The ethics of the Enhanced Games
A look at the ethics of the reinvigorated debates about performance enhancing drugs.
Hi there! I’m Evan DeTurk and I’m pleased to welcome you to my new Substack: The Science Fictional Now. For those of you don’t know me already, I’m a biologist (and occasional musician) with strong interests in the history of science, bioethics, biosecurity, and science fiction. I’ll be posting about a variety of topics that straddle these disciplines, with the goal of making each one accessible to a general audience. As such, I hope to structure each post as an engaging story, balancing readability with detailed research and rigorous thought. Some posts (such as today’s!) will be longer essays with original research and concrete arguments, while others will be more casual.
In addition to being an place where I can explore the ideas that interest me the most, I’m hoping that this Substack will allow me to hone my writing skills and develop new ways of thinking. While I do hope that my posts will be insightful enough to attract an interested audience, this is not my main goal. I’ve chosen this public forum because I hope it will help facilitate the feedback and discussion crucial to any writer’s development, but my purpose here is not to be a ‘content creator’. It’s my intent to post every three to four weeks, though I can’t promise this will always be the case: I don’t want this newsletter to evolve into just another responsibility. I’m very excited to finally have an official forum for my ideas, and I’m excited to hear everyone else’s thoughts as well!
With that introduction out of the way, it’s time to get to the meat of today’s post. Our topic is the Enhanced Games, an upcoming Olympics-style sporting event with no restrictions on performance enhancing drugs. When I found out about the Games a few months ago, they immediately struck me as a fascinating case of entrepreneurs looking to disrupt a new industry - in this case, sports - with a tech-inspired mindset. But the deeper I dug, the more I realized just how much of a bioethical gold mine the Games were. In today’s post, we’ll look at what the Enhanced Games mean for the sports world as well as how they figure into larger debates about human enhancement. Feel free to respond with your thoughts in the comments below or reach out to me directly. If you find the piece insightful, consider Subscribing (all posts on this Substack will be available for free) or joining the mailing list (which doesn’t require a Substack account). Enjoy!
The Enhanced Games: excuse to dope or harbinger of a transhuman future?
If you’re a sports fan like me, chances are that you’ve heard the ongoing debates about performance enhancing drug (PED) usage. As a young baseball fan in the late 2000s, I watched Major League Baseball struggle to deal with the aftermath of record-setting home run races between sluggers like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, which had brought excitement to the sport but were fueled by widespread PED usage. Around the same time, cyclist Lance Armstrong capped off the run that netted him an unprecedented seven Tour de France titles. Armstrong had beaten testicular cancer and founded the Livestrong Foundation to help others do the same before embarking on his historic run, making him a revered figure in the sports world. Armstrong’s success and popularity only worsened his eventual fall, turning his admission that he had used PEDs throughout his career and pressured teammates to do the same into an era-defining scandal.
But even as Armstrong was ridiculed and stripped of his Tour de France wins, many fans struggled to come to grips with the incongruity of the situation. Armstrong had broken the rules, sure – but most of the other top cyclists he had edged out on his way to victory were similarly guilty. It almost felt like Lance Armstrong had been a fall guy: blaming him saved fans from having to acknowledge the still-widespread nature of PED. Such drugs are allowed by default in a select few sports like bodybuilding, and their usage has been an open secret in others, such as cycling, for years. Individuals have even argued in favor of allowing them more broadly for some time. Despite this, PEDs remain unpopular and public debates surrounding them have stagnated in recent years. It seems likely that many sports fans suspect that PED usage is widespread and simply choose not to confront the issue. If thinking about something you can’t really control is just going to make you less happy, why do it? Ignorance is bliss.
Given this curious dynamic, I became quite intrigued when I first heard about the proposed Enhanced Games, a mini-Olympics style event where athletes are not only allowed to take PEDs but encouraged to do so. Currently scheduled for 2025, the Games received a burst of media coverage following their initial press release last summer and predictably drew ire from prominent anti-PED advocates. Sebastian Coe, the head of World Athletics and an Olympic Gold Medalist, summed up the outrage when he bluntly stated that “No one within athletics takes the Enhanced Games seriously.” The Games continued to invite controversy by posting a video on their official X page featuring a faceless athlete claiming to have broken Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record. Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza, an Australian businessman and lawyer, even boasted of athletes “breaking world records in their basement and sending [him] videos of it.” More announcements followed, with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel1 becoming a major investor and retired world champion swimmer James Magnussen announcing he planned to “juice to the gills” to break the 50-meter freestyle world record at the Enhanced Games. When I first encountered the Games, I assumed they were the brainchild of a band of disgruntled gym bros and other PED users simply looking to gain some recognition while making a quick buck. But the more I looked at the event’s website, the more intrigued I became. Sure, one page featured absolutely chiseled AI images of the stoic philosophers Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but there were other sections of the website with names like “Inclusive Language” and “Science Is Real.” What kind of gym bros were these people?
As I dug deeper through the strongly worded text that filled their website, I became increasingly interested in uncovering the Games’ true purpose. Gradually, it became clear to me that the Enhanced Games weren’t merely meant to disrupt the sports industry, but were also intended to demonstrate how biotechnology could enhance human abilities. In this piece, we’ll unpack what the Enhanced Games mean for the sports world and how they relate to larger bioethical discussions around human enhancement. We’ll start by considering a slew of arguments both for and against PED usage in sports and then situate the Enhanced Games in ongoing discussions of enhancement. To conclude, we’ll circle back to the sports world and reflect on how the Games could operate in the light of everything we’ve considered.
