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AEI Interview With Bush's Bioethics Council Head Leon Kass

by Hilary White

WASHINGTON, June 13, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –  The American Enterprise Online features an interview with Leon Kass, appointed by George Bush to head the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2001 and a leading opponent of embryonic stem cell research.

Kass was interviewed by Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Adam Wolfson, who asked about the development of his thought from his socialistic upbringing to his current position as one of the US’s most prominent conservative thinkers.

Kass is a medical doctor and a PhD in biochemistry who became interested in ethics as a serious study when at university he could not arouse interest in ethical problems among his colleagues. “The people at the university would just laugh. They believed that a scientific psychology and sociology would soon make ethical questions obsolete.”

This overwhelming trust in science to answer all moral questions is at the heart of the current debate over the use of embryos for stem cells, with most apologists for the practice arguing that the need for cures outweighs all other considerations. It is notable that Kass is best known for his work in making the ethical case against the use of living embryos for experimental research.

Kass said it was not until he began to work in the civil rights movement that he began to doubt the “liberal enlightenment” assumptions upon which he had been raised. He said he started to wonder about the “relation between progress in the arts and sciences and the state of morality and character.”

“Harvard's liberal students had all the right opinions, but they'd just as soon knock you over if you got in their way. On reflection, the difference seemed to me to have something to do with the presence or absence of awe and reverence, of religious belief and practice.”

Kass says his Jewish heritage came to play late in his search: “I have discovered rather late in life that many of my moral sensibilities and concerns are really Jewish interests and concerns.” When he began teaching a course attempting to explore the questions, ‘What is a good human being,’ Kass said the Bible was an unexpected source for him. He published a study of the book of Genesis and says the Bible, “contained a profound teaching about human nature and human good, a teaching that rivaled in wisdom my beloved Greeks.”

As head of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he is probably best known as the leader in the effort to stop human embryonic stem cell and cloning research, but he says the Council’s other works are more interesting and have a deeper significance as contributions to humanist philosophy.

The Council’s report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, he says, was an inquiry into the use of technology “to satisfy ancient human desires for better children, superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls.”

Kass says he is especially proud of the final report of his term as head of the Council. Taking Care, explores the “crisis of long-term care of the elderly and the demented, and how to think about what we owe each other in human terms.”

Read the full interview:
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.19237/article_detail.asp

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

Dr. Leon Kass an Exceptionally Principled Scientist
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2001/aug/01081605.html

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