"Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal"
About this Quote
Kass’s line works less as observation than as a pressure tactic: a calm, bureaucratic sentence designed to make dissent feel parochial. By invoking “many other countries” and “efforts at the UN,” he’s not arguing the science of cloning so much as leveraging the aura of international consensus. It’s a classic move in bioethics debates: shift the frame from “Should we?” to “Why are we the last holdouts?” The implied answer is that resistance is selfish, reckless, or morally backward.
The subtext is where Kass’s long-running project shows. He’s not neutral about the technology; he’s skeptical of what he famously called the “wisdom of repugnance,” the intuition that some innovations cross a human line even if they’re technically possible. This quote recruits geopolitics to that intuition. If the world is already banning cloning, then the repugnance looks less like a private shudder and more like civilization’s settled judgment.
Context matters: late-1990s/early-2000s panic about “Dolly” and the specter of made-to-order humans, plus the UN’s real, messy attempts to draft a cloning treaty. Those efforts were also tangled with abortion politics and disagreements over whether to ban only reproductive cloning or also therapeutic cloning. Kass’s phrasing smooths over that complexity. “Human cloning” becomes a single, ominous object; “universal” becomes a moral horizon. The sentence’s real intent is to make regulation feel inevitable, and to make hesitation feel like an outlier position history is about to condemn.
The subtext is where Kass’s long-running project shows. He’s not neutral about the technology; he’s skeptical of what he famously called the “wisdom of repugnance,” the intuition that some innovations cross a human line even if they’re technically possible. This quote recruits geopolitics to that intuition. If the world is already banning cloning, then the repugnance looks less like a private shudder and more like civilization’s settled judgment.
Context matters: late-1990s/early-2000s panic about “Dolly” and the specter of made-to-order humans, plus the UN’s real, messy attempts to draft a cloning treaty. Those efforts were also tangled with abortion politics and disagreements over whether to ban only reproductive cloning or also therapeutic cloning. Kass’s phrasing smooths over that complexity. “Human cloning” becomes a single, ominous object; “universal” becomes a moral horizon. The sentence’s real intent is to make regulation feel inevitable, and to make hesitation feel like an outlier position history is about to condemn.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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