Leon Kass

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Leon Kass

Leon Kass (born February 12, 1939) is an American bioethicist, best known as a leader in the effort to stop human embryonic stem cell and cloning research as former chair of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2002–2005.^[1]

He obtained S.B. and M.D. degrees (1958; 1962) at the University of Chicago and obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1967) at Harvard University^[2]. He then taught at St. John's College from 1972 to 1976 ^[3]. He currently retains a position as a member of the President's Council and is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and is the author of several books, including 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.

1 Early Life
2 Bioethics views
3 Views on women and sexual morality
4 Philosophical influences
5 Quotations
6 See also
7 References

[edit] Early Life

Leon Kass was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Kass described his family as a "Yiddish speaking, secular, socialist family". According to Kass, he participated in protests against the Vietnam War when he was a student at Harvard.^[4]

[edit] Bioethics views

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—including birth control—as well as all deliberate efforts to increase human longevity.^[5]

Kass makes a slippery slope argument with regards to the use of reproductive technology such as in vitro fertilization, even though at least one of his grandchildren was conceived through that technique. He feels that these now well-accepted practices desensitize society, increasing the likelihood of acceptance of more advanced technologies such as reproductive cloning. Kass suggests that possible medical therapies and disease treatments should be restricted if the technology used in them could also be used in reproductive cloning.^[6]

Kass also vigorously opposes progress in the fields of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research.^[7]

As stated, Kass finds wisdom in the Book of Genesis. For example, he has more than once given a lecture on the Tower of Babel story, in which he argues that the "sky-scraping tower" has to fall because it implies a secular form of society. Kass makes the claim that reason or science cannot provide "moral and political standards sufficient for governing civic life and of guiding the proper use of power and technique." See the related Argument from morality. Kass interprets the story as a metaphor, however. All of this informs his views on bioethics, according to the quoted version of the lecture. Elsewhere Kass expresses a strong faith that the potential of biological science is limited and will never provide answers to certain questions.

[edit] Views on women and sexual morality

Kass begins his essay "The End of Courtship" by asserting that the left and right in America have started to produce a consensus on some issues of sexual morality, coming to view "the break-up of marriage as a leading cause of the neglect, indeed, of the psychic and moral maiming, of America's children." The rest of the essay concerns what he sees as obstacles to lasting marriage, including feminism. Kass treats modesty in women as a very important element of sexual morality. "The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections." Kass argues that when women behave with modesty, they are better able to achieve their own "genuine longings and best interests," and that female modesty also helps men to control lustful desires in favor of love and "real intimacy."

In the same essay Kass attacks the use of birth control technology, and states that any woman's destiny is motherhood. The author expresses strong doubt that "courtship" can ever return, since this "would appear to require a revolution". He says that the social changes stem from the nature of modernity, and from the biological nature of men. But he bemoans the changes because he sees marriage and procreation as central to the good life for the vast majority -- perhaps for all of humanity. The essay contains one explicit reference to homosexuality, as one of the "sexual abominations of Leviticus—incest, homosexuality, and bestiality". A footnote also mentions aging bachelors and their "self-indulgent" ways.

[edit] Philosophical influences

Leo Strauss^[8]

Hans Jonas^[9]

[edit] Quotations

When I agreed to give this lecture some two years ago, I had no idea that, when the time came, my life would have ceased to be my own, and that I would be utterly submerged in the struggles of public bioethics. All the more reason why I am grateful for this change of venue and mood and for the opportunity tonight to step back from the urgency of contemporary issues to reflect on their deeper and enduring roots: the meaning of our devotion to technology, and especially its relation to the universal humanistic dream.

– Leon Kass, Technology and the Humanist Dream: Babel Then and Now, [1]

...the nature and meaning of living beings, and of life altogether, will forever lie out of reach. Modern biology will never be able to tell us what life is, what is responsible for it, or what it is for.... [T]he task of harmonizing competing goods, both for any individual and especially among individuals who seek them variously, will always remain the work of a largely autonomous ethical and political science, helped, where possible, with insights mysteriously received from sources not under strict human command. Biology may do some of its finest work when it is brought to acknowledge and affirm the mysteries of the soul and the mysterious source of life, truth, and goodness..

– Leon Kass, Quoted in "Conservatism's Third and Final Battle", William A. Rusher, Heritage Lecture #615, April 29, 1998, [2]

Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality—as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety.

– Leon Kass, The End of Courtship, [3]

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

– Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul, pp. 148-149. University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999, [4]