You can now listen to my interview with Harvard Professor Michael Sandel on the ethics of using genetic enhancement in sports on Ethics Bites (a transcript is also available). You can also read a blog post I wrote for the Open University site Open2.net.
Michael Sandel's summary of the main themes of his book The Case Against Perfection.
Listen to Michael Sandel interviewed about Genetic Enhancement and Sport for Ethics Bites
Biotechnology is opening up many possibilities. Athletes will soon be able to choose to inject substances that will produce genetic modifications that will dramatically improve their performance; parents will be able to specify many genetically controlled qualities for their offspring. This is not the world our parents and grandparents inhabited. How should we treat these developments?
In his short, highly-readable book The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael Sandel comes out firmly against the pursuit of perfection by genetic enhancement. He, of course, defends biotechnical solutions to medical problems. It is when we attempt to ehance ourselves and others genetically that he objects.
Much of his argument turns on his notion of 'giftedness'. An athlete, for example, has a natural genetic endowment. According to Sandel, to go beyond this 'gift' is a kind of hubris on our part, a Promethean project that involves playing God. This sounds like a theological position. But Sandel believes his reasoning should have force with secularists too.
For Sandel there are three features of our moral landscape that will be transformed if we succumb to this desire to play God:
1. Humility. We will lose the sense of reverence that is appropriate to our fate. Instead we will end up acting with hubris towards our nature.
2. Responsibility. With increases in choice about what we are, responsibility explodes. The consequence will be burdensome.
3. Perhaps most important, though, is solidarity. Sandel believes that the price of enhancement would be a loss of human solidarity. Once we lose the sense that we are subject to contingencies of fate, the successful will, even more than now, see themselves as self-made.
Sandel's message is clear:
Rather than employ our new genetic powers to straighten 'the crooked timber of humanity,' we should do what we can to create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts and limitations of imperfect human beings (p. 97)
Much of Sandel's argument will appeal to religious believers, particularly those who seek humility before God's will. But for atheists and agnostics, this may be harder to stomach. Why not improve ourselves if we can? Think of how wonderful it would be if we could increase the number of geniuses per capita, particularly if we could give them a compassion gene and a desire to improve the lot of humanity...In the area of sport much of Sandel's argument turns on his belief that watching bionic athletes slugging it out would become mere spectacle, and that part of what we value in sport is the limitations of the athletes. I'm not so sure about this. I'd like to watch a football match in which every player achieved the skill level of George Best or Maradonna. And watching the top marathon runners today is already like watching bionic athletes, but no less absorbing for us mere mortals.
Whether or not Sandel is right about these issues, this is a clear, entertaining and stimulating book about a topic that matters. Underlying it are major questions about what we value and why that any thinking person will want to address.
Over the last few days yet more examples of cheating in sport have been revealed: in the Tour de France (with blood doping etc.) and possibly in motor racing (with competitors having access to confidential information about their opponent's car design)...so I thought I'd wheel out a piece I wrote about sports ethics just before the last soccer World Cup - this was broadcast on Radio 4's Sports Programme in 2006:
Getting to Sports Heaven
In the next five weeks, alongside the athleticism and grace on show in a plethora of sporting arenas, we are going to witness, deception, dissent, gamesmanship and bone-crunching, ligament-twisting, on-pitch violence. I guarantee it. Some players will be out to win at any cost. The end of victory will justify almost about any means and the cheat’s craft will once more take to the world stage. Balancing out the elation of success, many fans will be left with a bitter sense of injustice.
Close-up and slow motion have made us armchair connoisseurs of the theatrical and sometimes cruel skills that were once a secret art - much as surveillance cameras have opened our eyes to street deceptions of pickpockets and bag-snatchers…
And contrary to the misplaced faith of the wide-eyed optimists, (as in other areas of life), cheats often do prosper. You don’t need to look to anything as dramatic as Maradona’s hand-of-god goal to see this: a well-timed dive in the box, or a few stolen yards on the placement of a free kick can turn a game just as easily – (and is sooner forgotten). If there’s something wrong with cheating it can’t be that it never works! There can be no doubt: cheats have changed the course of sporting history – and will do again.
The more extreme kinds of pre-planned cheating rely on their invisibility – once exposed, there is no way out for the perpetrator except the path of shame and ignominy. Maurice Garin, for example, winner of the first Tour de France in 1903, was disqualified the next year for taking a train ride during the race!. The Russian pentathlete-fencer Boris Onishchenko was caught out at the 1972 Olympics in possession of a rewired foil that registered false hits..(and was rapidly renamed ‘Disonishchenko’).
But the word ‘cheat’ is too crude to cover the full spectrum from match-fixing and drug taking, through to shirt pulling and niggling at referees. Sports have the complexity of most areas of life, and we shouldn’t take the existence of formulated rules as a mark of simple black/white answers about sports ethics. Nor should we blame all cheats to the same degree. Some ‘cheating’ even occurs within the stated rules. When the Tongan rugby league player Hopowatte got suspended for trying to put his finger into the anus of tackled opponents he was accused of ‘unsportmanlike behaviour’ – and it certainly did unsettle the opposition – But what he did was more obviously against the spirit of the game than the letter. But is taking a quick penalty kick ‘unsporting’ or What about deliberately targeting the weakest player in a team? There are marginal cases that need subtle policing.
As a philosopher I’m intrigued by what I see, (perhaps crudely), as a tension between a virtue-based approach and a shameless win-at-any-cost morality that treats the professional foul as a pragmatic solution. The Victorian public school attitude to games – as providing an arena in which to cultivate and display the virtues of honesty, nobility-in-defeat and modesty-in-victory, is easily parodied, but still relevant. It doesn’t, however, sit comfortably with the demands of professional sport. There are, though very occasional, exceptional acts of sporting morality – acts beyond the call of duty.
One that stands out is tennis star Andy Roddick’s honesty in last years’ Rome Masters where he was the number one seed. He was on match point and about to win. The Umpire called that his opponent had served a double fault. Roddick, however, corrected the umpire – pointing out that the ball had nicked the line and so was in. Roddick’s beyond-the-call-of duty honesty cost him dearly, as he went on to lose the match.
It’s easy to run through the clichés about pressure put on sportsmen and women to win at any cost. Yet it’s true that stars are selected for their ability to win. They don’t get picked as exemplars of fairness and moral virtue. We may want sports stars to be role models – but often that will be asking too much of them. Such character traits can even be obstacles to progress in the ‘red in tooth and claw’ world of professional sports: honesty is likely to result in fewer wins in competition with players who are more self-interested. Admirable as moral rectitude is, it is not what takes people to the top of the pyramid in their chosen sport, where getting an edge on your opponent is the key to success. Fairplay, could even work against ascent to the highest levels…So those who do manage both to excel in their sport, and to do so with exemplary fairness, are truly remarkable, and we should celebrate them: they are the ones who will get to sit next to Bobby Moore and Andy Roddick in sport heaven…
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