Leon Kass

Leon Kass is an American physician, biochemist and bioethicist who argues that biotechnology's central danger is not accident or inequity but the erosion of the goods that make a human life worth living — and that mortality, effort and the unchosen character of what is given to us are among those goods. He chaired the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005 and is the most philosophically substantial exponent of Bioconservatism.

§Career

Kass trained as a physician at the University of Chicago and took a doctorate in biochemistry at Harvard, working afterwards at the National Institutes of Health. He spent a summer in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, an experience he has described as formative in a different direction than expected: it made him doubt that scientific and material progress carries moral progress along with it. Reading Huxley's Brave New World alongside the emerging debates over reproductive technology completed the turn, and by the early 1970s he had left the laboratory for the study of ethics and political philosophy.

He served as executive secretary of a National Academy of Sciences committee on the life sciences and social policy, taught at St John's College in Annapolis, and joined the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought in 1976, where he taught for more than three decades. He has been a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His books range beyond bioethics into readings of Genesis and a study of the ethics of eating, and this is not incidental: his method treats the meaning of ordinary human activities as the material from which bioethical judgement is built.

§Key arguments

§The new biology and the price of relieving man's estate

Kass's 1971 article in Science is the origin point of his position and, arguably, of American bioethics as a distinct enterprise.¹ He asked what would follow from technologies then just visible — in vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnosis, and the eventual prospect of heritable genetic modification — and argued that each would be adopted for compelling humanitarian reasons while cumulatively changing the relations of parent to child and physician to patient. He was writing seven years before the first IVF birth. Several of the specific predictions did not hold; the structural claim, that each individual step is defensible and the aggregate is not chosen by anyone, has worn well and recurs throughout debates over Polygenic embryo screening and Designer babies.

§The wisdom of repugnance

In a 1997 essay written in response to the cloning of Dolly, Kass argued that visceral revulsion at certain practices can carry moral knowledge that argument has not yet articulated.² Repugnance, on this account, is "the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it" — a signal that something is being violated even when the violation resists formal statement. Applied to Human cloning, the argument holds that the widespread reaction against it registers real damage to the meanings of parenthood, individuality and generational succession.

The obvious objection

Repugnance has historically attached to interracial marriage, homosexuality, dissection and vaccination. Critics including Martha Nussbaum, Arthur Caplan and Steven Pinker argue that disgust is a poor moral instrument precisely because it is so easily attached to the unfamiliar, and that Kass supplies no criterion for distinguishing wise repugnance from prejudice. Kass's reply is that repugnance is evidence to be examined rather than a verdict, and that the alternative — admitting only what can be formalized — arbitrarily discards most of moral experience.

§Mortality and meaning

Kass's most direct engagement with this wiki's subject matter is his argument against indefinite life extension.³ He holds that mortality is constitutive of four goods: interest and engagement, since a finite span makes time matter; seriousness and aspiration, since the pressure of an ending drives people to attempt things; beauty and love, which depend on the perishability of what is loved; and virtue, since the highest form of it involves risking or spending a life that cannot be replaced. Add unlimited time, he argues, and each good is not increased but dissolved.

The argument is not that longer life is bad but that a life without a horizon would be a different and lesser kind of thing, and that a society organized around postponing death indefinitely would sacrifice the succession of generations that renews it. Proponents of life extension answer that the goods Kass names attach to the possibility of death, which no plausible technology removes; that no one at seventy in good health regards their own continuation as a loss of seriousness; and that the argument, taken literally, condemns most of the mortality decline of the past century. Kass has consistently denied that his position implies opposing medicine, which leaves him needing a principled boundary that critics say he has never supplied. See Right to die and the duty to live and Compression of morbidity.

§The President's Council on Bioethics

Appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001 amid the stem cell controversy, Kass chaired a council deliberately composed of people who disagreed, and its reports are unusually discursive for government documents. Human Cloning and Human Dignity (2002) recommended a permanent ban on reproductive cloning and, by a divided vote, a moratorium on research cloning. Beyond Therapy (2003) examined enhancement directly under four headings — better children, superior performance, ageless bodies and happy souls — and remains one of the few official documents to treat Human enhancement as a coherent subject rather than a set of unrelated products.⁴ Its treatment of pharmacological mood and memory alteration anticipates arguments now made about Moral enhancement, and its chapter on performance covers ground that anti-doping policy has been arguing over ever since.

The council drew sustained criticism. In 2004 the cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and the ethicist William May were not reappointed; Blackburn, later a Nobel laureate, argued publicly that the council was being reshaped to produce conclusions the administration wanted, and scientific organizations accused it of subordinating evidence to ideology. Kass maintained that the council's function was to deliberate about ends rather than to certify facts, and that a body composed only of working scientists would have been a different and narrower thing.

§Reception and legacy

Kass is dismissed in much of academic bioethics, where consequentialist and autonomy-based frameworks dominate and where his appeals to dignity and to given human form are treated as unargued. Julian Savulescu, John Harris and Nick Bostrom have all written direct replies; Bostrom's "In Defense of Posthuman Dignity" is substantially a response to him and to Francis Fukuyama.

His influence is nonetheless real, in two forms. He supplied the vocabulary in which non-consequentialist objections to biotechnology get made, and versions of his arguments now appear from writers who share none of his politics — in disability-rights criticism of selection, in worries about the commodification of reproduction, and in expressivist objections to screening. And he was early in seeing that the important questions would be about enhancement rather than about safety, at a time when most bioethics was still organized around consent and risk.

The unresolved point in his work is the boundary. Kass accepts antibiotics, surgery and the mortality decline they produced, and rejects the technologies that would extend the same trend. No formulation he has offered specifies where the line falls or why it falls there, and until one does, the strongest case against radical life extension remains an intuition in search of a principle.

§See also

• Bioconservatism
• Bioethics of enhancement
• Human cloning
• Julian Savulescu
• Posthuman
• Precautionary principle
• Maximum human lifespan
• Transhumanism

§References

Footnotes

1. paperKass, L. R. "The New Biology: What Price Relieving Man's Estate?" Science, 1971. ↩

2. paperKass, L. R. "The Wisdom of Repugnance." The New Republic, 1997. ↩

3. paperKass, L. R. "L'Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?" First Things, 2001.↩An essay in a religious and political journal; the argument concerns the meaning of finitude and makes no claim about what medicine can achieve.

4. reportPresident's Council on Bioethics. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. Washington, D.C., 2003.↩A government advisory report produced under Kass's chairmanship, so it reflects the council's composition as much as any settled consensus.