Sports
While PED advocates are quick to note that such substances have been used at least as far back as the original Olympics, the fact remains that today, the vast majority of sports leagues ban PEDs, which are typically off-label prescription drugs. This has certainly not stopped athletes from looking for an edge, however. Numerous athletes have won Olympic medals with the help of PEDs and there is statistical evidence that PED usage is widespread in a variety of sporting events, yet public opinion still tends to side against allowing2 such substances in sports. But why do people generally hold this opinion? To understand the backlash to the Enhanced Games, let’s consider some arguments for and against PEDs in sports.
Common arguments
The broad unpopularity of PEDs means that arguments against them don’t need to be especially rigorous. Substances like steroids and human growth hormone often precede feelings of repugnance3; why use logic to convince people of something they already believe instinctively? When they are articulated, anti-PED arguments often echo those presented in this 2010 blog post by April Ashby, citing the negative effects of PEDs on athletes’ health and on the integrity of sports (often referred to as the ‘spirit of sport’). But we don’t need to think very hard to poke holes in these boilerplate arguments. Regarding health, it’s true that PEDs have plenty of potential adverse effects. But so do other socially acceptable substances - most notably, alcohol. To accept this argument, we need to think harder about the potential costs and benefits of PED usage. Additionally, the idea that PEDs hurt athletic integrity only works in the context of existing PED restrictions. Would PEDs still hurt integrity if they were allowed for all competitors?
PED advocates must be especially creative and convincing to overcome their weak starting position. In a 2008 public debate organized by the media company Intelligence Squared, a group of pro-PED thinkers laid out a diverse set of arguments to counter those articulated by their opponents. A mere 18 percent of the audience supported PED usage in a pre-debate poll, but that number had grown to 37 percent by the end of the two hours4. Ethicist and noted PED advocate Julian Savulescu voiced a philosophical critique of the ‘spirit of sport’ argument, stating that “performance enhancement is not against the spirit of sport, it's been a part of sport through its whole history, and to be human is to be better, or at least to try to be better." We’ll return to this argument when we discuss enhancement more broadly - for now, let’s look at the more practical arguments put forth by other members of the pro-PED team. Journalist Radley Balko argued that humans are irrationally skeptical of synthetic biology, which has led to paternalistic regulation of PEDs. Pediatrician and bioethicist Norman Fost offered a similar perspective, contending that society tends to overestimate the danger of PEDs, both in absolute terms and relative to other things we already permit, including sports themselves.
These lines of reasoning are also not without their flaws. Fost’s argument, for example, effectively implies that allowing one dangerous behavior means we should consequently allow anything else with a lower risk of harm. True, playing professional sports is a privilege and athletes must accept some risk to play them. But the risk of playing any given sport is not constant but context-dependent: the equipment and rules used in a particular instance of any sport impact the safety of that instance. It’s possible to make sports safer and we should strive to do so, especially as their competitive nature can encourage dangerous practices. Safety has been a key consideration in recent rule changes to sports like American football, which has sought to decrease players’ risk of concussions and other injuries. But when taken together, the points raised by Balko and Fost do get at something important: we can’t argue that individuals should be banned from using PEDs simply because they have nonzero risks. Instead, we need to determine whether PEDs surpass some threshold of individual risk, and how broader PED usage might change the collective risk of athletes.
Fost is part of a group that believes the dangers that PEDs post for adults are commonly overstated; a group that also includes the founders of the Enhanced Games. The Games’ “Science is Real” page5 lists the idea that “Steroids are bad for your health” as a myth, arguing instead that “the use of steroids typically has positive effects on the health of athletes, particularly in relation to muscle mass, strength and endurance, and in reducing the risk of injury and fatigue, thus leading to improved performance.” This rather evasive statement fails to acknowledge the known health risks of steroids and other PEDs, making me skeptical of the Games’ commitment to safety. But as willfully ignorant as this statement may be, it does make one interesting point. Typically, PEDs are thought of as substances that can improve athletes’ results in competition at the expense of their health. But the direct benefits of PEDs are actually the muscle growth or other physical changes that the athlete undergoes in response to the drugs, which in turn allow them to compete harder. The Games’ wording asks us to think in this mode, seeing PEDs as drugs that sacrifice one area of health to improve another, rather than improving results at the expense of health. Even using this way of thinking, I don’t think it would be easy to make the argument that PEDs promote health using common definitions of the term. Rather, I think that this way of thinking provides further ammunition for Balko’s paternalism argument, suggesting that individuals might opt for personal definitions of health that lead them to use PEDs.
How dangerous are PEDs?
Of course, it’s true that using PEDs can be quite dangerous, especially when used in amounts far exceeding typical prescription doses. A commonly-used class of PEDs is anabolic steroids, which may lead to adverse effects, especially in the cardiovascular (i.e., high blood pressure, heart attacks) and hormonal (i.e., decreased sperm count) systems. Extreme anabolic steroid usage, typically involving multiple drugs, can even result in death through such mechanisms as drug toxicity and cardiovascular disease. Of course, PED side-effects are dependent on factors such as the drug used and in what amount; athletes with normal testosterone levels who take a typical dose of the compound used in testosterone replacement therapy will experience worse side-effects than people with lower-than-normal amounts of that hormone, but won’t take on nearly the risk they would with a much stronger anabolic steroid like trenbolone. PEDs are of course not the only substances that have negative effects on health, and I believe that there are cases in which PED usage falls into the same moral category as substances that are already legal, such as alcohol and (in some places) cannabis.
