Politics & Power Quote by Leon Kass

Kass frames his role as counsel not in terms of influence, but of moral illumination. “Richest possible consideration” is a deliberately lush phrase: it rejects the thin, checkbox logic of policy memos and insists that presidential decisions deserve thickness - competing goods, hidden costs, and human consequences that can’t be reduced to a single metric. The sentence is built to sound humble (“my job is to provide”), yet it smuggles in a serious claim about authority: the educator becomes the curator of what counts as relevant reality.

The key move is “so that he knows what is at stake.” Kass isn’t promising to tell the president what to do; he’s claiming responsibility for making the stakes legible. That’s both ethical and political. Ethical, because it casts decision-making as a burden that requires conscience, not just competence. Political, because “at stake” hints at lives, legitimacy, and national identity - the stuff that evaporates when leaders treat choices as mere management problems.

Context matters: Kass is best known for bioethics and for advising at the highest level during debates over stem cells, cloning, and the boundaries of human enhancement. In that arena, the usual expert posture (“here are the facts”) can feel evasive. Kass offers a different model: the adviser as teacher of consequences, not technician of outcomes. The subtext is a quiet critique of governance-by-spreadsheet and a defense of deliberation as a civic virtue. He’s not asking to drive the ship; he’s insisting the captain look over the side.