Leon Kass
Leon Kass
Leon Richard Kassis 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth12 February 1939
CountryUnited States of America
As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God's image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one's own.
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.
It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.
Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.
Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.
We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.
Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.
Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.
If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.
I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.
I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.