Tag: Human Dignity

Topics

Books

Death as an Event: A Commentary on Robert Morison

– Science 173:698-702, 1971.
Abstract: 1) We have no need to abandon either the concept of death as an event or the efforts to set forth reasonable criteria for determining that a man has indeed died. 2) We need to… More

The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization

– American Enterprise Institute Press, 1 January 1979.
A Conversation with Dr. Leon Kass: The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization is the edited transcript of a discussion of the ethics and policy issues of research on so-called test… More

“Making Babies” Revisited

– The Public Interest, Number 54:32-60, Winter 1979.
Excerpt: Seven years ago in the pages of this journal, in an article entitled “Making Babies-the New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality” (Number 26, Winter 1972), I explored some of the… More

Doctors Must Not Kill

– With W. Gaylin, E.D. Pellegrino, and M. Siegler, Journal of the American Medical Association 259:2139-40, April 8, 1988.

Neither for Love Nor Money: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– The Public Interest, Number 94:25-46, Winter 1989.
Excerpt: Is the profession of medicine ethically neutral? If so, whence shall we derive the moral norms or principles to govern its practices? If not, how are the norms of professional… More

Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life

– Commentary, March 1990.
Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Chana Kass (1903-1989), my first and best teacher regarding human dignity. “Call no man happy until he is dead.” With these deliberately… More

‘I Will Give No Deadly Drug’: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– American College of Surgeons Bulletin 17:3, March 1992. Updated and reprinted in Kathleen Foley, M.D. and Herbert Hendin, M.D., ed., The Case Against Assisted Suicide (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17-40. 

The Problem of Technology

– In Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Technology and the Western Political Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1-24.

Is There a Right to Die?

– Hastings Center Report 23 (1):34-43, January/February, 1993. A slightly different version appears in Robert A. Licht, ed., Old Rights and New, Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1993, 75-95.

Dehumanization Triumphant

– First Things, August/September 1996.
Excerpt: Recent efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide and to establish a constitutional “right to die” are deeply troubling events, morally dubious in themselves, extremely… More

Courting Death: Assisted Suicide, Doctors, and the Law

– With Nelson Lund, Commentary, December 1996.
Abstract: That we die is certain. When and how we die is not. Because we want to live and not to die, we resort to medicine to delay the inevitable. Yet medicine’s increasing success in… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– With James Q. Wilson, American Enterprise Institute Press, June 1, 1998.
Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more dramatically during the past several decades or yielded so many palpable improvements in human… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– The American Enterprise, March 1, 1999.
Social critics James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass debate the social, psychological and ethical ramifications of human cloning. Wilson supports limited cloning to two-parent heterosexual… More

Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings

– Texas Review of Law & Politics 4(1): 41-49, Fall 1999.
Excerpt: “To clone or not to clone a human being” is no longer a fanciful question. Success in cloning first sheep, then cows, and most recently, great success in cloning mice… More

The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology

– Commentary, September 1999. Reprinted in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 45:1-16, 2000.
Abstract: As one contemplates the current and projected state of genetic knowledge and technology, one is astonished by how far we have come in the less than 50 years since Watson and Crick… More

Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)

– First Things, March 2000.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century, successfully waged against totalitarianisms first right and then left, seems to have blinded many people to a… More

L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?

– First Things, May 2001.
Excerpt: You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always… More

The Ethics of Cloning

– Testimony Before United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, June 7, 2001.
Excerpt: Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Leon Kass, and I am the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of… More

Ban Stand

– With Daniel Callahan, The New Republic, August 6, 2001.
Excerpt: Everyone has been arguing for weeks about whether President Bush should authorize funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. But few have noticed the much more momentous… More

Brave New Biology: The Challenge for Human Dignity

– London: The Institute of United States Studies, 2002.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century and the new global struggle against terrorism and fanaticism seems to have blinded many people to a deep truth… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– In Kenneth L. Vaux, Sara Vaux, and Mark Stenberg, eds., Covenants of Life: Contemporary Medical Ethics in Light of the Thought of Paul Ramsey (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 57-69. Revised and reprinted in Svetozar Minkov, ed., Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 127-141.