In an oft-cited 2010 medical journal article, pharmacologist David Nutt and colleagues at University College London quantified cumulative direct and indirect risks from multiple drugs, including alcohol, cannabis, and anabolic steroids. The publication of the study was not without criticism, and Nutt has acknowledged the limitations of his team’s approach while opining that they “provided the best currently available analysis of an extremely complex multifaceted data set.” Much of the discourse surrounding the paper’s conclusions has focused on comparisons between alcohol and marijuana amid calls for legalization of the latter, but PED advocates have also taken to citing the study for its apparent exoneration of anabolic steroids and the general shadow of doubt that it casts upon the idea that drug harms are intrinsically correlated with legality. Since PEDs are banned in most sports, more empirical and comparative research is needed to concretely capture the risks associated with various drug use parameters in the context of sports. In particular, I think we need more information about the long-term effects of PEDs, and the biochemical effects of various common PED use patterns are deserving of study. But with the information we do have, I think that sports should set levels at which consenting adults can use certain PEDs. This conclusion comes out of a framework that is largely rights-based, indicating that we should give athletes more control over what substances they can take while training and competing within a set of reasonable guidelines. By comparing PEDs and alcohol once again we can identify another more consequentialist argument for allowing broader PED usage.
To elucidate this argument, let’s look at alcohol through a historical lens and consider the impacts of prohibition. In a 2004 paper, Julian Savulescu and colleagues note that “The Prohibition of Alcohol in America during the 1920s led to a change in drinking habits that actually increased consumption. Driven from public bars, people began to drink at home, where the alcohol was more readily available, and the incidence of deaths due to alcoholism rose or remained stable, while they dropped widely around the world in countries without prohibition.” They contend that PED bans hurt safety in a similar manner, advocating instead for a system where athletes undergo health tests in order to be cleared for competition. PED bans lead to clandestine use, leading many users to purchase dangerous gear from disreputable sources. In the Intelligence Squared debate, Radley Balko compared such drugs to the dangerous ‘bathtub gin’ produced during prohibition. Permitting PED use would allow athletes to consult with doctors in order to construct their regimes more carefully, better understand the risks involved with their decisions, and consume only FDA-approved substances. PED liberalization would also incentivize athletes to take drugs that are safer rather than less detectable, and would pave the way for development of improved PEDs going forward. I believe that smaller sporting events with carefully crafted rules6 around PED usage are ideal venues for testing how PED usage works in practice. The Enhanced Games’ no-holds-barred approach is a more extreme departure from current regulations than anything put forward by the PED advocates mentioned thus far. We’ll take a look at specific organizational suggestions for the games later in this piece; I think they’d benefit from trying to take a more active role in the safety of their athletes, rather than spending so much time pretending the problem of safety doesn’t exist.
The search for philosophical objections
The Intelligence Squared debate took place at a time when the debates around PEDs felt especially relevant. In the late 2000s, Major League Baseball was doing damage control after years of widespread PED usage, culminating in a report to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and published mere months before the debate. PED usage had made baseball a more exciting sport, fueling record-setting home run races and allowing pitcher Roger Clemens to win a record seventh Cy Young award after a surprise career resurgence. But the news of widespread drug usage threatened to tarnish the league’s image significantly. In spite of the seemingly dire situation that prompted it, the Mitchell Report was criticized for failing to get to the core of the issue. Motivated by this lack of intellectual rigor in the fight against PEDs, noted bioconservatives Leon Kass and Eric Cohen penned a piece seeking to strengthen the philosophical and social cases against PEDs, which in turn was released shortly after the Intelligence Squared debate took place.
Kass and Cohen sum up their principal argument when they write that “athletic activity and athletic excellence are diminished and dehumanized by the turn to biotechnological enhancements…the steroid-using athlete cheats not simply his competitor, but first and foremost himself.” They pick up here on the previously described ‘spirit of sport’ argument but their version doesn’t rely on the assumption that steroids are already illegal. Moreover, Kass and Cohen go so far to argue that athletic achievements made with the help of PEDs should be devalued because they are inherently less connected to the reality of being human, writing that “when we use performance-enhancing drugs to alter our native biology–whether to make the best even better or the below-average more equal–we paradoxically make improvements to our performance less intelligible, in the sense of being less connected to our own self-conscious activity and exertion.”
Kass’ and Cohen’s core arguments are in many ways extensions of more commonly articulated anti-PED arguments, but their logic ultimately takes us places far beyond these arguments. For instance, consider a theoretical drug that confers an athletic benefit with no side-effects whatsoever. I’d argue that such a substance would be preferable to current PEDs with potential side-effects, and I suspect that even some of those inclined to argue against PEDs on health grounds might view such a drug in a different regard. If we follow the naturalistic argument presented by Kass and Cohen however, we reach the very interesting conclusion that such a drug should still be impermissible, as it still distances athletes from their “native biology.”
As such, while I think Kass and Cohen muster arguments stronger than those typically put forward by opponents of PED usage, I ultimately find their logic unconvincing for a few reasons. Enhancement advocates will often point to genetics as a natural source of unfairness in athletics, arguing that it conflicts with the ‘spirit of sport’ just as much as PED usage. Kass and Cohen take this critique in stride, arguing that “however mysterious the source and the distribution of each person’s natural potential, the individual’s cultivation of his natural endowments is intelligible.” In other words, improving through practice and repetition is an experience that all humans can relate to while improving due to the influence of PEDs is not. Instead, they argue that PED usage makes it difficult for an athlete to tell how much of their improvement was due to this practice and repetition. Moreover, Kass and Cohen deride PEDs as an illegitimate form of training since they originate outside the body, opining that “We appreciate self-achieved excellence because it flows from and manifests the presence of an active, excellence-seeking self.” I don’t actually see conflict here since truly maximizing performance with PEDs requires careful usage of the substances in question in conjunction with all of the other typical components of a rigorous training regime.
