Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs by Leon R. Kass (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. By Leon R. Kass. New York: Free Press, 1985. Pp. 370. $23.50. Modern medical ethics has become in its short 20-year history a large, heterogeneous, and complex discipline. Few writers have been as reliable a guide to this literature as Leon Kass. Kass, the Henry B. Luce Professor in the College and in the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, represents the best in the general education/great books traditions founded at Chicago and St. John's College. Most important, Kass is one of those rare scholars who makes technically complex and morally ambiguous issues accessible to both the scientist untrained in ethics and to the ethicist unfamiliar with science. Toward a More Natural Science contains Kass's best essays (both old and new) and presents a constructive analysis of modern science's role in a democratic society. Modern science, argues Kass, in its attempts to master nature, often subverts the human qualities that make science worth pursuing. Indeed, science, uncritically understood, threatens the foundations of liberal democracy: ". . . science essentially endangers society by endangering the supremacy of its ruling beliefs. It is one thing to hold on trust as true that ... all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; it is another thing to have to prove it" (p. 4). As a result, reductionist science inevitably becomes misanthropic : "According to our biological science, nature is indifferent even as between health and disease: Since both healthy and diseased processes obey equally and necessarily the same laws of physics and chemistry, biologists conclude that disease is just as natural as health" (p. 5). For modern society, therefore, the inevitable and tragic result is an all too common form of intellectual schizophrenia : ". . . many a pious man over the past century has thus compartmentalized his beliefs, embracing Darwinism during the week and biblical religion on the Sabbath " (p. 6). Yet, for all his stringent criticisms, Kass is neither technophobic nor antiscientific. He is by training a physician and a biochemist. He intends, instead, to raise crucial, yet often neglected, moral questions about modern science: For what reason is it pursued? What values does it seek to preserve? Like all human endeavors, science must be clear, Kass argues, about its purpose, meaning, and form if it is to avoid becoming inhumane. Kass believes the moral center of modern science is to be found in the traditional goals of medical practice: preserving health and curing disease. Medicine is, Kass insists, an intrinsically moral Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. 152 Book Reviews practice. In an illuminating examination of the Hippocratic oath, Kass shows that, if ". . . medicine can withstand the theoretical challenges posed by the new biology, if medicine still is nature served rather than nature mastered, and if medicine tacitly knows things about our nature and our life that our biology cannot support, we are invited to seek for a richer and more adequate biology . . ." (p. 12). Kass's reconstructed biology forces us to reconsider what nature testifies about itself: organisms have hierarchical purposes; the human body induces wonder about human being; the necessity of human finitude "turns out to be the mother of aspiration toward the beautiful, the good, the transcendent" (p. 14). If modern science has been too narrow and constricting in its scope and purpose, so too has modern ethics. Toward a More Natural Science is one of those rare recent books that liberates the scientific, intellectual, and moral imagination to reappropriate all of our Western cultural resources. Liberal education, liberal democracy , the humanities, and indeed the sciences can find few more engaging defenses. Richard P. Vance Department ofPathology Wake Forest University Medical Center Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103 On Size andLife. By Thomas W. McMahon andJohn Tyler Bonner. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1983. Pp. 255. $27.95. This is both literally and figuratively a beautiful book. The authors have assembled a collection of artistic and appropriate photographs to complement the ideas presented in the text and graphs. Although not overly large, the book is as wide as it...