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

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