Abstract

In “The misguided quest for the ethics of enhancement”, Tom Murray makes two related claims. First, he argues that “understanding the ethics of enhancement is deeply dependent on context". Second, he suggests that, as a consequence, we should not look for “a single all-purpose ethics for every form of human enhancement”. In this brief response, I argue that while Murray is correct in the first of these claims, there is an important sense in which he is wrong in the second. His focus on the ethics of enhancement in sport serves him well in illustrating how our reasons to embrace or resist technological change as it impacts on athletes and players depends crucially on “why we play” and, in particular, on nature of the excellences made possible by the current rules of the game. However, the thing about life is that the “rules” are unknown and the meaning of participation and the excellences it makes possible are widely disputed. For this reason, a focus on the ethics of sport serves us less well when it comes to the larger question of the attitude we should take towards “human enhancement”. In the context of the profound disputes about the nature of the good in modern liberal societies, we may indeed need a single, robust, theoretical framework through which to resolve questions about enhancement – although whether this is best thought of as an “ethics” or a “politics” of enhancement is a further (and difficult) question. Regardless of how such a framework is conceived, Murray’s observations about the importance of context, the significance of competition, and the attractions of a “public health ethics” approach, all serve to alert us to just how difficult the task of developing an ethics for human enhancement more generally is likely to be.