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Leon Kass
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Leon Richard Kass (born February 12 1939) is an American physician, educator, and public intellectual, best known as an opponent of human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia; as a critic of unrestrained technological progress; and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005.
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Leon Richard Kass (born February 12 1939) is an American physician, educator, and public intellectual, best known as an opponent of human cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia; as a critic of unrestrained technological progress; and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."
Kass is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.
Early life and education
Kass was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He described his family as "Yiddish speaking, secular, socialist." Although his upbringing was not religious, it was moralist: "Morality, not Judaism, was the religion of our home, morality colored progressively pink with socialism, less on grounds of Marxist theory, more out of zeal for social justice and human dignity." He would not begin to explore his religious heritage until later in his career.
Kass enrolled in the University of Chicago at age 15, graduating from the College with a degree in biology in 1958. The College is well-known for its core curriculum, and Kass studied the great books then prescribed by Chicago's core. "I became a devotee of liberal education . . . with a special fondness for the Greeks." graduated from the University of Chicago's medical school in 1962 and completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1967.
In 1961, Kass married the former Amy Apfel, a fellow graduate of the College of the University of Chicago. As instructors in the College in later years, they would frequently teach seminars together. Their scholarly collaborations include several articles on marriage and courtship and a reader on the subject. (The Kasses have two adult daughters and reside in Chicago and Washington.)
Leon and Amy Kass went to Holmes County, Mississippi, in 1965 to do civil rights work. The character of the rural, poor, and uneducated African Americans they encountered contrasted with his colleagues at Harvard and other elite universities. It was this experience, he later said, that
caused me to shed my enlightenment faith and ultimately begin a journey in which Jewish thought would ultimately come to play a more prominent part. Why, I wondered then, was there more honor, decency, and dignity among the impoverished and ignorant but church-going black farmers with whom we had lived than among my privileged and educated fellow graduate students at Harvard, whose progressive opinions I shared but whose self-absorption and self-indulgence put me off. If poverty and superstition were the cause of bad character, how to explain this?
First forays into bioethics
After completing his doctorate, Kass conducted molecular biology research for the National Institutes of Health, authoring several scientific papers, and practiced as a surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service. His early interest in bioethics was stimulated by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, both of which he read at the suggestion of Harvey Flaumenhaft. In these books, Kass saw examples of "how the scientific project to master nature could, if we are not careful, lead to our dehumanization, via eugenics, drug-induced contentment, and other transformations of human nature, possibilities already foreseeable in the new biology. . . . Will man remain a creature made in the image of God, aspiring to align himself with the divine, or will he become an artifact created by man in the image of God-knows-what, fulfilling the aspirations only of human will? . . . I soon shifted my career from doing science to thinking about its human meaning."
In 1967, Kass read an article by Joshua Lederberg suggesting that humans could one day be cloned. In a letter to the editor, Kass made a moral case against cloning and suggested that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him." Thus began a second career of writing on bioethics, including essays on organ transplantation, abortion, in vitro fertilization, aging, assisted suicide, medical ethics, and biotechnology. Kass was also involved in founding the Hastings Center.
Teaching experience
As he moved from biology to bioethics, Kass also moved from full-time research into teaching, first at St. John's College from 1972 to 1976, Georgetown University from 1974 to 1976, and at Chicago from 1976 onward. At St. John's, Kass led studies in biology, the Great Books, and the Greeks, including in-depth studies of Aristotle's De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics and Darwin's On the Origin of Species. At the University of Chicago, Kass taught courses across the humanities and sciences, including both undergraduate and graduate seminars in the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato's Symposium and Meno, Lucretius, human passions, science and society, Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Genesis, Darwinism, Descartes's Discourse on the Method, classical geometry, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, marriage and courtship, Exodus, and biotechnology. Kass won the University of Chicago's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1983 and the Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching in 1993. At Chicago, he cofounded and led the "Fundamentals: Issues and Texts" concentration.
