Quotes By Leon Kass

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.

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.

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

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

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

Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.

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

In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.

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

I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.

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

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

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.

An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.

If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.

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.

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

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

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

If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.

Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

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

We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.

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.

I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.

Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.

Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.

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

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