source of great social change, affecting our opinions, practices, and ways of life. It thus exists necessarily in tension with law and morality, our institutions of stability and order. This tension between change and permanence, between science and law or morals, was institutionalized by the American Founders who sought to encourage, under law, the progress in science and the useful arts, by means of the copyright and patent laws. American science and technology have flourished under the patent law, an ingenious ethical and social contract between scientists and the polity, through which private right and interest and public good generally coincide. Nevertheless, this contract has its limitations. Some of these limitations are vividly seen through the recent Supreme Court decision (in the Chakrabarty case) to permit the patenting of living microorganisms. Analysis of this case shows why the contract between science and the polity embodied in the Patent Laws may not always serve the public good and may also be harmful to science itself. Also, permitting ownership of living species shows how close we have come in our thinking to overstepping the sensible limits of the project for the mastery and possession of nature.