WSJ Interviews Leon Kass

January 11, 2006

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Leon Kass, member and former chair of the President’s council on Bioethics, posted on their (free!) OpinionJournal site. Dr. Kass is adept at looking past the minutiae of specific debates to the broader issues of what it means 2BHuman, which this article demonstrates well.

Health and longevity; dementia and death; euthanasia and living wills; performance enhancement and life-prolonging genetic manipulations–these are the subjects that really engage the mind of this 66-year-old physician and ethicist (and former philosophy professor of mine). As for embryos, stem cells, cloning and the uses and abuses thereof, they are “not the most profound of subjects,” he told me over a pot of tea in the kitchen of his Washington apartment. “The embryo question is really about the means. The real question has to do with the ends to which we put this.”
. . .
. . . in an era in which biomedical technologies have already begun to alter the broad and basic contours of human nature, questions about when life begins, or what is permissible in the name of medicine, seem almost quaint. “Killing the creature made in God’s image is an old story,” he says. “Redesigning him after our own fantasies: That’s what’s really new.”

Read the whole thing.