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Type: Hardcover
Item#: C6115
ISBN#: 1893554554
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"A clarion call to protect human freedom from the excesses of biotechnology."
-- Publishers Weekly
Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics
by Leon Kass
Stem cells. Cloning. The human genome project. Bioethics issues increasingly dominate the news. All too often, conservatives find themselves bewildered by the tangle of ethical issues involved and speechless before the media elite's pro-biotechnology onslaught. But now Leon Kass's Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics gives you the information you need to fight back in defense of life.
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The chairman of the new President's Council on Bioethics, Kass sorts out the ethics of new biotechnological breakthroughs and explains why bioethics has become the scene of a showdown between the dignity of the human being and the arrogance of the scientific elite. Many biotechnical advances, says Kass, take us down "a slippery slope [on] which we would increasingly pay a toll in coin of our human dignity for our growing technical mastery."
Kass observes trenchantly that in today's amoral environment, bioethicists earn more money by promoting the latest technological advances than they do by investigating the moral questions that these advances raise. But Kass is unafraid to confront this brave new world. Clearly and fearlessly, he exposes the thoroughgoing anti-life agenda of bioethicists - from abortion and cloning to tissue harvesting and the "right to die." He even explains how procedures such as in vitro fertilization, for all their superficial humaneness, are in fact dangerously dehumanizing. Above all, Kass calls for renewed recognition of the permanent limitations of biology - not out of opposition to progress, but from respect for the sanctity of life.
Exhaustively researched, profoundly illuminating, and superbly argued, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity helps you clear away the fog of media confusion and face squarely one of the most important issues of our time.
Get the truth about the new biotechnologies from Leon Kass:
- The notion of "personal dignity": why it's considered by many bioethicists to be only of limited value
- Why it's so much more difficult to formulate compelling arguments against cloning today than it was thirty years ago
- The ominous implications for society as a whole of allowing scientists to "play God"
- Why many biotechnological advances are contrary to human dignity even though they aim to wipe out disease and decay
- The enormous human cost of biotechnology's devotion to keeping the present generation alive
- In vitro fertilization and cloning: why they're not only unethical, but dangerous as well
- How American liberalism actually contains the seeds of a possible remedy to the problem of technology
- Liberty: what it really means - and how this true meaning differs from the amorality and libertinism that underlies today's bioethics
- How the field of bioethics has changed (and not for the better) as technology has advanced
- The bankruptcy of liberal arguments that defend the destruction of human embryos in the process of in vitro fertilization
- How the idea that every child should be a "wanted" child fosters the acceptance of cloning as a legitimate option
- The real question: not whether in vitro fertilization and embryo research should be permitted in the United States, but whether they should be funded by our tax dollars
- Genetic screening: how it actually limits our freedom (rather than increasing it as its advocates claim)
- How anti-life forces use economic pressures to further their insidious agenda
- Genetic and reproductive biotechnology: the risks of allowing it to continue as the big business it has become
- Beyond the media distortions: the real differences between euthanasia and capital punishment
- Why the claim of a "right to die" is made only in Western liberal societies - and why there is, in fact, no defensible right to die
- Four fears from which the "right to die" is derived (and how each can be assuaged by a better response than assisted suicide)
- Why prolonging earthly life - and removing pain and suffering from it - will not satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart
- Why technological progress is not a reliable indicator of national health
- The sale of body parts: why supporters of cloning and in vitro fertilization can mount no coherent opposition to this inhuman practice
- How the Left misuses the language of rights in order to further its biotechnological agenda
- The fatal weakness of modern biology - and why biologists don't like to acknowledge it
"This book is indispensable for understanding the past and future of the biotech revolution."
-- Francis Fukuyama, author, The End of History and the Last Man
"The wisest of the burgeoning crop of bioethics books."
-- Mary Ann Glendon, author, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse
"Kass has spent his career taking serious questions seriously, and our national debate on bioethics is the richer for it."
-- William Bennett, author, The Book of Virtues
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