X-Message-Number: 18506 Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 09:58:53 -0500 From: Jeffrey Soreff <> Subject: Soreff, Kass, citation >> >the head of the US's "bioethics" council, >> >Leon Kass, is on record as opposing lifespan extending research. >Could we have a citation on this, please? I've got some partial ones. Kass wrote "The Case for Mortality," in The American Scholar 52 (2):173-191, 1983. but I don't have direct access to it. In http://www.thedailycamera.com/extra/last-rights/ there is a quote: "To know and to feel that one only goes around once and that the deadline is not out of sight is for many people the necessary spur to the pursuit of something worthwhile," wrote Leon Kass, a "media-shy" University of Chicago professor. Kass, who wrote an essay on the benefits of mortality in the 1980s, is one of the few voices questioning the value of indefinite life spans. In http://reason.com/9912/fe.rb.petri.shtml there is a section: <blockquote> The most influential conservative bioethicist, Leon Kass of the University of Chicago and the American Enterprise Institute, worries both that our quest for ever-better mental and physical states is too open-ended and, contradictorily, that it is utopian. "`Enhancement' is, of course, a soft euphemism for improvement," he says, "and the idea of improvement necessarily implies a good, a better, and perhaps even best. But if previously unalterable human nature no longer can function as a standard or norm for what is regarded as good or better, how will anyone truly know what constitutes an improvement?" Kass argues that even "modest enhancers" who say that they "merely want to improve our capacity to resist and prevent diseases, diminish our propensities for pain and suffering, decrease the likelihood of death" are deceiving themselves and us. Behind these modest goals, he says, actually lies a utopian project to achieve "nothing less than a painless, suffering-free, and, finally, immortal existence." What particularly disturbs these conservatives is biomedicine's potential to overthrow their notion of human nature--a nature defined by suffering and death. "Contra naturam, the defiance of nature, used to be a sufficient argument for those who were not persuaded by contra deum, provoking the wrath of God," writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb in The Wall Street Journal. "But what does it mean today, when we have defied, even violated, nature in so many ways, for good as well as bad?" She goes on to suggest that cloning, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and even the pill might be "against nature." Himmelfarb continues, "But the ultimate question is how far we may go in defying nature without undermining our humanity....What does it mean for human beings, who are defined by their mortality, to entertain, even fleetingly, even as a remote possibility, the idea of immortality?" Himmelfarb insists that she doesn't disdain all improvement. "To raise these questions is in no way to reject science and technology or to belittle their achievements," she writes. "It is not contra naturam to invent labor-saving devices and amenities that improve the quality of life for masses of people, or medicines that conquer disease, or contrivances that allow disabled people to live, work and function normally. These enhance humanity; they do not presume to transcend it." It is hard to see how a genetically enhanced memory, a faster mental processing speed, or a stronger immune system "undermines our humanity." After all, many full-fledged human beings already enjoy these qualities. Nor is it clear why "contrivances" that let disabled people cope with their physical problems are acceptable, while genetic cures to avoid the problems in the first place are not. Nearly all technologies--agriculture, literacy, electric lighting, anesthesia, the pill, psychoactive drugs, television--affect human nature in the sense that they change the rhythms of human life and widen the range of behavior in which people can engage. We are no longer tribesmen living in family bands of 20, hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa. Surely there have been significant changes in human psychology as a result of the development of civilization. In fact, changing human psychology might be said to be the whole point of civilization; some anthropologists speculate that civilization is a set of social institutions that exist to tame human, especially male, violence. Himmelfarb and Kass accuse those who favor biomedical progress of seeking immortality, as though that were a self-evident evil. But "immortality" is, in a sense, just a longer lifespan. Since 1900, lifespans worldwide have doubled, and most people think that achievement has been a great moral good. Using genetic techniques to increase human lifespans is not any different ethically from using vaccines, organ transplants, or antibiotics to achieve the same goal. Kass and Himmelfarb assert that human beings have been "defined by their mortality." But human beings are perhaps even better defined by their unending quest to overcome disease, disability, and death. </blockquote> Sufficient? Best wishes, -Jeff Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18506