Thank You For Your Service, Leon Kass
Leon Kass has resigned his position as the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. I will miss his leadership. Kass is one of the great thinkers in contemporary bioethics and a writer of intense talent whose prose reads like poetry. As chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, he did a sterling job stimulating profound conversations about the most controversial biotechnology issues of the day. He even forged much consensus among the Council members in several reports, which must at times have seemed to him like herding cats. Contrary to some previous bioethics commissions I could mention, Kass refused to "stack the deck" by appointing only council members who shared one worldview. Thus, the Council, while unanimously rejecting reproductive cloning, divided bitterly about the propriety of human therapeutic cloning in its first report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity.
Because Kass is our premier apologist for the belief that human life has intrinsic dignity and value, which cuts sharply against the grain of the bioethics movement that views such thinking as irrational and discriminatory against animals (speciesism), he was subjected to intense vituperation and calumny. I responded to these attacks in the National Review Online.
Leon served his country well as chairman of the President's Council. Whether or not one agrees with his philosophy, all should applaud his willingness to enter the arena and for his selfless service. I know he will have more to contribute in the years to come. (He will apparently continue on as an associate member of the President's Council under new leadership.)
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:51 AM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
Who will be replacing him?
Edmund Pelligrino, a physician and one of the founders of bioethics, back before the mainstream view rejected the sanctity of human life ethic. He is a very good man. But at 85, I wonder whether he has the energy to make the Council an influential voice.
I am thankful for Chairman Kass's service as well.
It is one thing that he so strongly and carefully advanced important considerations and concers about human dignity and inhumane uses of technology on the most vulnerable among us. But it is another for him to advance such arguments in a committe of strongly diverse views. They weren't advanced through a group-thinking stacked committee. We've seen this happen in bioethics. Such willingness by Dr. Kass to raise important concerns through careful examination and scrutiny demonstrates clear intellectual confidence.
Dr. Kass has raised the level of debate for those who think that human dignity is still worth debating. The elitists who have so savagely attacked him think it is not.
I was lucky enough to hear Professor Kass speak when he lectured in London on human dignity and the importance of knowing what we would lose if human cloning was to happen. His use of language and ability to express sublime concepts about the nature of humanity is remarkable and I wish more people could have heard him first hand.
I have linked to your blog on mine, and would like to say thank you for all your work in this area. I'm a huge fan of stemcellresearch.org
Best wishes
Thanks for your kind words.
I enjoyed your post on Leon Kass. Thanks.
http://www.lifestudies.org/weblog/2006/01/eternity_immortality_and_desir.html
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