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 23, 2002.
Mr. Kass talked about his role in advising President Bush on cloning and stem cell research. The new President’s Council on Bioethics is made up of 17 philosophers, medical experts… More

Defending Dignity

– Christianity Today, May 23, 2002.
Excerpt: Condensed from an interview with Leon Kass, head of President Bush’s Advisory Council on Bioethics, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The interview was… More

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, July 2002.
Excerpt: Man’s biotechnological powers are expanding in scope, at what seems an accelerating pace. Many of these powers are double-edged, offering help for human suffering, yet… More

Report to the President on Human Cloning

– CPAN, July 11, 2002.
Mr. Kass presented and summarized some of the debate found in the council’s report on human cloning. Among the issues that the report examined were reproductive and therapeutic… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 1, 2003.
Dr. Kass talked about ethical issues involving human cloning and recent news of the first human reproductive clone by a private organization. He also responded to viewer comments and… More

Who’s Afraid of Leon Kass? by Gary Rosen

– Gary Rosen, Commentary,  January 2003.
Abstract: In the summer of 2001, as the Bush administration prepared to announce its much-anticipated decision on federal funding for stem-cell research, the White House began to leak word… More

Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, October 2003.
Excerpt: Biotechnology offers exciting and promising prospects for healing the sick and relieving the suffering. But exactly because of their impressive powers to alter the workings of body… More

The Public’s Stake

– Symposium, Biotechnology: A House Divided, Public Interest 150: Winter 2003.
Excerpt: For the first six months of this year, the President’s Council on  Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise… More

Monitoring Stem Cell Research

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, January 2004.
Excerpt: I am pleased to present to you Monitoring Stem Cell Research, a report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the past two years, in keeping with your stated intention,… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, April 25, 2004.
Dr. Kass talked about a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics on reproductive techniques and guidelines for assisted reproductive procedures. He also responded to viewer… More

Human Frailty and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Fall 2004-Winter 2005).
Excerpt: In the aftermath of an election season, with the question of stem cell research in the public eye and demagogued in the most awful way, Eric Cohen has chosen to ask more… More

Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches

– Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (3): 221-250, 2005.
Abstract: For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President’s Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of… More

Cast Me Not Off in Old Age

– Commentary (January 2006).
Excerpt: Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts was grilled about his views on removing… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2007).
Excerpt: Issues of individual rights tend to stand at the very center of legal disputes and moral debates in the United States. This is no accident, for “rights talk” is as American as… More

Defending Human Dignity

– Commentary, December 2007. Revised and reprinted in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington DC, 2008), 297-331.
Abstract: In contrast to continental Europe, human dignity has never been a powerful idea in American public discourse. We tend instead to be devoted to the language of rights and the… More

The Unique Worth of an Individual Human Life

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2010).
Excerpt: The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network selected Leon R. Kass, M.D. to receive its Paul Ramsey Award for 2010 — an award honoring those “who have demonstrated exemplary… More

Cancer and Mortality: Making Time Count

– Rebecca Dresser, ed., Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 179-194.
Excerpt: All human beings are mortal, and nearly all of us know it. But for most of us, through much of our lives, this knowledge remains largely below the level of consciousness. The… More

Leon Kass on Why Not Immortality?

– TV Ontario, September 21, 2012.
Dr. Leon Kass, Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research. Dr. Kass addresses the philosophical question: Why not… More

Essays

Death as an Event: A Commentary on Robert Morison

– Science 173:698-702, 1971.
Abstract: 1) We have no need to abandon either the concept of death as an event or the efforts to set forth reasonable criteria for determining that a man has indeed died. 2) We need to… More

The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization

– American Enterprise Institute Press, 1 January 1979.
A Conversation with Dr. Leon Kass: The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization is the edited transcript of a discussion of the ethics and policy issues of research on so-called test… More

“Making Babies” Revisited

– The Public Interest, Number 54:32-60, Winter 1979.
Excerpt: Seven years ago in the pages of this journal, in an article entitled “Making Babies-the New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality” (Number 26, Winter 1972), I explored some of the… More

Doctors Must Not Kill

– With W. Gaylin, E.D. Pellegrino, and M. Siegler, Journal of the American Medical Association 259:2139-40, April 8, 1988.

Neither for Love Nor Money: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– The Public Interest, Number 94:25-46, Winter 1989.
Excerpt: Is the profession of medicine ethically neutral? If so, whence shall we derive the moral norms or principles to govern its practices? If not, how are the norms of professional… More

Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life

– Commentary, March 1990.
Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Chana Kass (1903-1989), my first and best teacher regarding human dignity. “Call no man happy until he is dead.” With these deliberately… More

‘I Will Give No Deadly Drug’: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– American College of Surgeons Bulletin 17:3, March 1992. Updated and reprinted in Kathleen Foley, M.D. and Herbert Hendin, M.D., ed., The Case Against Assisted Suicide (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17-40. 

The Problem of Technology

– In Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Technology and the Western Political Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1-24.

Is There a Right to Die?

– Hastings Center Report 23 (1):34-43, January/February, 1993. A slightly different version appears in Robert A. Licht, ed., Old Rights and New, Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1993, 75-95.

