OP-ED: For the Love of the Game

March 10, 2008

By Leon Kass & Eric Cohen

Like the Mitchell Report, most discussions of biotechnical enhancement are preoccupied with the novel biotechnologies themselves. Commonplace in such discussions are quasi-Talmudic (and inconclusive) arguments about whether and how, for example, steroid use differs from special diets as a means for increasing the mass of muscles, or how an erythropoietin injection (“blood doping”) differs from taking vitamins as a means for increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. But a deeper analysis of enhancement should begin not from assessments of the technical means, but from explorations of the desirable ends. Only if we have a clear idea of the nature and dignity of human activity, in sport and beyond, can we see how that dignity is threatened by the age of biotechnological enhancement. (This was the approach adopted in Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, the 2003 report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which we helped to draft and from which, in this section of our essay and the next, we freely draw.) We begin by examining athletic activity itself, seeking to illuminate the integrity of the athlete; and move then to consider the activity of the spectators, so as to illuminate the integrity of sport and its value for all of us. . . . (The New Republic)