CS Monitor interviews Kass

CS Monitor: Does the debate boil down to those who oppose biotechnology because it's 'playing God' versus those who think we ought to pursue any scientific advances open to us, thus using the intelligence that God or nature gave us?

Leon Kass: The environmental movement has taught us that one intervenes in the product of eons and eons of evolution at one's peril, and that it's not so much the hubris of usurping God's powers as it's the hubris of having God's powers without God-like knowledge - going in there making transformations without a complete understanding of what you're doing. It's an ancient tension between, on the one hand, wanting to savor the world as it is and, on the other hand, wanting to improve on the world as given.

There is a danger that the freedom to transform everything embraces the freedom to transform our own nature and even to destroy that very freedom itself. So some kind of limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the ... cleverness that we have to make changes.... I'm not making an argument for a static world, and I'm certainly not making an argument that an old world is better than this one. One should simply proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.

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