Kass and Cohen also write that “the scientist who produced the biological agents of such improvement can certainly understand in scientific terms the genetic workings or physiochemical processes that make it possible. But from the athlete’s perspective, he improves as if by ‘magic’.” Thus, they effectively argue that only that which is comprehensible at a conscious level is actually ‘human’. Never mind the fact that the PED user’s body is still very much the same species as the natural athlete’s: for them the inability to accurately explain improvements without the aid of biomedical tests forces the athlete into “partial alienation from his own efforts.” My more fundamental disagreement with Kass and Cohen stems from how they conceptualize human agency here. No matter how one prepares for competition, it is still the athlete – the human – that enacts any given athletic task or feat. Their body may have higher latent concentrations of certain chemical compounds, but the muscle they may have built while using steroids is made from the same biomolecules as that of any natural athlete. We don’t give more than passing credit to the tennis player’s coach, the baseball player’s bat, or even the Formula 1 driver’s car7 alongside the human they assist because these outside forces are not capable of performing on their own. Julian Savulescu, for example, makes a distinction between winning the Tour de France with the aid of PEDs and winning by riding a motorbike. Writing that “If motorbikes were allowed, it would still be a good sport, but it would no longer be a bicycle race…Athletes train in different, creative ways, but ultimately they still ride similar bikes, on the same course. The skill of negotiating the steep winding descent will always be there.” Thus, the nature of any given sport is defined in part by the equipment that is allowed: riding a motorbike would change the actions that a human must do to compete in the Tour de France, while PEDs do no such thing. PEDs don’t change the fundamental nature of any given sport, they merely adjust the ways in which athletes prepare for competition and potentially the outcomes they’re capable of.
The communal impacts of PEDs
Kass and Cohen also look to set the stakes in their piece, arguing that PED usage is related to larger societal issues. They worry that widespread PED usage will lead young athletes to become jaded about the fate of their own species, writing that “the deeper danger is that the young will come to assume that everything fine is really fake; that human excellence is always compromised; that the greatest performances are always an illusion; that the curtain will inevitably be lifted to reveal the chemist lurking in the shadows.” I’m not convinced that this argument actually supports their position. I’ll concede that the jadedness Kass and Cohen envision could certainly come to fruition if PEDs continue to be banned in professional sports, but I think that more openness about PED usage might actually help prevent such a future. Permissible PEDs will give athletes fewer reasons to hide their usage, likely making it easier for young athletes to determine who among the record-setters are natural or not. I can’t imagine that there will be no role models for young athletes who wish to compete as natural either: even in the PED-dominated sport of bodybuilding, a tradition of natural competition has subsisted for decades. I doubt other sports will be different – unlike bodybuilding, existing norms almost always favor natural competition, and the advantages gained from PEDs might not be of such great magnitude either.
There are, however, other indirect issues that do worry me. I share Kass’ and Cohen’s concern for the youth, as increased visible PED may promote body image issues, particularly in young men. It is also possible that permitting PED usage will have a ‘trickle-down’ effect: clandestine use may increase in youth leagues where drugs are not permitted. These seem to me to be real concerns, and I believe we should take them seriously. In addition to defining the specifics of permissible drug use, sports leagues that allow PED usage will need to work with regulatory organizations to facilitate harm-reduction. Alcohol is legal for consumption by those 21 and older in the US, but there are still age restrictions, penalties such as DUIs to prevent particularly risky behavior, and programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and rehab to combat addiction and facilitate recovery. In fact, during the Intelligence Squared debate, Savulescu proposed redirecting funds currently used to regulate PED usage in professional sports towards combating usage by minors8. Steps towards harm reduction include health tests, as well as evidence-based guidelines for safe PED usage in professional leagues that allow them, and programs to combat various forms of PED dependence. Reasonable restrictions, transparent guidelines, and well-crafted monitoring programs will likely be key in helping open PED usage act in the service of athlete safety. By taking a considered approach to preventing worst-case outcomes and potential spillover effects from PED usage in adult sports leagues, we can better balance individual choice with collective safety.
Some of the arguments made by Savulescu, Kass, and Cohen have steered our discussion towards larger bioethical debates about natural bodies and human enhancement. Let’s step fully into these debates and see how the case of the Enhanced Games fits in.
Bioethics
Before we go any further, I think it’ll be useful to define some of the particulars of human enhancement. An ‘enhancement’ is an ability that goes beyond normal species capabilities gained through science or technology; the word can be used to refer both to the ability itself or the method through which it was gained. (A vaccine or the resulting acquired immunity might both be called ‘enhancements’.) Defining normal species capabilities is not exactly an easy thing to do; even distinguishing between therapeutic devices designed to help disabled individuals reach normal function and enhancements can be difficult. Such debates surfaced in the late 2000s and early 2010s when South African Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius attempted to qualify for the Olympics. Pistorius used prosthetic lower legs that allowed him to exert up to 25% less energy than an able-bodied runner to reach the same speed, resulting in claims that his prostheses conferred an advantage. After being banned from the 2008 Olympics, he was allowed to compete in 2012. Disability scholar Gregor Wolbring notes that “such enhancement-enabling ‘therapeutic’ devices…are a harbinger of change to come” and argues that that the disabled community should be more involved in enhancement debates as a results. Existing function-restoring technologies will likely receive design updates that push them solidly into the realm of enhancements. People who wear glasses today generally don’t enjoy a noticeable over their unspectacled peers but think of Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation – a blind man whose metal VISOR allows him to see light with wavelengths outside the seeing range of any unenhanced human. Indeed, PEDs are typically drugs developed for medical uses that become enhancements when used off-label by athletes with no need for their restorative properties.