Dehumanization Triumphant

– First Things, August/September 1996.
Excerpt: Recent efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide and to establish a constitutional “right to die” are deeply troubling events, morally dubious in themselves, extremely… More

Courting Death: Assisted Suicide, Doctors, and the Law

– With Nelson Lund, Commentary, December 1996.
Abstract: That we die is certain. When and how we die is not. Because we want to live and not to die, we resort to medicine to delay the inevitable. Yet medicine’s increasing success in… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– With James Q. Wilson, American Enterprise Institute Press, June 1, 1998.
Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more dramatically during the past several decades or yielded so many palpable improvements in human… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– The American Enterprise, March 1, 1999.
Social critics James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass debate the social, psychological and ethical ramifications of human cloning. Wilson supports limited cloning to two-parent heterosexual… More

Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings

– Texas Review of Law & Politics 4(1): 41-49, Fall 1999.
Excerpt: “To clone or not to clone a human being” is no longer a fanciful question. Success in cloning first sheep, then cows, and most recently, great success in cloning mice… More

The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology

– Commentary, September 1999. Reprinted in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 45:1-16, 2000.
Abstract: As one contemplates the current and projected state of genetic knowledge and technology, one is astonished by how far we have come in the less than 50 years since Watson and Crick… More

Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)

– First Things, March 2000.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century, successfully waged against totalitarianisms first right and then left, seems to have blinded many people to a… More

L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?

– First Things, May 2001.
Excerpt: You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always… More

The Ethics of Cloning

– Testimony Before United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, June 7, 2001.
Excerpt: Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Leon Kass, and I am the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of… More

Ban Stand

– With Daniel Callahan, The New Republic, August 6, 2001.
Excerpt: Everyone has been arguing for weeks about whether President Bush should authorize funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. But few have noticed the much more momentous… More

Brave New Biology: The Challenge for Human Dignity

– London: The Institute of United States Studies, 2002.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century and the new global struggle against terrorism and fanaticism seems to have blinded many people to a deep truth… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– In Kenneth L. Vaux, Sara Vaux, and Mark Stenberg, eds., Covenants of Life: Contemporary Medical Ethics in Light of the Thought of Paul Ramsey (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 57-69. Revised and reprinted in Svetozar Minkov, ed., Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 127-141.

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 23, 2002.
Mr. Kass talked about his role in advising President Bush on cloning and stem cell research. The new President’s Council on Bioethics is made up of 17 philosophers, medical experts… More

Defending Dignity

– Christianity Today, May 23, 2002.
Excerpt: Condensed from an interview with Leon Kass, head of President Bush’s Advisory Council on Bioethics, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The interview was… More

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, July 2002.
Excerpt: Man’s biotechnological powers are expanding in scope, at what seems an accelerating pace. Many of these powers are double-edged, offering help for human suffering, yet… More

Report to the President on Human Cloning

– CPAN, July 11, 2002.
Mr. Kass presented and summarized some of the debate found in the council’s report on human cloning. Among the issues that the report examined were reproductive and therapeutic… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 1, 2003.
Dr. Kass talked about ethical issues involving human cloning and recent news of the first human reproductive clone by a private organization. He also responded to viewer comments and… More

Who’s Afraid of Leon Kass? by Gary Rosen

– Gary Rosen, Commentary,  January 2003.
Abstract: In the summer of 2001, as the Bush administration prepared to announce its much-anticipated decision on federal funding for stem-cell research, the White House began to leak word… More

Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, October 2003.
Excerpt: Biotechnology offers exciting and promising prospects for healing the sick and relieving the suffering. But exactly because of their impressive powers to alter the workings of body… More

The Public’s Stake

– Symposium, Biotechnology: A House Divided, Public Interest 150: Winter 2003.
Excerpt: For the first six months of this year, the President’s Council on  Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise… More

Monitoring Stem Cell Research

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, January 2004.
Excerpt: I am pleased to present to you Monitoring Stem Cell Research, a report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the past two years, in keeping with your stated intention,… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, April 25, 2004.
Dr. Kass talked about a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics on reproductive techniques and guidelines for assisted reproductive procedures. He also responded to viewer… More

Human Frailty and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Fall 2004-Winter 2005).
Excerpt: In the aftermath of an election season, with the question of stem cell research in the public eye and demagogued in the most awful way, Eric Cohen has chosen to ask more… More

Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches

– Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (3): 221-250, 2005.
Abstract: For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President’s Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of… More

Cast Me Not Off in Old Age

– Commentary (January 2006).
Excerpt: Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts was grilled about his views on removing… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2007).
Excerpt: Issues of individual rights tend to stand at the very center of legal disputes and moral debates in the United States. This is no accident, for “rights talk” is as American as… More

Defending Human Dignity

– Commentary, December 2007. Revised and reprinted in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington DC, 2008), 297-331.
Abstract: In contrast to continental Europe, human dignity has never been a powerful idea in American public discourse. We tend instead to be devoted to the language of rights and the… More

The Unique Worth of an Individual Human Life

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2010).
Excerpt: The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network selected Leon R. Kass, M.D. to receive its Paul Ramsey Award for 2010 — an award honoring those “who have demonstrated exemplary… More

Cancer and Mortality: Making Time Count

– Rebecca Dresser, ed., Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 179-194.
Excerpt: All human beings are mortal, and nearly all of us know it. But for most of us, through much of our lives, this knowledge remains largely below the level of consciousness. The… More

Leon Kass on Why Not Immortality?