"The president's philosopher"
As the stem cell controversy brewed in the late 1990s and into 2001, President George W. Bush had to decide whether to allow federal funding for research on stem cells derived from embryos. Many scientists were advocating the removal of limits on embryonic stem cell research, but critics expressed concern about the wanton destruction of human life. In an August 2001 speech, Bush announced that he would support funding research on stem cell lines already created--"where the life and death decision has already been made"--but not on lines created by the further destruction of embryos. And because "[e]mbryonic stem cell research is at the leading edge of a series of moral hazards," Bush said, he would create the President's Council on Bioethics, to be led by Kass and with a mandate to "monitor stem cell research, to recommend appropriate guidelines and regulations, and to consider all of the medical and ethical ramifications of biomedical innovation." As the council was appointed and prepared to begin meeting in early 2002, Kass received a great deal of media attention, especially due to his reputation for pessimism and concern about the moral implications of scientific progress with respect to health and life issues. Calling him "the president's philosopher," U.S. News and World Report noted that "he tends to dwell on the dark side of modern medicine. . . . Kass has tried to raise the public's consciousness of emerging technology's risks to values that humanity holds dear."
The composition of the Council was also subject to controversy. Kass was accused of "stacking the deck" with philosophers, scientists, and public intellectuals likely to oppose "unfettered medical research in the area of stem cells, therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning. Given that fact, researchers had better worry a lot about what the Council is likely to recommend to the president." Critics also charged that Kass eliminated those who disagreed with him, such as Elizabeth Blackburn and William May, and replacing them with opponents of cloning. Kass replied to these criticisms by saying that the Council was more intellectually diverse than prior bioethics commissions precisely because it included opponents of abortion. (Previous commissions had "excluded representatives of the right to life movement.")Since Bush never intended the Council to reach consensus but rather serve in an advisory capacity, Kass said that he welcomed disagreement within the Council: "This council is easily the most intellectually and ethically diverse of the bioethics commissions to date. We have worked with mutual respect while not papering over our differences. No one who has attended any of our meetings or read the transcripts can believe that we do anything but serious and careful work, without regard to ideology, partisan politics or religious beliefs."
The Council has been renewed by executive order every two years since 2001, and the subjects it considered ranged beyond the stem cell battles during which it was established. Kass expressed a desire for the Council to take on philosophical questions at the root of bioethical dilemmas and lamented that the Council was pigeonholed: "The Council came into existence identified as the 'stem cell council,' and people on all sides of the embryo research debate seem to care more about the Council's views on this subject than about anything else. Not by our choice--and certainly not by mine--the Council was born smack in the middle of 'embryoville,' and it has never been able to leave this highly political field." Thus, during Kass's chairmanship, the Council produced five reports, a white paper, and a background reader on subjects ranging from cloning to biotechnology to aging.
Kass described the Council's work as "public bioethics," a "richer" inquiry that debates "ends as well as means." The Council addressed its report to "clearly political" questions, "not merely administrative or regulatory ones," and it welcomed disagreements because of their role in creating a more substantive moral discourse. "A proper bioethics must lead public reflection on the ways in which new biotechnologies may affect those things that matter most regarding how human lives are lived," Kass wrote. "This means beginning by reflecting upon the highest human goods and understanding the latest technological advances in this light." Eschewing much of the language and theoretical framework of academic bioethics, Kass drew on literary, philosophical, and theological sources to inform the Council's discussion. At the Council's first meeting, he led a discussion of "The Birth-Mark," a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Kass stepped down as chairman of the Council in October 2005 and remained a member of the Council until 2007. He returned to positions at the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Chicago.
Views on bioethics
Biotechnology and medical enhancement
Kass distinguishes between therapy (the removal of disease and the restoration of good health) and enhancement (boosting capability beyond what is given naturally). While biotechnology offers great promise for health care, it has applications for "many other ends, good ones and bad." Biotechnology can be employed to produce "better children [free of some kinds of birth defects], superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls." Kass argues that biotechnology may eventually be used as a substitute for virtue, hard work, study, or love in order to "fulfill our deepest human desires." His worries about biotechnology stem from what he calls "the technological disposition," which transforms the meaning of human nature by believing that "all aspects of life can be rationally mastered through technique."
