081401The President's Ethicist
Leon Kass brings moral seriousness to his task.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, August 14, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Shortly before I graduated from the University of Chicago, I ran into Leon Kass--the man George W. Bush tapped last week to chair his presidential council on bioethics--at a departmental reception. His book "The Hungry Soul," an imaginative and erudite exploration of the relationship between eating and human nature, and the product of years of labor, had recently been published to mixed reviews and poor sales. "They're marketing it with cookbooks," he told me, trying to make light of his distress.

For his students this was, if anything, even more upsetting. To say that Dr. Kass was a highly popular professor goes only a short distance in conveying the awe in which he was held. His seminars--deeply serious excursions into the book of Genesis, Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," Plato's "Meno," Descartes's "Discourse on the Method," and other Western classics--served as a kind of church in which we came to understand that one could not be intellectually respectable without being morally so. This was news to most of us, but it gave us a reputation that we tried, with typical Chicago earnestness, to live up to.

So we were unprepared to discover that our admiration for our professor was not universally shared. Far from it. "The mere mention of Leon Kass makes my nose wrinkle," says one acquaintance of mine. "There is nothing moderate about Kass," adds Virginia Postrel, former editor of Reason magazine, who describes him as a representative "of an extreme point of view . . . among the purest and most honest, but still presentable, proponents of social, economic, and technological stasis."

 

 

This view of Dr. Kass is, at the very least, shallow. "There's a thoughtlessness in describing [debates about new technologies such as stem-cell research] as a battle between freedom, optimism and prosperity on the one hand, and backward-looking superstition and nostalgia on the other," he says. "Anyone who lives in our time and is hostile to technology is self-deceived and a hypocrite." Yet, he adds, "where you have technologies that touch so deeply on the nature of our humanity, [decisions about their use] shouldn't be left to a kind of technological fatalism and free markets."

On balance, however, Dr. Kass does tend to lean toward the ancients in their battle with the moderns. Despite holding an M.D. and a doctorate in biochemistry from Harvard, and having been a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, he has spent much of his career raising seemingly abstruse moral objections to the whole thrust of the modern scientific enterprise--what Francis Bacon grandly called "the relief of man's estate."

Thus he has questioned the uses of in vitro fertilization; opposed the substitution of the Hippocratic Oath--with its injunction against abortion--with the American Medical Association's more anodyne version; decried the growing acceptability of euthanasia; and, most recently, argued strenuously against even basic research into human cloning. A recent article of his in The New Republic is unsparing of the "cheering claque of sci-fi enthusiasts, futurologists, and libertarians" who favor any new technology so long as it marches under the banner of capital-P Progress.

 

 

At the core of Dr. Kass's thinking is the view that "we should bequeath to our children a world in which human dignity can flourish no less than human health." Human health is, of course, an uncontroversial, largely measurable good. But it is not the only good, and Dr. Kass has been a relatively isolated voice explaining the ways in which a culture that is narcissistically obsessed with personal "wellness" may lose sight of more important human goods and principles. These include love and friendship, "a certain kind of awe and reverence for the mystery of life," a conviction that "life is lived most fully and joyously when one understands that it is finite," and, not least, a sense of the divine.

Such arguments--informed by readings of the Hebrew Bible, Plato and Aristotle, and Rousseau--are, in many ways, persuasive. Yet it is easy to see why they might have trouble gaining currency. "Dignity," after all, is a contested term, which citizens of a liberal-democratic republic reserve the right to define for themselves. In arguing, for instance, for a ban on human cloning, Dr. Kass suggests that some restraints ought to be put on our freedom to avoid the slide toward what he calls a "post-human world." While most Americans would likely agree with his verdict on cloning, one wonders whether employing the discourse of virtue is the best way to persuade a mass audience.

As it is, it is not Dr. Kass's intention to serve as the country's "ethics cop," as he was recently described in a profile in Time magazine. "The task that's been assigned to us," he says, "is not to make arrests and catch scientists. The task is to clarify the issues, to lift the public understanding of the human and moral significance of doing what we're doing." His council, he promises, will not be "stacked with like-minded people."

This is to the good, and should help mollify those who might otherwise be disposed to dismiss any verdicts issuing from the "Kass Council." But in the end, this is going to be his show. Provided he can make his case in a way Americans understand, the country will, morally speaking, be the richer for it.

Mr. Stephens is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.