– TV Ontario, September 21, 2012.
Dr. Leon Kass, Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research. Dr. Kass addresses the philosophical question: Why not… More

Commentary

Death as an Event: A Commentary on Robert Morison

– Science 173:698-702, 1971.
Abstract: 1) We have no need to abandon either the concept of death as an event or the efforts to set forth reasonable criteria for determining that a man has indeed died. 2) We need to… More

The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization

– American Enterprise Institute Press, 1 January 1979.
A Conversation with Dr. Leon Kass: The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization is the edited transcript of a discussion of the ethics and policy issues of research on so-called test… More

“Making Babies” Revisited

– The Public Interest, Number 54:32-60, Winter 1979.
Excerpt: Seven years ago in the pages of this journal, in an article entitled “Making Babies-the New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality” (Number 26, Winter 1972), I explored some of the… More

Doctors Must Not Kill

– With W. Gaylin, E.D. Pellegrino, and M. Siegler, Journal of the American Medical Association 259:2139-40, April 8, 1988.

Neither for Love Nor Money: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– The Public Interest, Number 94:25-46, Winter 1989.
Excerpt: Is the profession of medicine ethically neutral? If so, whence shall we derive the moral norms or principles to govern its practices? If not, how are the norms of professional… More

Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life

– Commentary, March 1990.
Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Chana Kass (1903-1989), my first and best teacher regarding human dignity. “Call no man happy until he is dead.” With these deliberately… More

‘I Will Give No Deadly Drug’: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– American College of Surgeons Bulletin 17:3, March 1992. Updated and reprinted in Kathleen Foley, M.D. and Herbert Hendin, M.D., ed., The Case Against Assisted Suicide (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17-40. 

The Problem of Technology

– In Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Technology and the Western Political Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1-24.

Is There a Right to Die?

– Hastings Center Report 23 (1):34-43, January/February, 1993. A slightly different version appears in Robert A. Licht, ed., Old Rights and New, Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1993, 75-95.

Dehumanization Triumphant

– First Things, August/September 1996.
Excerpt: Recent efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide and to establish a constitutional “right to die” are deeply troubling events, morally dubious in themselves, extremely… More

Courting Death: Assisted Suicide, Doctors, and the Law

– With Nelson Lund, Commentary, December 1996.
Abstract: That we die is certain. When and how we die is not. Because we want to live and not to die, we resort to medicine to delay the inevitable. Yet medicine’s increasing success in… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– With James Q. Wilson, American Enterprise Institute Press, June 1, 1998.
Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more dramatically during the past several decades or yielded so many palpable improvements in human… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– The American Enterprise, March 1, 1999.
Social critics James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass debate the social, psychological and ethical ramifications of human cloning. Wilson supports limited cloning to two-parent heterosexual… More

Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings

– Texas Review of Law & Politics 4(1): 41-49, Fall 1999.
Excerpt: “To clone or not to clone a human being” is no longer a fanciful question. Success in cloning first sheep, then cows, and most recently, great success in cloning mice… More

The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology

– Commentary, September 1999. Reprinted in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 45:1-16, 2000.
Abstract: As one contemplates the current and projected state of genetic knowledge and technology, one is astonished by how far we have come in the less than 50 years since Watson and Crick… More

Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)

– First Things, March 2000.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century, successfully waged against totalitarianisms first right and then left, seems to have blinded many people to a… More

L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?

– First Things, May 2001.
Excerpt: You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always… More

The Ethics of Cloning

– Testimony Before United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, June 7, 2001.
Excerpt: Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Leon Kass, and I am the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of… More

Ban Stand

– With Daniel Callahan, The New Republic, August 6, 2001.
Excerpt: Everyone has been arguing for weeks about whether President Bush should authorize funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. But few have noticed the much more momentous… More

Brave New Biology: The Challenge for Human Dignity

– London: The Institute of United States Studies, 2002.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century and the new global struggle against terrorism and fanaticism seems to have blinded many people to a deep truth… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– In Kenneth L. Vaux, Sara Vaux, and Mark Stenberg, eds., Covenants of Life: Contemporary Medical Ethics in Light of the Thought of Paul Ramsey (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 57-69. Revised and reprinted in Svetozar Minkov, ed., Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 127-141.

