Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Kass

Kass sets a trap with familiar moral language, then springs it on the modern techno-optimist. “A creature made in God’s image” borrows the gravitas of religious humanism: even secular readers recognize it as shorthand for inherent dignity. But the line’s real target isn’t murder or euthanasia; it’s the quiet arrogance of manufacture. “Destroy” is the obvious sin, the kind we already know how to condemn. “Creating…after images of one’s own” reframes the deeper danger as a subtler, more contemporary vice: self-deification through biotechnology.

The syntax does the heavy lifting. “As bad as… it might be very much worse” sounds like a cautious concession, but it’s a rhetorical judo move that flips the moral burden onto the act typically sold as benevolent progress. Kass’s subtext is that modern power doesn’t just end lives; it edits the terms of what a life is allowed to be. Making humans “after images of one’s own” isn’t merely cloning or genetic selection; it’s the conversion of persons into projects, children into deliverables, citizens into optimized products. The “image” language is doing double duty: it warns against both narcissism (reproducing ourselves) and control (reproducing what we prefer).

Contextually, Kass wrote in the shadow of late-20th-century bioethics debates-cloning, embryo research, enhancement, the commodification of reproduction-where the promised goods (health, choice, mastery) can mask a civilizational shift. His intent is to argue that the gravest threat isn’t that we’ll treat life as disposable, but that we’ll treat it as designable, and call that compassion.