Dr. Kass sometimes finds himself at odds with [pro-life] advocates. The movement’s narrow focus on nascent life, he worries, blinds it to the fact that “abortion is connected to lots of other things that are threats to human dignity in its fullness. Pursuing perfect babies, ageless bodies and happy souls with the aid of cloning, genetic engineering and psychopharmacology,” he thinks, are among the most significant of those threats.

The trial of Kermit Gosnell—a Philadelphia doctor charged in January 2011 with, among other things, murdering seven infants who survived abortions he performed—has been under way for a month. But it was only last week that the case was thrust into the national spotlight. Thanks to intense pressure from conservative critics of the media’s apparent lack of interest in the case, the rest of the country has now glimpsed some of what went on for years in Gosnell’s benignly named Women’s Medical Society.

Investigators who raided the clinic in 2010 saw “blood on the floor” and smelled “urine in the air,” according to the grand jury that indicted Gosnell. They also found “fetal remains haphazardly stored throughout the clinic—in bags, milk jugs, orange-juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers.” Members of Gosnell’s staff testified that the abortionist would deliver babies who had been gestating for as long as 30 weeks, far longer than the 24-week limit imposed by Pennsylvania law. Gosnell or staff members would gouge the infant’s neck with scissors to sever the spinal cord, according to the grand jury report. Gosnell referred to the method as “snipping.”

These and other appalling details of the Gosnell trial elicit reactions that might be called revulsion or disgust or horror. The word that eminent bioethicist and physician Leon Kass prefers is “repugnance.” This intense human reaction reflects a sort of deep moral intuition, he says, and it is one that deserves much more serious consideration than our too-sophisticated culture allows.

“As pain is to the body so repugnance is to the soul,” Dr. Kass says as we sit down for an interview in his book-lined office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is the Madden-Jewett Scholar. “So too with anger and compassion. Repugnance is some kind of wake-up call that there is something untoward going on and attention must be paid. These passions are not simply irrational. They contain within them the germ of insight. You cannot give proper verbal account of the horror of evil, yet a culture that couldn’t be absolutely horrified by such things is dead.”

The observation may not sound controversial, yet Dr. Kass, who was the chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, has often found himself in a minority among bioethicists when it comes to abortion, euthanasia, embryonic research, cloning and other right-to-life questions. Dr. Kass’s emphasis on what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance,” for example, has been assailed by liberal thinkers. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, for instance, said in a 2004 critique of Dr. Kass’s work that repugnance has been used in the past “as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons.”

Dr. Kass says his critics misunderstand the role of repugnance in his thinking. “It’s not that repugnance is always right,” he says. “There was once repugnance at interracial marriage, and there have been other repugnancies that turned out to be mere prejudice. But you wouldn’t want to live in a society where people feel no guilt or shame just because guilt and shame are sometimes disruptive—or in a society that doesn’t feel righteous indignation at the sight of injustice.”

Degradation and its opposite, human dignity, are central elements of Dr. Kass’s philosophy, and he fears that American society risks becoming disrespectful of dignity and indifferent to degradation.

Consider abortion. After years of calling for abortions that are “safe, legal and rare,” the Democratic Party in its 2012 platform dropped such language altogether in an attempt to appeal to its feminist base. But viewing childbearing solely as a matter of personal reproductive choice, Dr. Kass says, “means we no longer see a child as a gift but as a product of our will to be had by choice only. That makes human choice the basis of all value”—at the price of the child, for “he or she comes from the hands of nature.”

“Nascent life prior to birth,” Dr. Kass says, “does not yet display any of the grand and glorious things for which we applaud humanity in its flowering. And yet it is the dignity of human possibility to be found in nascent life that should lead us treat it not less well than it deserves.” He admits to being “agnostic” on the question of whether the embryo “is a human being equal to your grandchildren.” Even so, Dr. Kass says, “in the face of our ignorance about its status, the embryo does have a certain claim on us. It is the bearer of human possibility, and we owe it not to mistreat it.”

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