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 23, 2002.
Mr. Kass talked about his role in advising President Bush on cloning and stem cell research. The new President’s Council on Bioethics is made up of 17 philosophers, medical experts… More

Defending Dignity

– Christianity Today, May 23, 2002.
Excerpt: Condensed from an interview with Leon Kass, head of President Bush’s Advisory Council on Bioethics, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The interview was… More

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, July 2002.
Excerpt: Man’s biotechnological powers are expanding in scope, at what seems an accelerating pace. Many of these powers are double-edged, offering help for human suffering, yet… More

Report to the President on Human Cloning

– CPAN, July 11, 2002.
Mr. Kass presented and summarized some of the debate found in the council’s report on human cloning. Among the issues that the report examined were reproductive and therapeutic… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 1, 2003.
Dr. Kass talked about ethical issues involving human cloning and recent news of the first human reproductive clone by a private organization. He also responded to viewer comments and… More

Who’s Afraid of Leon Kass? by Gary Rosen

– Gary Rosen, Commentary,  January 2003.
Abstract: In the summer of 2001, as the Bush administration prepared to announce its much-anticipated decision on federal funding for stem-cell research, the White House began to leak word… More

Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, October 2003.
Excerpt: Biotechnology offers exciting and promising prospects for healing the sick and relieving the suffering. But exactly because of their impressive powers to alter the workings of body… More

The Public’s Stake

– Symposium, Biotechnology: A House Divided, Public Interest 150: Winter 2003.
Excerpt: For the first six months of this year, the President’s Council on  Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise… More

Monitoring Stem Cell Research

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, January 2004.
Excerpt: I am pleased to present to you Monitoring Stem Cell Research, a report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the past two years, in keeping with your stated intention,… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, April 25, 2004.
Dr. Kass talked about a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics on reproductive techniques and guidelines for assisted reproductive procedures. He also responded to viewer… More

Human Frailty and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Fall 2004-Winter 2005).
Excerpt: In the aftermath of an election season, with the question of stem cell research in the public eye and demagogued in the most awful way, Eric Cohen has chosen to ask more… More

Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches

– Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (3): 221-250, 2005.
Abstract: For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President’s Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of… More

Cast Me Not Off in Old Age

– Commentary (January 2006).
Excerpt: Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts was grilled about his views on removing… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2007).
Excerpt: Issues of individual rights tend to stand at the very center of legal disputes and moral debates in the United States. This is no accident, for “rights talk” is as American as… More

Defending Human Dignity

– Commentary, December 2007. Revised and reprinted in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington DC, 2008), 297-331.
Abstract: In contrast to continental Europe, human dignity has never been a powerful idea in American public discourse. We tend instead to be devoted to the language of rights and the… More

The Unique Worth of an Individual Human Life

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2010).
Excerpt: The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network selected Leon R. Kass, M.D. to receive its Paul Ramsey Award for 2010 — an award honoring those “who have demonstrated exemplary… More

Cancer and Mortality: Making Time Count

– Rebecca Dresser, ed., Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 179-194.
Excerpt: All human beings are mortal, and nearly all of us know it. But for most of us, through much of our lives, this knowledge remains largely below the level of consciousness. The… More

Leon Kass on Why Not Immortality?

– TV Ontario, September 21, 2012.
Dr. Leon Kass, Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research. Dr. Kass addresses the philosophical question: Why not… More

Multimedia

Death as an Event: A Commentary on Robert Morison

– Science 173:698-702, 1971.
Abstract: 1) We have no need to abandon either the concept of death as an event or the efforts to set forth reasonable criteria for determining that a man has indeed died. 2) We need to… More

The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization

– American Enterprise Institute Press, 1 January 1979.
A Conversation with Dr. Leon Kass: The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization is the edited transcript of a discussion of the ethics and policy issues of research on so-called test… More

“Making Babies” Revisited

– The Public Interest, Number 54:32-60, Winter 1979.
Excerpt: Seven years ago in the pages of this journal, in an article entitled “Making Babies-the New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality” (Number 26, Winter 1972), I explored some of the… More

Doctors Must Not Kill

– With W. Gaylin, E.D. Pellegrino, and M. Siegler, Journal of the American Medical Association 259:2139-40, April 8, 1988.

Neither for Love Nor Money: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– The Public Interest, Number 94:25-46, Winter 1989.
Excerpt: Is the profession of medicine ethically neutral? If so, whence shall we derive the moral norms or principles to govern its practices? If not, how are the norms of professional… More

Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life

– Commentary, March 1990.
Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Chana Kass (1903-1989), my first and best teacher regarding human dignity. “Call no man happy until he is dead.” With these deliberately… More

‘I Will Give No Deadly Drug’: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– American College of Surgeons Bulletin 17:3, March 1992. Updated and reprinted in Kathleen Foley, M.D. and Herbert Hendin, M.D., ed., The Case Against Assisted Suicide (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17-40. 

