Defending Dignity
By Leon R. Kass , M.D.

Condensed from an interview with Leon Kass, head of President Bush's Advisory Council on Bioethics, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The interview was conducted by Nigel Cameron and published in Christianity Today, May 23, 2002.

CT: It's hard now to remember that when the President spoke to the nation in a televised speech on August 9 a little more than a year ago, the focus was not on al-Qaeda but on bioethics, as he named you chair of a new advisory council. Tell me how you see the potential of the council.

KASS: The biological revolution, of which we have seen only the very earliest stages, is a matter of momentous and lasting importance. Extraordinary powers are being gathered to intervene in the bodies and minds of human beings. These powers were sought initially for the laudable purposes of healing disease and relieving suffering. But they also force us to consider, in the most profound way, the basic elements of what it means to live a human life. They can make inheritable changes in human nature. They can intervene in all aspects of living. They touch birth, they touch death, they touch questions of bodily integrity as one moves organs around or implants other things in the human body.

We stand at a critical point. It is given to this generation to decide whether we will shape these powers and use them for limited flourishing, or whether these powers will increasingly be used to push us down the road to a "Brave New World." What's wrong with Huxley's Brave New World is that it has pushed our humanitarian principles to cure disease, reduce poverty, eliminate war, and relieve suffering and grief to their logical conclusion, with the result that life has been robbed of almost everything that makes it worthwhile. There is no love, no self-governance. It's a world of trivial pursuits and shallow attachments.

Our first task is to do fundamental inquiry into the moral significance of these advances in biomedical science and technology, to make vivid to everybody as best we can what it actually means to acquire the power to create human life in a laboratory or intervene in the human genome, or to move body parts around or to put computer chips in the human brain.

This is not a case where we've got something good versus evil. This is a case where we've got competing goods. And it's very important that everybody in the discussion acknowledge that the other side also has something vital to defend. So people who care about the sanctity of life should understand that the scientists who wish to experiment on embryos are also defending something very important when they seek in this way to cure disease. And the scientists have to understand that people who worry about the fate of the embryos are not simply practitioners of some narrow religious doctrine but are defending the dignity of our humanity. If we can at least get the arguments out there in as rich and deep a way as possible, I think we will have made a contribution.

Some earlier bioethics councils were set up to be a mixture of scientists and bioethicists, as if bioethics were a countervailing technique of solving the problems that science produces but cannot solve itself. The idea seemed to be that you had science, which was morally neutral in its findings, and then you imported these other people to somehow supply the ethics. But in practice this winds up treating ethics as simply another technical subspecialty, just like science itself. And out of the clash of these two things you find somehow a compromise that purports to be ethical wisdom--the scientists say this, the ethicists say that, and a deal is brokered. The net effect of this approach has so often been that the ethicists wring their hands as they confront the dilemmas raised by the scientists, but ultimately they pronounce blessings on whatever it is the scientists want to do. Bioethicists have not, by and large, stepped up to the plate on the questions of humanization versus dehumanization. Those are not terms that they've cared about, because so many of them are utilitarians or rationalists.

CT: What has prepared you to take this role?

KASS: My parents were both immigrants, neither of them schooled. But the moral questions and the question of how to live righteously and nobly and well and with dignity were the questions of their home. I don't just mean that we were exhorted to be good, but there were dinner conversations about "What do you think of so-and-so's behavior?" One was somehow encouraged to pay attention to conduct and to character. As to the integrity of both of my parents, I can't shine their shoes. They provided remarkable moral examples, and promoted a kind of explicit moral conversation. So moral questions have always been some of the most interesting questions for me.

I went to the University of Chicago, and was headed for a career in academic medicine. I finished medical school, did an internship, and went back and got a Ph.D. in biochemistry. Then in 1965 m wife and I went to Mississippi to do civil rights work. I came back wondering why there was often more honor and dignity and things that I admired in these uneducated black farmers in Mississippi with whom we lived, than in my well-educated, privileged fellow graduate students at Harvard University? Why this discrepancy between these very smart people who were around me, many of whom you would not want your sister to marry, and the very fine, simple, uneducated men and women we met in Mississippi? If the Enlightenment secular view of morals was correct, this couldn't be true.

I read Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Aristotle's Ethics and Physics, C. S. Lewis's Abolition of Man, and Huxley's Brave New World. And I was off. I discovered questions about the foundations of our morals which advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

I also learned gradually that what I thought had been the socialism of my home was, in fact, a secularized version of prophetic Judaism. Many of the people who fell for Marxism did so, I think, out of a longing for justice and a belief that one didn't have to wait for the messianic age, one could build it here and now. Especially when our children were born, I realized that one shouldn't somehow live as a parasite on the tradition that one knew nothing about. So I joined a synagogue, I began to do some studying of the Torah. I don't regard myself as a good enough Jew by a long shot. But I've come to treasure the biblical strand of our Western tradition more than the purely philosophical strand that flows from Athens.