It’s also worth noting that PEDs constitute a specific type of enhancement that differs from other technologies we’ll be looking at. PEDs are biochemical substances of either natural or synthetic origin; they’re generally created outside the body and then delivered to produce changes in one’s chemical landscape. Enhancement via PEDs does not occur at the level of DNA, making them distinct from potential genetic enhancements despite both being biological in nature. Other enhancements like Geordi’s VISOR and Pistorius prostheses are technological in nature. The burgeoning fields of nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces are likely to create technological enhancements that are not so visibly distinct from the biological body.
One additional concept that frequently figures into debates about human enhancement is transhumanism, which the Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics defines as “the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints.” Thus, in its simplest form, transhumanism is an ideology that sees enhancement as a broadly positive force key to evolving the human condition. While the two concepts are often discussed in tandem, transhumanism does not necessarily advocate for the evolution of humanity into ‘post-humans’. Additionally, not all advocates of enhancement identify as transhumanists. Defining exactly what constitutes a post-human is quite a sticky topic and is beyond the scope of this essay. However, considering such concepts raises questions that are relevant to our discussion, such as whether humanity has a fixed nature.
Authenticity
With this background in mind, let’s discuss a philosophical treatise that helps us consider views both for and against enhancement side-by-side. In a 2005 paper, bioethicist Erik Parens argues that advocates and opponents of enhancement both seek a way of realizing the ‘authentic self’, but that they have different ideas about how we should act in order to do this. Parens suggests that opponents of enhancement work out of a “gratitude framework” that asks us to “be grateful and remember that we are not the creators of the whole” while enhancement advocates utilize a “creativity framework” which stipulates that “It is also our responsibility to use our creativity to mend and trans- form ourselves and the world.” At the risk of nitpicking Parens’ language, I’ll note that I think that both modes of thinking actually suggest that humans should be grateful for what we’ve given. Rather, I think they differ in how they think we should show that gratitude: by staying as we are or exhibiting the creativity with which we were endowed.
Thus, it seems that these two frameworks lead us to believe quite different things about human nature. The gratitude framework sees humanity as united by a naturally occurring condition; any attempt to deviate from this would separate us from what makes us human. Kass’ and Cohen’s “active, excellence-seeking self”, for instance, would be a manifestation of gratitude. In contrast, the creativity framework allows us to define human nature in one of two ways, which for all practical purposes are the same: either the human condition is to be ever-changing, or there is no fixed human nature. Philosophers such as Nietzsche have viewed this freedom to shape oneself as part of humanity’s fundamental beauty, and I’m inclined to agree. We homo sapiens likely evolved from our genetic precursors around 300,000 years ago, and have changed significantly since then – so much so that the geneticist George Church observes that we would already seem alien to a human plucked from the Stone Age. Even those who venerate ‘the natural’ must therefore contend with changes over time, and I think there’s little reason to argue that such changes are the only ones we should accept. Biological evolution does not optimize any given trait but merely drives organisms towards the overall state that confers the best chance of survival. The human moral systems that have come into being over the past few centuries, however, do not prioritize survival at all costs, often focusing instead on things such as minimizing suffering, or achieving justice. Extreme emotions like anxiety evolved for specific reasons, but our current moral systems stipulate that we should relieve the suffering that some people experience from this predisposition to negative emotions.
This conception of nature is what Bjorn Hoffman terms “normatively bidirectional”, meaning that aspects of human nature can be both positive and negative. One way to conceptualize enhancement might therefore be as a process of finding ways to overcome the negative aspects of human nature. But viewing human nature as normatively bidirectional means that parts of it are positive. If this is the case, should we not also express gratitude for these gifts we’ve been given? This leads us to one of Parens’ crucial insights: that individuals may operate out of different frameworks in different situations. He declares that “moving between frameworks, being ambivalent, seems to me to be a sign of openness and thoughtfulness, not confusion.” I think that trying to strike a balance between the gratitude and creativity frameworks is therefore what we should aspire to. While I don’t believe there are a priori reasons we should never enhance, I think that we should not necessarily exercise creativity for its own sake, lest we risk losing the best of our natural endowments.
Parens also introduces a very interesting case of the creativity framework in action that will figure into subsequent discussion. Discussing transgender activist Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man, Parens observes that Green “did not feel at home in the body of a woman”, leading him to “claim that surgical transformation is a necessary condition for him to experience connectedness, intimacy, and relationship.” This type of enhancement seems to me to deserve a different type of thought than we might give to performance-enhancing drugs. We’ll return to it after diving further into the world of the Enhanced Games.
With the gratitude and creativity frameworks in mind, let’s take a look at the broader social goals of the Enhanced Games. To start, let’s look at statements about the games made by their co-founder - biotech investor and entrepreneur Christian Angermeyer - on his own Substack. In short, Angermeyer wants the Enhanced Games to increase the public profile and acceptance of enhancements broadly. For instance, he hopes that “The ability for athletes to achieve record-breaking accomplishments within a secure environment will inspire the public’s imagination, reinforcing the profound impact of science on human progress.” For Angermeyer, the Games are only part of what he calls the Next Human Agenda, a project in line with the transhumanist goal of re-engineer[ing] our minds and bodies” that drives much of his biotech investing and other ventures. This really gets to the core of why I find the Games so interesting: many within sports would see hosting such an event as a goal within itself, but for the Games’ founders, it’s also a means to much greater ends. Sports hold tremendous cultural importance and debates about enhancement have brewed just below their surface for decades, making them an ideal venue for advertising transhumanist ideas. Angermeyer says he wants the Enhanced Games to be an event that “stimulates scientific breakthroughs and nurtures human advancement.” It’s not clear to me if he sees the Games as being directly impactful (i.e. profits from the Enhanced Games go towards funding enhancement research) or whether he simply hopes it will inspire others, but in either case it’s clear that he wants to promote a transhumanist future.
