Leon Kass's Quotes

Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

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.

Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.

One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?

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.

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.

Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.

Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.

The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.

The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.

The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.

The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.

The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.

There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.

We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.

We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.

We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.

We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.

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.