The Problem of Technology

– In Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Technology and the Western Political Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1-24.

Is There a Right to Die?

– Hastings Center Report 23 (1):34-43, January/February, 1993. A slightly different version appears in Robert A. Licht, ed., Old Rights and New, Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1993, 75-95.

Dehumanization Triumphant

– First Things, August/September 1996.
Excerpt: Recent efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide and to establish a constitutional “right to die” are deeply troubling events, morally dubious in themselves, extremely… More

Courting Death: Assisted Suicide, Doctors, and the Law

– With Nelson Lund, Commentary, December 1996.
Abstract: That we die is certain. When and how we die is not. Because we want to live and not to die, we resort to medicine to delay the inevitable. Yet medicine’s increasing success in… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– With James Q. Wilson, American Enterprise Institute Press, June 1, 1998.
Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more dramatically during the past several decades or yielded so many palpable improvements in human… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– The American Enterprise, March 1, 1999.
Social critics James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass debate the social, psychological and ethical ramifications of human cloning. Wilson supports limited cloning to two-parent heterosexual… More

Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings

– Texas Review of Law & Politics 4(1): 41-49, Fall 1999.
Excerpt: “To clone or not to clone a human being” is no longer a fanciful question. Success in cloning first sheep, then cows, and most recently, great success in cloning mice… More

The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology

– Commentary, September 1999. Reprinted in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 45:1-16, 2000.
Abstract: As one contemplates the current and projected state of genetic knowledge and technology, one is astonished by how far we have come in the less than 50 years since Watson and Crick… More

Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)

– First Things, March 2000.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century, successfully waged against totalitarianisms first right and then left, seems to have blinded many people to a… More

L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?

– First Things, May 2001.
Excerpt: You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always… More

The Ethics of Cloning

– Testimony Before United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, June 7, 2001.
Excerpt: Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Leon Kass, and I am the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of… More

Ban Stand

– With Daniel Callahan, The New Republic, August 6, 2001.
Excerpt: Everyone has been arguing for weeks about whether President Bush should authorize funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. But few have noticed the much more momentous… More

Brave New Biology: The Challenge for Human Dignity

– London: The Institute of United States Studies, 2002.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century and the new global struggle against terrorism and fanaticism seems to have blinded many people to a deep truth… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– In Kenneth L. Vaux, Sara Vaux, and Mark Stenberg, eds., Covenants of Life: Contemporary Medical Ethics in Light of the Thought of Paul Ramsey (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 57-69. Revised and reprinted in Svetozar Minkov, ed., Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 127-141.

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 23, 2002.
Mr. Kass talked about his role in advising President Bush on cloning and stem cell research. The new President’s Council on Bioethics is made up of 17 philosophers, medical experts… More

Defending Dignity

– Christianity Today, May 23, 2002.
Excerpt: Condensed from an interview with Leon Kass, head of President Bush’s Advisory Council on Bioethics, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The interview was… More

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, July 2002.
Excerpt: Man’s biotechnological powers are expanding in scope, at what seems an accelerating pace. Many of these powers are double-edged, offering help for human suffering, yet… More

Report to the President on Human Cloning

– CPAN, July 11, 2002.
Mr. Kass presented and summarized some of the debate found in the council’s report on human cloning. Among the issues that the report examined were reproductive and therapeutic… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 1, 2003.
Dr. Kass talked about ethical issues involving human cloning and recent news of the first human reproductive clone by a private organization. He also responded to viewer comments and… More

Who’s Afraid of Leon Kass? by Gary Rosen

– Gary Rosen, Commentary,  January 2003.
Abstract: In the summer of 2001, as the Bush administration prepared to announce its much-anticipated decision on federal funding for stem-cell research, the White House began to leak word… More

Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, October 2003.
Excerpt: Biotechnology offers exciting and promising prospects for healing the sick and relieving the suffering. But exactly because of their impressive powers to alter the workings of body… More

The Public’s Stake

– Symposium, Biotechnology: A House Divided, Public Interest 150: Winter 2003.
Excerpt: For the first six months of this year, the President’s Council on  Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise… More

Monitoring Stem Cell Research

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, January 2004.
Excerpt: I am pleased to present to you Monitoring Stem Cell Research, a report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the past two years, in keeping with your stated intention,… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, April 25, 2004.
Dr. Kass talked about a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics on reproductive techniques and guidelines for assisted reproductive procedures. He also responded to viewer… More