In their quest to convince the public of the importance of human enhancement, the Enhanced Games have sought to situate themselves as a progressive social movement. Their website is rife with dogwhistles to clearly indicate their positions on major contemporary culture wars. They frequently use the word “science” in place of mentioning PEDs by name9 and decry ‘doping’ as a “colonialist slur.” They acknowledge inspiration from the LGBTQ+ community (D’Souza himself is gay) on their “inclusive language” page and even encourage enhanced athletes to “come out.” While Angermeyer stresses in his Substack post that he doesn’t want to compare the situations of queer people and enhanced athletes, D’Souza is not so coy. In an interview with CityAM, he opined that “being an enhanced athlete today is like being gay 50 years ago – it’s stigmatised, it’s illegal in some sense and it’s done in a dark alley.” But the Enhanced Games’ attempts to bring the LGBTQ+ community into their corner have mostly backfired. Writing for OutSports, Jon Holmes issued a blistering critique of the Games’ language, surmising that “by brazenly appropriating the language of the LGBTQ community, these wealthy financiers are disrespecting the memory of those who went before.” Thus, Holmes makes it clear that unlike the Games’ founders, he does not see PED and enhancement advocacy as being allied with the goals of the LGBTQ+ rights movement10.
Declining trust in science worries me too, but I don’t think the solution is to convince people that they’re just like the Transients, the Morlocks, or even John Galt. The idea of PED users being oppressed in the same way as gay or trans people feels misguided to me, and smacks of the objectivist conceit that the exceptional among us must not be held back by the unremarkable. The LGBTQ+ community has dealt not only with legal discrimination but claims of mental illness and outright violence. I’m aware of no such action against PED users. On its website, the Enhanced Games lauds athletes who set records while using PEDs for their “enduring bravery in the face of oppression.” In the light of D’Souza’s comparison of enhanced athletes and queer people, it seems that the Games are equating these Enhanced World Records to acts of protest made by queer people against discriminatory laws. Being gay or trans is not a choice, and existing as an LGBTQ+ person when such identities are outlawed is an unavoidable form of protest. Clandestine PED usage always involves a choice and thus does not constitute a similar form of resistance. If any of these Enhanced World Recordholders truly prioritized using science to push athletics forward, they would have advocated for the repeal of PED bans or establishment of alternative competitions rather than simply using the drugs to gain an advantage.
The nuts and bolts of enhancement
We can see then, how the notion of PED usage as enhancement forces us to consider the creativity framework a bit differently than Parens’ example of gender transition surgery. Performance enhancing drugs may validate athletes’ affinity for their sport by allowing them to compete harder than they would be able to otherwise, but they lack the truly transformational power of something like gender transition surgery. These two examples are by no means representative of all possible enhancements either. Enhancements might be biomedical (i.e., genome editing therapies to confer resistance to virus infection), sensory (i.e. Neil Harbisson’s BlueTOOTH), or otherwise. Angermeyer for his part, foresees five ‘waves’ of enhancement including varieties concerned with cognitive function (focus, etc.) and the improvement of individual happiness. The point I want to make is that each of these enhancement goals will force us to think differently about the gratitude and creativity frameworks. Julian Savulescu argues that recognizing a moral obligation to prevent and treat disease precludes a similar obligation to pursue any enhancement that “promotes human well-being.” Indeed, many individuals already make this argument implicitly when they criticize parents for not vaccinating their children. New biological (genetic or biochemical) enhancements with the potential to reduce individuals’ susceptibility to disease may come to be seen in a similar light. But as Savulescu notes in his paper, health and well-being are not one in the same; I suspect that other enhancements, especially in the emotional vein, may spark arguments about what precisely constitutes the latter.
It's often said that we should consider the ends of human enhancement technologies to be more important than their means or mechanisms. While I think it makes sense to start from the ends, I also believe that the mechanism of an enhancement is important for practical and philosophical reasons. For example, imagine two enhancements developed by longevity researchers that have the exact same effect of extending life by an average of five years. One treatment involves taking a pill at semi-regular intervals and has no side-effects while the other involves a one-time gene surgery that also makes it 2% harder to concentrate. The drugs were developed for the same purpose and have the same effect, but differences inherent to their mechanisms lead to different philosophical considerations. The value of the first therapy is unambiguous while the value of the second is in the eye of the beholder, who might conclude that it actually has net-negative value. If I had to guess, I’d bet that most enhancements in the near future will resemble the second treatment more closely than the first. Treatments will not always be easy-to-swallow pills with no side effects – they’re more likely to be things that give people pause: off-label medicines, treatments with variable risk, and the like. Beyond this, mechanisms will also influence the practical elements of enhancement, including cost, social acceptability, and the specifics of development and regulation.
In this section of the essay, we’ve situated PEDs in broader philosophical conversation surrounding human enhancement and gradually zoomed in, ultimately finding ourselves discussing the nuts and bolts of future enhancements. I’ve argued that enhancement does not intrinsically distance us from the human condition, which also suggests that PEDs do not inherently conflict with the spirit of sport. At the same time, I’ve argued that details matter, and that we should consider the mechanisms of enhancement alongside the goals they help us achieve. Maintaining this zoomed-in view, let’s return to the Enhanced Games for some final thoughts about how we might want an event to look in light of what we’ve discussed.
