Leon Kass  

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Leon Richard Kass (born February 12, 1939) is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the "Great Books," as an opponent of human cloning, life extension and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, 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."

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 suggests that we should respect the revulsion most people feel about cloning human beings, just as we respect their supposed revulsion at incest and cannibalism. "In crucial cases," he writes, "repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it." Kass writes that modern ethical discourse, which emphasizes autonomy, equity, and utility, 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."

In response to Kass, other ethicists have argued that reactions of repugnance or disgust are not a valid basis for banning cloning because such feelings are subjective, dictated by cultural norms, and change over time. Fritz Allhoff of the American Medical Association Division of Bioethics contends that "racial integration once elicited the same sentiments of repugnance that Kass claims that cloning elicits now; surely public sentiment should not be taken as a moral guide." Martha Nussbaum has advanced a broader argument against using feelings of disgust as a basis for policymaking, writing that "laws and social rules" should be based on "substantive harm, rather than on the symbolic relationship an object bears to our anxieties."

In addition to opposing cloning on the grounds of repugnance, Kass has also argued that cloning constitutes an "unethical experiment upon the resulting child-to-be"; creates confusions of identity and individuality; "turns begetting into making"; and, by giving parents control over a child's genetic make-up, exacerbates the "dangerous" idea of parental control over children's lives and prospects. "One must never forget that these are human beings upon whom our eugenic or merely playful fantasies are to be enacted," he writes.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Leon Kass" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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