Home Runs and IQs: Moral Issues in Performance Enhancement
Abstract
The paper examines various methods for boosting human performance, such as pills and technologically altered genes, from a moral perspective. I focus on the cogent arguments concerning steroids and enhancement in general offered by Michael Sandel in The Case Against Perfection (2007). Because Sandel’s arguments are based on considerations of moral virtue and the nature of practices, they possess a breadth of moral scope beyond performance improvement. Sandel argues that enhancement treatments jeopardize the virtue of humility by promoting excessive pride and risk distorting such practices as playing sports and parenting children. The paper exposes the limits of Sandel’s trenchant critique while indicating ways in which it can also be made more encompassing. It is limited with regard to enhancement in artistic and intellectual endeavors, as well as some sports, because in such practices more is simply better; ratcheted power or prowess does not distort the practice. Yet Sandel’s critique is more encompassing because genetic augmentation, for example, can threaten the child’s autonomy in ways that Sandel actually dismisses.