Human Frailty and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Fall 2004-Winter 2005).
Excerpt: In the aftermath of an election season, with the question of stem cell research in the public eye and demagogued in the most awful way, Eric Cohen has chosen to ask more… More

Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches

– Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (3): 221-250, 2005.
Abstract: For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President’s Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of… More

Cast Me Not Off in Old Age

– Commentary (January 2006).
Excerpt: Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts was grilled about his views on removing… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2007).
Excerpt: Issues of individual rights tend to stand at the very center of legal disputes and moral debates in the United States. This is no accident, for “rights talk” is as American as… More

Defending Human Dignity

– Commentary, December 2007. Revised and reprinted in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington DC, 2008), 297-331.
Abstract: In contrast to continental Europe, human dignity has never been a powerful idea in American public discourse. We tend instead to be devoted to the language of rights and the… More

The Unique Worth of an Individual Human Life

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2010).
Excerpt: The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network selected Leon R. Kass, M.D. to receive its Paul Ramsey Award for 2010 — an award honoring those “who have demonstrated exemplary… More

Cancer and Mortality: Making Time Count

– Rebecca Dresser, ed., Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 179-194.
Excerpt: All human beings are mortal, and nearly all of us know it. But for most of us, through much of our lives, this knowledge remains largely below the level of consciousness. The… More

Leon Kass on Why Not Immortality?

– TV Ontario, September 21, 2012.
Dr. Leon Kass, Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research. Dr. Kass addresses the philosophical question: Why not… More

Teaching

Death as an Event: A Commentary on Robert Morison

– Science 173:698-702, 1971.
Abstract: 1) We have no need to abandon either the concept of death as an event or the efforts to set forth reasonable criteria for determining that a man has indeed died. 2) We need to… More

The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization

– American Enterprise Institute Press, 1 January 1979.
A Conversation with Dr. Leon Kass: The Ethical Dimensions of in Vitro Fertilization is the edited transcript of a discussion of the ethics and policy issues of research on so-called test… More

“Making Babies” Revisited

– The Public Interest, Number 54:32-60, Winter 1979.
Excerpt: Seven years ago in the pages of this journal, in an article entitled “Making Babies-the New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality” (Number 26, Winter 1972), I explored some of the… More

Doctors Must Not Kill

– With W. Gaylin, E.D. Pellegrino, and M. Siegler, Journal of the American Medical Association 259:2139-40, April 8, 1988.

Neither for Love Nor Money: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– The Public Interest, Number 94:25-46, Winter 1989.
Excerpt: Is the profession of medicine ethically neutral? If so, whence shall we derive the moral norms or principles to govern its practices? If not, how are the norms of professional… More

Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life

– Commentary, March 1990.
Abstract: Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Chana Kass (1903-1989), my first and best teacher regarding human dignity. “Call no man happy until he is dead.” With these deliberately… More

‘I Will Give No Deadly Drug’: Why Doctors Must Not Kill

– American College of Surgeons Bulletin 17:3, March 1992. Updated and reprinted in Kathleen Foley, M.D. and Herbert Hendin, M.D., ed., The Case Against Assisted Suicide (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 17-40. 

The Problem of Technology

– In Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Technology and the Western Political Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1-24.

Is There a Right to Die?

– Hastings Center Report 23 (1):34-43, January/February, 1993. A slightly different version appears in Robert A. Licht, ed., Old Rights and New, Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1993, 75-95.

Dehumanization Triumphant

– First Things, August/September 1996.
Excerpt: Recent efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide and to establish a constitutional “right to die” are deeply troubling events, morally dubious in themselves, extremely… More

Courting Death: Assisted Suicide, Doctors, and the Law

– With Nelson Lund, Commentary, December 1996.
Abstract: That we die is certain. When and how we die is not. Because we want to live and not to die, we resort to medicine to delay the inevitable. Yet medicine’s increasing success in… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– With James Q. Wilson, American Enterprise Institute Press, June 1, 1998.
Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more dramatically during the past several decades or yielded so many palpable improvements in human… More

The Ethics of Human Cloning

– The American Enterprise, March 1, 1999.
Social critics James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass debate the social, psychological and ethical ramifications of human cloning. Wilson supports limited cloning to two-parent heterosexual… More

Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Human Beings

– Texas Review of Law & Politics 4(1): 41-49, Fall 1999.
Excerpt: “To clone or not to clone a human being” is no longer a fanciful question. Success in cloning first sheep, then cows, and most recently, great success in cloning mice… More

The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology

– Commentary, September 1999. Reprinted in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 45:1-16, 2000.
Abstract: As one contemplates the current and projected state of genetic knowledge and technology, one is astonished by how far we have come in the less than 50 years since Watson and Crick… More

Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)

– First Things, March 2000.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century, successfully waged against totalitarianisms first right and then left, seems to have blinded many people to a… More

L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?

