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
In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.
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.
If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.
I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
We do restrict so-called reproductive freedom. We do not allow polygamy, we do not allow incest, we do not allow the buying and selling of babies.
to consider not just the technologies ... but also to see how those things which impinge on our humanity, in fact, touch our personal aspirations, our human longings, our duties.
I believe that if we really do pour our resources into these alternatives, ... we might find a morally unproblematic and uncontroversial way to get this research done.
Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?
It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.
One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.