Abstract
The possibility of genetic enhancement to increase the likelihood of success in sport and life’s prospects raises questions for accounts of sport and theories of justice. These questions obviously include the fairness of such enhancement and its relationship to the goals of sport and demands of justice. Of equal interest, however, is the effect on our understanding of individual effort, merit, and desert of either discovering genetic contributions to components of such effort or recognizing the influence of social factors on the development and exercise of individual effort. This paper analyzes arguments about genetic enhancement with the goal of raising questions about how sport and justice regard unchosen, undeserved inequalities and what is assumed to be their opposite—namely, the exercise and results of individual effort. It is suggested that contemplating enhancement of natural assets previously outside human control may reinforce recognition of responsibility to intervene with regard to social advantages so as to support individual effort and improve individuals’ life prospects.
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Notes
In speaking of ‘the individual’s control’, it would be more accurate, but more cumbersome, to speak of factors that are beyond or within an individual’s sphere of influence or partial control, as nothing is completely within the control of any individual.
Others will face in an ancillary way the question of whether genetic enhancement in sport should be permitted; for them the answer will depend largely on the answer and attitudes adopted by the public. These others include businesses that use sports and athletes to advertise goods and services, and institutions whose development and marketing departments use sports to raise funds to support institutions’ sport and non-sport infrastructures.
It is not obvious how the WADA’s therapeutic use exemption would apply to an intervention that, instead of being on the list of prohibited substances and clearly subject to the exemption, fit the broader definition of having potential for enhancement, and further, that may have permanently affected the athlete’s genotype. The WADA rule thus introduces concern about genetic discrimination (see [18]). It would seem unjustifiably discriminatory to prohibit those who used gene transfer technology to treat their disease, simply because the treatment has ancillary sport-relevant enhancement potential. It may also seem inappropriate, for reasons discussed below, to ban those whose genotype has been enhanced, while not banning those who have functionally the same genotype (acquired without enhancement on either their part or their parents). Finally, it might seem inappropriate to ban those athletes who have an enhanced genotype as a result of others’ actions (e.g., their parents’), when the athletes have not themselves sought an advantage through any prohibited or unfair means. As discussed below, if one goal of sport is to recognize different degrees of excellence in sport-relevant abilities, then it would seem wrong to bar someone who has potential for such excellence through no fault (or responsibility) of her own.
The distinction between treatment and enhancement is notoriously contested (see, e.g., [16]). The issue is complicated by the multiple levels at which genetic enhancement could occur: for example, in a particular case, intracellular enhancement might be required to produce statistically normal phenotypic function at some physiological level (e.g., muscle strength), which might or might not result in enhanced sport performance of the whole organism, the athlete. Rules about genetic enhancement in sport would have to wrestle with determining at what level of enhancement (intracellular to whole organism) the rules would apply.
Although genetic enhancement would obviously rely on technological developments, lay understanding of ‘technology’ does not seem to apply neatly, for example, to the use of steroids or drugs or to intensive training regimens. In using the term ‘technology’ to apply to all such practices that seek to improve performance, I rely on Michel Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, those strategies that enable people to act on their bodies, minds, and conduct to transform themselves to attain particular desired states (see [10]). On this view, coaching, diet and exercise, biofeedback, anabolic steroids, surgery, genetic modification, split-finger pitches, pep talks, and squatting suits are all examples of technologies employed to enhance sport performance.
The rules themselves are constructed (enacted, accepted, evolved) by a set of nested communities—e.g., the community of athletes nested within sports and sport organizations, which are themselves within larger communities of sport lovers, spectators, and the public. These nested communities are the final arbiters of the rules and of the line drawn between protecting athletes from harm and allowing them to assume risks. It may become ethically problematic when the benefit to other parties is disproportionate in comparison to the potential benefit to the athletes who assume sport’s risks, as when states have driven their Olympic athletes exceedingly hard for reasons of national prestige, or when universities and other institutions stand to benefit so substantially from the activities of amateur athletes, or even when spectators “demand” ever more daring feats. There is reason to be wary of pressures from the broader communities on the communities of athletes and officials nested within them to accept rules permitting (or requiring) assumption of great or ever increasing risks. Indeed, many rules have been enacted to make sport safer. The point here, however, is that rules grounded in the goal of protecting athletes’ health should be consistent with regard to the degrees of risk that athletes are permitted to assume.
