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Home
Authors
Leon Kass
American
Educator
About the author
I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Beginning
I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#People
#Nothing
#Responsibility
If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Life
In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Contrast
Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one's self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It's a long argument.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Life
#Self
#Argument
It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Thinking
#Country
#Opportunity
It's a short step from the belief that every child should be wanted to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Belief
It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Family
#Arguments
Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Limits
#Cleverness
Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Countries
Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#People
#Technology
My job is to provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#President
#Job
#Decision
#Consideration
Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Self
#Happiness
An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Problems
#Solution
#Advertising
I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Successful
We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Parents
#Choice
#Existence
We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#People
#May
#Talking
#Engineering
What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Nothing
#Years
We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Culture
Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Work
#Mind
#Genetics
Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Countries
#Foolishness
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Danger
#Example
Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Right
#Children
#Parents
#Parenthood
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.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#God
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Disease
#Promise
#Cure
#Suffering
We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Nations
#Folly
Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Life
#Science
#Meaning
The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Genetics
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.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#People
#May
#Talking
#Caution
#Engineering
Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Life
#Children
#Responsibility
#Care
Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Celebrity
Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Man
#Woman
#Sexuality
#Mortality
Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Possibilities
#Growth
#Innovation
The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Children
#Abortion
#Controversy
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Longevity
#Past
The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Fear
#Babies
The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Right
The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Life
The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Thinking
#Ethics
There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Science
#Questions
#Morals
There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#World
#Tension
I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Being
#Sound
#Thoughts
The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Progress
#Obvious
#Benefits
In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator
#Life
#Abortion
#Woman
We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.
Leon Kass,
American
Educator