Parenting & Family Quote by Leon Kass

The sentence lands like a moral mic drop: a tidy boundary drawn around the self and the nuclear family, daring anyone to call it selfish. Kass is compressing a whole political philosophy into a domesticated mandate. By framing obligation as "only" and narrowing it to "our own life" and "our own children", he invokes a commonsense ethic of caretaking while quietly rejecting broader claims on our time, money, and conscience.

The rhetoric is strategic. "Responsibility" sounds civic-minded, even noble, but the object of that responsibility is radically private. It borrows the prestige of duty to justify withdrawal from public entanglements: no neighbors, no institutions, no future generations in the abstract. The phrase "our own" does a lot of ideological work; it turns solidarity into overreach and makes communal obligation read like an unwelcome intrusion.

Kass's background matters. As a bioethicist and public intellectual associated with debates over family, reproduction, and the moral limits of liberal modernity, he often treats the family as the primary site where virtues are formed and transmitted. Read in that context, the line is less a casual shrug than a counterpunch to expansive notions of social responsibility - the idea that justice requires care beyond kin. It also subtly positions state programs, cosmopolitan ethics, and even certain forms of altruism as distractions from the "real" work.

The subtext is a wager: that if everyone minds their own household, society will take care of itself. History suggests it rarely does.