On “Enhancement”

March 10, 2008

A thoughtful piece in today’s New York Times has usefully brought the “enhancement” question into general discussion. It is a curious thing how little attention this clutch of questions has received, and how when attention has been evident it has tended to be to some particular (mainly in the sports context) rather than the general principle.

It is widely agreed that there is no easy way to draw the “enhancement” line; though some otherwise smart people have been much too quick to suggest that therefore there is no issue here to be discussed. One of the most useful documents to emanate from the President’s Council on Bioethics was the report Beyond Therapy, which asserted jointly that this issue has huge importance and it is not possible to give it a sharp definition. Yet the examples of steroid use, human growth hormone, and the sprinter with prostheses, are beginning to illustrate to the public that definitional difficulty is no bar to the need to make decisions, and to our ability to make them when we are presented with a particular application.

The key need is to mainstream this discussion, and get it out of the hands of transhumanists on the one hand and Luddites, if there really are any, on the other. Our embrace of the technologies of the 21st century depends vitally on our understanding of their implications and our ability to take responsibility for their development.

The significance of the sports doping (and prosthetics) stories, and the particular issue that sparked the Times article (discussion among educators about academics’ use of performance-enhancing pills like Adderall), is that they offer us the opportunity to reflect on the limits of such interventions in human capacities with an eye on current technologies and their uses – well before tomorrow’s technologies, with their sci-fi promise of brain-boosting implants and the steady cyborgization of at least some of the world’s “haves,” have become immediate problems. Conversely, how the current debates go (and they may well be going one way in the sports world and another in the laisser-faire world outside) is likely to weight the dice for every future engagement with such technology applications. (ChoosingTomorrow)