CT: These issues have come together in a dramatic way in the debate about human cloning.

KASS: I cut my bioethics teeth on the subject of cloning. I first wrote about it in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post in 1967 after they cloned the first tadpoles. And I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning. I have seen it as one of these emblematic instances of what we should be worried about.

The public is rightly upset about human cloning. The first reaction before one gets used to it is largely one of repugnance and revulsion--people sense that something important is being transgressed here. But it's very hard to say in words just what that is. Cloning, I think, is important because it represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture, sometimes referred to as "designer babies," in which parents and scientists work their private eugenic visions on the child-to-be and impose it on members of the next generation. A child, therefore, ceases to be welcomed as a gift, as a mysterious stranger whose genetic independence from the parents is an emblem Of the kind of independence that all of our children are raised to acquire, and instead becomes a being to work out the particular vision that the parents have. And part of the reason that this bothers people is that it strikes them as a kind of degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

There are also questions about identity and individuality. Our natural genetic distinctiveness is an emblem of the uniqueness of every human life. But in cloning, a blueprint of a life that has already lived is somehow supposed to be reenacted again. People sense that what we're really talking about are efforts to redesign what a human being shall be.

CT: Advocates of human cloning say it is simply an issue of reproductive freedom, not a new issue at all.

KASS: Well, we do, in fact, restrict reproductive freedom. We do not allow

polygamy, we do not allow incest, we do not allow the buying and selling of babies so people can realize their reproductive aspirations in the case of unwelcomed infertility. The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.

Moreover, while you could sympathize perhaps with the aspiration of those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, I would be inclined to regard this as a form of child abuse. It would be unsafe, biologically speaking, but beyond that these are experiments in identity, in being made a design of somebody else. These are unethical experiments on the child-to-be, who cannot give consent to have that experiment foisted upon him. We place all kinds of restrictions on people's freedom to do things to their children and to experimental subjects.

CT: Will technological achievement plus marketing write the next chapter in human society?

KASS: Technological thinking is, at bottom, a disposition to all of life. It is fundamentally a mentality that formulates all of life's questions as problems that demand solutions. This technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good, but instead is trying to solve various kinds of problems so we can go on to the next problem. 

One of the regrettable things about the stem cell discussion, if I may say so, was the hype that the proponents used, taking advantage of desperate people's desires for cures and seeming to promise them cures just around the corner. Truth to tell we don't even have animal examples of anything remotely resembling a cure for any of these diseases. Fifteen years ago it was fetal research which was supposed to solve all of these dilemmas and help the lame to walk and the demented to think again. So we've got to be very cautious. 

What is absolutely new is the economic power of biotech. And we've just seen the beginning.

By the way, the neuroscience area, now absolutely in its infancy, will, I think, be much more important than genetics. Genetics offers only crude and indirect control over the activities that make us human, but the powers coming from the neurosciences will go directly to work on the brain and changes in the mind will follow. And we know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 years, 50 years, and so on.

So, at the moment, we have on one side scientists with prestige, knowledge, and power backed by powerful economic interests. And on the other side there are those of us equipped only with our ability to raise hard questions about human values. How many divisions does the Pope have? In this discussion, not very many.

That's why it's important not simply to mount the moral argument, but to think about regulatory mechanisms that would be able to ward off some of the things that are most to be feared. In the absence of that, it does seem to me that the steamroller will simply roll its own course down the slippery slope.

But we should not ignore one resource on the other side. There are certain resiliencies in the human spirit. We've seen it in this country since September 11. Many of our moral notions and cultural forms are enfeebled because they have lost all ties to their roots. But we are still capable of remembering that there are things about "real life" to be treasured. Regard for the things that make us human will not disappear easily.

I teach in the university--a culture that is very debased. Students come in with the most shallow thoughts and cynical opinions on the tips of their tongues. But if you put good books in front of them that force them to talk about the virtues, it turns out they're more than capable of appreciating them. We have an opportunity to cultivate intellectual alternatives and opposition to mere technocratic thinking. And we need help from the great religious traditions. Many people today sense this. On campuses, there is a renewed interest in religion. Twenty years ago when I taught a course on the organism, the class was filled with materialists and I had to make the argument for something other than materialism. Now, if I get a class together, I have to make the argument that materialism might have something to be said for it. Many, many young people sense there is more to life than mechanism, power, and technique. The interest in religious questions and religious studies amongst the younger generation is palpable.

Perhaps the events of September 11 and its aftermath provide an opportunity to think more deeply about how best to spend our allotted three score and ten. If that happens, then a kind of thinking which is not technocratic may have an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.