Not everyone agrees that the prospect of enhancement in sport presents precisely a prisoner’s dilemma. Given that obtaining enhancement is neither costless nor riskless, and that some people may benefit more than others from enhancement, it may be in the rational self-interest of some, but not all, to seek enhancement when others do (see, for example, [5, 6, 8]).
As suggested below, though such advantages are morally neutral characteristics of the individual, other people and social practices may be subject to moral evaluation with regard to advantages distributed by the natural or social lotteries. Though an individual athlete may not be subjected to moral judgment in virtue of being born rich or poor, or with a particular ethnicity, social practices that make wealth or ethnicity matter may be evaluated for their justice or injustice. Furthermore, in light of current and anticipated advances in genetics, parents may be subject to moral evaluation for their decision to have (or risk having) offspring with particular genetic conditions or traits (for exemplary opposing views, see [24, 25]).
Admittedly in drawing this parallel between advantages outside of the individual’s control and some of those within it, there is slippage between the notions of being merited and being meritorious. The difference is between something’s being deserved (based on some further relevant normative feature of the person) and something’s being in itself worthy of honor, praise, or esteem (where only something that is itself positive and laudable could be meritorious or praise worthy).
Of course, racism, segregation, and apartheid in sport are instances of sport’s failure to treat participants as moral equals, and reflect racist views current in the larger society. In at least some cases, sport moved before that society at large to challenge racist premises. Whether in the United States today society interprets African-Americans’ athletic abilities and successes to reinforce racist stereotypes and limit other social opportunities is a matter of debate and of broader social attitudes (see, e.g., debate surrounding John Hoberman’s Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race [15].
Music, poetry, architecture, and art competitions—indeed competitions ranging from the Booker Prize to high school science projects—may also presuppose and celebrate some underlying inequalities between persons. But the domains themselves do not rest on these competitions. Instead, the competitions serve to draw attention to and award excellence in producing music, poetry, etc. that itself has aesthetic, practical, or entertainment value quite distinct from the pleasures taken in (or any good constituted by) the competition.
That Schneider’s father had a modest occupation, shoemaking, and that circumstances prompted her to quit school to maintain the household upon her mother’s death could be considered disadvantages of the social lottery.
Much as the ‘but for’ test of causation in law picks out, from among a string of causal factors, the normatively relevant causal factor as the cause of a tortious or criminal act, the ability to benefit from training is picked out among several abilities as the ability competition is to reveal. This is a statement of both the rule or value of sport, and the operation of the rules of sport in practice. ‘But for’ that athletic ability, the other abilities either would not—or according to the values of sport, should not—result in sport success. (If other abilities—like benefiting from steroids—do lead to sport success in the absence of excellence in the relevant athletic ability, then this success is spurious, according to the socially constructed rules of the game, the social practice of sport.).
Fetal environment is increasingly understood and subject to intervention as well.
The most minimalist conception of fair equality of opportunity demands that formal (legal) barriers and informal barriers (e.g., both de jure and de facto racial, sex, or age discrimination) be prevented from limiting one’s life prospects resulting from the admixture of one’s individual effort and one’s natural abilities.
Moreover, not only is it arbitrary to restrict “concern about equal opportunity to differences among those with the same talents and abilities,” but also it would be arbitrary to restrict intervention in genetically-based opportunity-limiting conditions to those that are considered diseases [4, p. 70, 72]. Intervention in such conditions, however, may be either primarily environmental or genetic.
A body of research is emerging that investigates the relationship among race, income, socio-economic status and social class, education, health, built environment, social services and resources, and environmental risks [28]. Clearly, many of these influence both the relative ease with which an individual may exercise the components of effort (dedication, motivation, commitment, consistency, courage) and the magnitude and likelihood that such effort will be successful (in sport or life).
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Parker, L.S. In Sport and Social Justice, Is Genetic Enhancement a Game Changer?. Health Care Anal 20, 328–346 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0226-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0226-z