The Enhanced Games in practice
I’ve argued throughout this essay that biological enhancement does not conflict with the ideals of sports, and that some current PEDs fit the description of such acceptable enhancements when examined at a mechanistic level. Despite all of this, I’m not really sure what will happen when the Enhanced Games actually take place. Despite claims that sports will become vastly more exciting with widespread PED usage, it seems likely that the advantages conferred by the drugs will vary between competitions. Additionally, the fact that PED usage is already so widespread makes me skeptical of D’Souza’s claims that we’ll see a whole slate of new records. I don’t doubt that the athletes competing in the Games will be able to use PEDs more effectively than their peers who are already doping in traditional leagues, but I’m not sure that the benefits will be so great as to create an entirely new class of athletes. As much as the Games might fancy themselves ‘disruptors’ in the sports world, the fact remains that their competition lacks the historical and cultural provenance of the Olympics so I suspect they’ll struggle to recruit a critical mass of truly world-class competitors. But beyond this skepticism, I’m troubled by certain aspects of the Enhanced Games’ brand. Their rhetoric is consistently counterproductive, I think a moderate approach is preferable to their no-holds-barred approach, and their focus on elite athletes gives me pause about how human enhancement might actually play out. Let’s discuss these concerns in this final section of the essay.
What should they do?
Since the day they were announced, the Enhanced Games have communicated primarily through bombastic claims, shunning nuance and hurting their public relations. Jon Holmes’ critique in Outsports indicates that the Games haven’t done a great job appealing to their target audience, meaning that they might end up hurting progress towards the high-minded goals Angermeyer talks about. The Enhanced Games would have gotten a lot of negative press no matter how they advertised themselves, but I think a more serious attitude could decrease the risk that they fly too close to the sun and end up actually decreasing the public appetite for enhancement. They’ve also taken to vilifying (quite harshly) both athletic governing bodies and existing competitions – I recognize the need to call out corruption where it exists, but their language frequently lacks nuance and can even come off as willfully ignorant. It’s not hard to see why the Enhanced Games have adopted this gonzo approach: it’s much more in line with the technolibertarianism that clearly inspires D’Souza, Angermeyer, and Thiel than the moderate one I’m proposing. The Enhanced Games are designed to show that entrepreneurial capitalism will lead to better, safer sports than the current regulatory system. But this doesn’t mean that they can’t take the health of their athletes more seriously, even if only to avoid a catastrophe in the court of public opinion. Nothing would set their cause back more than an athlete dying or getting seriously injured while competing in an event.
The Games’ messaging has fluctuated in a rather confused manner between ‘juiced to the gills’ and ‘safety first’; I think they’d do a better job of selling themselves as pro-science if they stuck to the latter. While D’Souza stated relatively early on that the Enhanced Games will utilize electrocardiographs to test athletes’ health, they only added a page on health testing to their website a few months later, in December 2023. A more comprehensive safety plan would go a long way towards portraying the Enhanced Games as an organization that truly cares for its athletes and would help frame enhancement as a considered process – not one that chases progress at all costs. I suspect they’d resist the idea of preventing athletes that fail health tests from competing, but even so, I think such assessments would give athletes a more accurate idea of the risks they face. Additionally, I think it would be prudent to have athletes discuss their PED regimes with doctors if we’re to truly “do it all out in the open” as D’Souza says.
Ultimately, I understand that the decision on what to take will have to be left with the athletes, lest the Games betray their central premise. But if we’re to know the true results of allowing PED usage, I think the Games need to pay attention to what happens, especially given the anti-medical sentiment8 traditionally associated with PED usage by bodybuilders. Is the construction of PED regimes a collaborative process when done within the rules or do athletes and doctors clash? Does the pressure of competition lead athletes to take more drugs than recommended? Do athletes give credence to safety or simply seek to optimize their performance at all costs? These are just a few of the questions that might be asked to probe the dynamics that emerge with more widespread PED usage. One final recommendation I’d like to make is that the Games ask athletes not to make their regimes public. I hope that PED usage can remain as safe as possible wherever it becomes allowed, but I think we should avoid sharing too much information about the specifics until we have a better idea of potential indirect harms and spillover effects. Events like the Enhanced Games are effectively pilot programs for PEDs in sports: they have the opportunity to showcase the true effects of relaxing regulations, but must be diligently administered if they hope to make the case for doing so on a larger scale. The direct and indirect effects of these small events must be studied before PEDs become allowed more broadly within the sports world.
Who is transhumanism really for?
Before I conclude this piece, I’d like to examine one final question about the ethics of human enhancement that I believe the Enhanced Games implicitly raises. Human enhancement and especially ‘transhumanism’ have come to be associated with tech money, leading to a certain kind of indirect skepticism: critics either suspect the motives of billionaires or simply come to loathe enhancement via its association with people they already don’t like. While Nick Bostrom notes that the concepts of ‘hubris’ and ‘playing God’ have long been deployed in opposition to enhancement, the perception that tech billionaires are simply looking to fuel personal vanity projects has undoubtedly fed this narrative in recent years. I think the question of inequality looms large over the enhancement debate: unequal access to enhancement technologies could vastly increase existing modalities of inequality both within and between countries. I think it’s unnecessary and likely impossible to guarantee completely even access to enhancements, but I worry that enhancements might be so unevenly distributed that the inequality they create offsets or even outweighs any social good that they create.