Stem cell research
Kass has consistently opposed stem cell research that destroys embryos. "There is something deeply repugnant and fundamentally transgressive about such a utilitarian treatment of prospective human life," he writes. But because he recognized the potential of such cells for medical research, he led the President's Council on Bioethics to examine alternative avenues of obtaining pluripotent stem cells: "Pluripotent cells might be obtainable from already dead (not just unwanted or doomed but actually dead) embryos, some of whose individual cells might nonetheless still be viable; from living embryos by nondestructive biopsy; from bioengineered, embryo-like artifacts; and from reprogrammed body cells, taken from children or adults, that are induced to return to the undifferentiated state of pluripotency. . . . We should be hopeful that a technological solution to our moral dilemma might soon be found and that this divisive piece of our recent political history will soon come to an end."
In 2007, in two separate studies, research teams led by James Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka created induced pluripotent stem cells from adult cells, meaning that the destruction of embryos for stem cells would no longer be necessary. Robert P. George praised Kass as the driving intellectual force against embryo-killing and in favor of finding alternative methods of obtaining pluripotent stem cells: "All along, it was Dr. Kass who said that reprogramming methods would, if pursued vigorously, enable us to realize the full benefits of stem cell science while respecting human dignity."
Human cloning
Kass supports a universal ban on the cloning of humans on the grounds that cloning is an affront to morality and human dignity. In a 1997 article in The New Republic entitled "The Wisdom of Repugnance," Kass summons up the importance of revulsion in responding to attempts to clone humans. Although "not an argument," one need not make arguments for that which is repugnant because "in crucial cases . . . repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it." Kass writes that modern discourse, through which cloning and other morally repulsive practices are defended as if rational, fails to provide the moral guidance that the modern world demands:
Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.
A society that tolerates cloning, Kass writes, "has forgotten how to shudder [and] always rationalizes away the abominable.
A society that allows cloning has, whether it knows it or not, tacitly said yes to converting procreation into manufacture and to treating our children as pure projects of our will."
Kass's other ethical concerns about cloning include the "unethical experiment upon the resulting child-to-be" and the ambiguity over "to what extent a clone will fully be a moral agent." Furthermore, a clone may not know who his father or mother are; indeed, a clone may have no natural father or mother at all. "One must never forget that these are human beings upon whom our eugenic or merely playful fantasies are to be enacted," he writes.
Reproductive technologies
Kass places "special value on the natural human cycle of birth, procreation and death" and views death as a "necessary and desirable end." As such, he has opposed most kinds of interference in the reproductive process, as well as deliberate efforts to increase the normal range of human longevity. Kass has criticized the widespread use of reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization on the basis that the use of such technology obscures truths about the essence of human life and society that are embedded in the natural reproductive process. (He has since changed his mind about in vitro.)
Kass also considers human cloning to be a natural progression from the decoupling of sex and procreation: "Cloning turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the ruling opinions of our new age. Thanks to the sexual revolution, we are able to deny in practice, and increasingly in thought, the inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself. But, if sex has no intrinsic connection to generating babies, babies need have no necessary connection to sex. . . . For that new dispensation, the clone is the ideal emblem: the ultimate 'single-parent child.'" As in his other writings, Kass emphasizes the connection of reproduction to marriage and family life: "No child conceived with the aid of assisted reproductive technologies should be denied the lineage and biological ties to two parents that all children born 'naturally' have. No child should have to say, 'An embryo was my father.'"
Philosophical influences
Selected Bibliography
- Leon R. Kass. "" Commentary (2007): 36-48.
- Leon R. Kass and Eric Cohen. "" Commentary (2006).
- Leon R. Kass. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. (ISBN 0743242998)
- . "" The New Atlantis 1 (2003): 9-28
- . Foreword. In Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, report of the President's Council on Bioethics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002. (ISBN 1586481762)
- . Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002. (ISBN 1893554554)
- Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, eds. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. (ISBN 0268019606)
- Leon R. Kass and James Q. Wilson. The Ethics of Human Cloning. Washington: AEI Press, 1998. (ISBN 0844740500)
- Leon R. Kass. "The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings." The New Republic (June 2, 1997).
- . "" The Public Interest 126 (1997): 39-63.
- . "" Bradley Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, March 14, 1994.
- . The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. (ISBN 0226425681)
- . Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York: Free Press, 1985. (ISBN 0029183405)
- . "" American Enterprise Institute, 1979.
See also
External links
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