Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Kass

Kass’s line is a quiet rebuke disguised as a modest confession. “We may simply not be wise enough” doesn’t argue that the engineering is impossible; it argues that our judgment is the scarce resource. The sentence turns on “wise,” not “smart.” It’s aimed at a modern reflex: if we can do a thing, we treat that as a moral permission slip to do it. Kass inserts an older, thicker standard - prudence, humility, a sense of limits - into a culture drunk on capability.

The phrasing is careful. “Some of the kinds of engineering things” sounds almost comically vague, but that vagueness is strategic. He’s not litigating one technology; he’s challenging the mindset that frames human life, bodies, and ecosystems as design problems awaiting optimization. In bioethics debates he’s been central to - cloning, gene editing, “enhancement,” reproductive tech - the worry isn’t only unintended side effects. It’s the way intervention reshapes what we value: parenthood becomes product development, children become outcomes, aging becomes a failure of maintenance.

Subtext: expertise is not the same as moral authority. Kass is suspicious of a technocratic pipeline where researchers build, industry scales, and society is told to “adapt.” The line also anticipates the PR language of innovation, where risks are “manageable” and trade-offs are “worth it.” He suggests the trade-offs may be unknowable until they’ve rewritten the rules of the game.

It works because it flips the burden of proof. The default is not progress; the default is restraint until wisdom - social, ethical, political - catches up to power.