Parenting & Family Quote by Leon Kass

Kass writes like someone staging a moral thought experiment and daring you to flinch. The opening hedge - "Perhaps" - isn’t softening the claim so much as baiting the reader into an uncomfortable admission: yes, you can feel for the grief that would drive someone to want a replacement child. Then he tightens the screws by sliding from the most sympathetic case (a dead child) to progressively less defensible desires (a parent, a relative, a celebrity). It’s a rhetorical slope that exposes how quickly compassion can be recruited to sanitize something ethically volatile.

The intent is not to debate cloning in technical terms but to reframe it as a cultural temptation: the urge to treat people as reproducible goods. Kass’s subtext is that modern biotechnology doesn’t create the desire to control and replay human life; it simply gives that desire a laboratory. By invoking "copy" rather than "twin" or "genetic duplicate", he makes the act sound like counterfeiting - an industrial logic invading the family.

Context matters. Kass became one of America’s most prominent bioethics voices during the early-2000s cloning panic and broader anxieties about designer babies. His argument trades on a conservative humanism: grief and admiration are real, but turning them into a manufacturing brief collapses the difference between loving someone and owning an image of them. Even the celebrity example is doing work: it links private sorrow to mass culture’s obsession with replication, branding, and replaceability. The point is that a society that can clone will be pressured to justify it, and pity is often the cleanest solvent for moral resistance.