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Sometimes a Title Says It All: "Kass Backwards"

The editors here at The American Journal of Bioethics have been none too kind to Leon Kass, but none have been quite as harsh as Scott McLemee from InsideHigherEd.com in his piece titled, "Kass Backwards".

Below are a few choice excerpts from McLemee's perspective piece on Kass's NEH Jefferson lecture:

Kass invoked the "wisdom of repugnance" a few years before he joined an administration that treated the willingness to torture as a great moral virtue -- meanwhile coddling bigots for whom rage at gay marriage was an appropriate response to "the violation of things we hold rightfully dear."

Now, as it happens, some of us do indeed feel disgust at one of these practices, and not at the other. We also suspect that Kass's aphorism about the shallowness of souls that have forgotten how to shudder would make a splendid epigraph for the chapter in American history that has just closed.

In short, disgust is not quite so unambiguous and inarguable an expression of timeless values as its champion on the faculty of the University of Chicago has advertised. Given a choice between "deep wisdom" and "reason's power fully to articulate," we might do best to leave the ineffable to Oprah.

And so last week's Jefferson lecture was, perhaps, an encouraging moment, in spite of everything. With it, Leon Kass was saying farewell to Washington for, with any luck, a good long while. Maybe now he can spend some time catching up with the range of work people in the humanities have actually been doing. At very least he could read some Martha Nussbaum.

Then he might even pause to reflect on his own role as hired philosopher for an administration that revived one of the interrogation techniques of the Khmer Rouge. The wisdom of repugnance begins at home."

Summer Johnson, PhD