With its focus on breaking records and making the best athletes even better, the Enhanced Games does little to abate this concern. It’s possible that if the Games become a profitable venture, the money made will be funneled to research aimed at helping a broader swath of the population. But this is only a possibility - the core of my skepticism is in fact the overall approach they’ve taken. The Enhanced Games want to put the few first and wait for their success to (hopefully) eventually trickle down to everyone else. Besides, is it even worthwhile or justifiable to focus on enhancement while diseases still pose such a large and unevenly distributed health burden? Instead of trying to fight aging, shouldn’t we focus on decreasing infections in order to help people live longer? This argument implicitly identifies what Bjorn Hofmann calls the “opportunity cost” of human enhancement. A dollar does not have the same impact in one area that it has in another, meaning that a sophisticated analysis of this worry requires more attention than I can give it here. But at the very least, such arguments push us to consider the truth of our motivations and goals, and how they might best be achieved. I’m not advocating that we should avoid enhancement research until we live in a Star Trek-like post-disease world. Rather, I hope that we can collectively think hard about where resources are needed the most.
Some final thoughts
Even if individuals like Sebastian Coe think that the Enhanced Games don’t merit a second thought, I think it’s likely that the Games will have an audience given the financial backing the event has received and the ongoing stream of news it’s generated (while I was writing this, a docuseries about the Games was announced). I hope that the Games are entertaining, and I certainly hope that they end up providing some sort of social benefit. Thinking about human enhancement might seem frivolous at times, especially when sports are involved. But I think we need to think creatively and seriously about the future, because if we don’t, it will sneak up and catch us completely unaware. Indeed, the biological enhancement space experienced such a surprise when Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui shocked the world by announcing the birth of the first genome-edited babies11.
I believe that human enhancement has lots of potential, from allowing us to fight diseases more effectively and fully exploring latent identities to helping us exercise biological creativity in other ways. But I also take this responsibility seriously. We may need to be brave and push forward when enhancement looks to ameliorate pressing issues, but we may also need to step back and think. If sufficiently powerful enhancements are used without thought of their consequences, we risk converging on a set of genes or values that will be effectively ‘locked-in’. In this era of rapid technological advancement, our greatest challenge may well be to ensure that as we enhance our bodies, we also elevate our moral compass, ensuring a future where human enhancement enriches not just individuals, but humanity as a whole.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Heather Cook, John DeTurk, Ace DeTurk, and Hannah Karp for providing feedback on drafts of this essay. I’m also grateful to Elie Svoll, Amanda Vera, Lauren McCarthy, and Petr Skopintsev for thoughtful discussions that helped shape the piece.
Several different surveys have concluded this over the years, including some from the Washington Post, Harris Interactive, and a group at the University of Chicago.
If you’re thinking that Aron D’Souza’s name sounds familiar, it’s likely because he pitched Thiel the idea of bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s 2013 lawsuit against Gawker Media. Gawker had outed Thiel as gay years earlier and the suit ultimately bankrupted the company.
I refer, of course, to Leon Kass’ famous (or perhaps infamous) 1997 article “The Wisdom of Repugnance”, where he argues that individuals should put stock in their natural revulsion to novel biotechnologies such as human cloning. I suspect he’d be willing to apply the principle to PEDs as well.
If we look at the data a little closer, we can see that the percentage of the audience opposed to PED usage only fell four points, meaning that the pro-PED team mostly gained ground by convincing individuals who were undecided at the debate’s inception. Still, this indicates to me that the pro-PED team ‘won’ the debate.
I should briefly mention that I was only able to find one of the three papers they reference on this page online. The claim that steroids build muscle is not in question (why would athletes use them otherwise?), but I’m a little confused at why these papers don’t seem to exist.
An effective set of rules would necessitate the involvement of doctors, psychiatrists, and sociologists in addition to athletes themselves. These regulations would likely allow only narrow PED usage at first and expand over time with the collection of more information on PED safety and athletes’ evolving habits. From the information I’ve gleaned, the initial PEDs allowed would likely be supplemental doses of compounds our bodies already produce, including testosterone, human growth hormone, and erythropoietin. Dosage limits and health tests would need to be included to gauge the effects of athletes’ usage.
I’ve chosen these three examples because they’re all external (read: outside the body) agents that influence athletes’ performance, in spite of the differences in how and to what extent they do so. Even in Formula 1, where the importance of the car rivals that of the driver, the human directing the vehicle is still the entity that receives recognition for athletic achievements.
I should note that funding allocations like this are dependent on where and how PEDs become allowed, as a single rogue entrepreneurial venture like the Enhanced Games is not likely to force international sports governance organizations to change their policies overnight and move money around.
This is actually quite interesting as sports sociologists have generally observed that PED users develop tacit knowledge that falls outside the realm of biomedicine. Sociologist Lee Monaghan calls this ‘ethnopharmacological’ knowledge, while anthropologist Mair Underwood prefers ‘folk pharmacology’ and a more colloquial phrase might be ‘bro science’. In any case, PED-using bodybuilders have generally been observed to be quite skeptical of the scientific and medical establishments.
The elephant in the room here is the ongoing culture war surrounding transgender athletes. This topic is complex and falls decidedly beyond the scope of this essay, but I’m very curious to see if it surfaces in relation to the Enhanced Games at any point.
A detailed explanation of this chain of events is beyond the scope of this essay, but as a CRISPR researcher and genome editing ELSI enthusiast I feel obligated to provide some further reading. This book provides the most succinct account of the Jiankui Affair, while this one provides what I think is the most detailed and insightful perspective.