Improving Sports Performance? Enhancements and the Future of Sport

Abstract

This chapter looks at human enhancement domains—the physical, affective, cognitive, moral, and spiritual—and identifies some sport enhancements that are already used or may emerge in the near future. Enhancing technologies are proliferating and range from gene editing, to robots on the football field, to brain stimulation. Five sport enhancement ethics issues are identified: the power of words to shape the conversation; fairness; justice and choice; the meaning of being human; and the meaning of sport. Values and intentionality emerge as important considerations in the sports enhancement ethics debate.