– First Things, May 2001.
Excerpt: You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always… More

The Ethics of Cloning

– Testimony Before United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, June 7, 2001.
Excerpt: Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Leon Kass, and I am the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of… More

Ban Stand

– With Daniel Callahan, The New Republic, August 6, 2001.
Excerpt: Everyone has been arguing for weeks about whether President Bush should authorize funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. But few have noticed the much more momentous… More

Brave New Biology: The Challenge for Human Dignity

– London: The Institute of United States Studies, 2002.
Excerpt: The urgency of the great political struggles of the twentieth century and the new global struggle against terrorism and fanaticism seems to have blinded many people to a deep truth… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– In Kenneth L. Vaux, Sara Vaux, and Mark Stenberg, eds., Covenants of Life: Contemporary Medical Ethics in Light of the Thought of Paul Ramsey (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 57-69. Revised and reprinted in Svetozar Minkov, ed., Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 127-141.

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 23, 2002.
Mr. Kass talked about his role in advising President Bush on cloning and stem cell research. The new President’s Council on Bioethics is made up of 17 philosophers, medical experts… More

Defending Dignity

– Christianity Today, May 23, 2002.
Excerpt: Condensed from an interview with Leon Kass, head of President Bush’s Advisory Council on Bioethics, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The interview was… More

Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, July 2002.
Excerpt: Man’s biotechnological powers are expanding in scope, at what seems an accelerating pace. Many of these powers are double-edged, offering help for human suffering, yet… More

Report to the President on Human Cloning

– CPAN, July 11, 2002.
Mr. Kass presented and summarized some of the debate found in the council’s report on human cloning. Among the issues that the report examined were reproductive and therapeutic… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, January 1, 2003.
Dr. Kass talked about ethical issues involving human cloning and recent news of the first human reproductive clone by a private organization. He also responded to viewer comments and… More

Who’s Afraid of Leon Kass? by Gary Rosen

– Gary Rosen, Commentary,  January 2003.
Abstract: In the summer of 2001, as the Bush administration prepared to announce its much-anticipated decision on federal funding for stem-cell research, the White House began to leak word… More

Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, October 2003.
Excerpt: Biotechnology offers exciting and promising prospects for healing the sick and relieving the suffering. But exactly because of their impressive powers to alter the workings of body… More

The Public’s Stake

– Symposium, Biotechnology: A House Divided, Public Interest 150: Winter 2003.
Excerpt: For the first six months of this year, the President’s Council on  Bioethics met to consider the moral, biomedical, and human significance of human cloning in order to advise… More

Monitoring Stem Cell Research

– The President's Council on Bioethics, Washington, DC, January 2004.
Excerpt: I am pleased to present to you Monitoring Stem Cell Research, a report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the past two years, in keeping with your stated intention,… More

Interview on Washington Journal

– CSPAN, April 25, 2004.
Dr. Kass talked about a report by the President’s Council on Bioethics on reproductive techniques and guidelines for assisted reproductive procedures. He also responded to viewer… More

Human Frailty and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Fall 2004-Winter 2005).
Excerpt: In the aftermath of an election season, with the question of stem cell research in the public eye and demagogued in the most awful way, Eric Cohen has chosen to ask more… More

Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches

– Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15 (3): 221-250, 2005.
Abstract: For many reasons, and more than its predecessors, the President’s Council on Bioethics has been the subject of much public attention and heated controversy. But little of… More

Cast Me Not Off in Old Age

– Commentary (January 2006).
Excerpt: Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts was grilled about his views on removing… More

The Right to Life and Human Dignity

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2007).
Excerpt: Issues of individual rights tend to stand at the very center of legal disputes and moral debates in the United States. This is no accident, for “rights talk” is as American as… More

Defending Human Dignity

– Commentary, December 2007. Revised and reprinted in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics (Washington DC, 2008), 297-331.
Abstract: In contrast to continental Europe, human dignity has never been a powerful idea in American public discourse. We tend instead to be devoted to the language of rights and the… More

The Unique Worth of an Individual Human Life

– The New Atlantis (Spring 2010).
Excerpt: The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network selected Leon R. Kass, M.D. to receive its Paul Ramsey Award for 2010 — an award honoring those “who have demonstrated exemplary… More

Cancer and Mortality: Making Time Count

– Rebecca Dresser, ed., Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 179-194.
Excerpt: All human beings are mortal, and nearly all of us know it. But for most of us, through much of our lives, this knowledge remains largely below the level of consciousness. The… More

Leon Kass on Why Not Immortality?

– TV Ontario, September 21, 2012.
Dr. Leon Kass, Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding stem cell research. Dr. Kass addresses the philosophical question: Why not… More