John Feinstein offers an insightful and timely argument in today’s edition of The Washington Post. In “Teach the ‘Good Kids,’” Feinstein explains that athletes often get a pass on bad behavior — even criminal behavior — because teams are desperate for their talent.

In today’s commentary, I review C. J. Mahaney’s newest book, Humility: True Greatness. C.J. is the right man for this job in almost every respect. Almost every respect.

Should human beings accept certain limitations in terms of cognitive ability and physical strength? These questions take on a whole new urgency in the face of recent developments in the fields of psychostimulants and other pharmaceutical innovations. Moreover, as if these developments do not represent enough of a challenge, the development of computer-enhanced human intelligence may be just around the corner.

Professor Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University sees the controversy in sports over the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs as part of a larger and more threatening issue — the use of performance-enhancing technologies to redefine humanity. Writing in The Los Angeles Times, Professor Sarewitz argues: Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance — memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it’s likely to be increasingly futile.
Furthermore, Professor Sarewitz points to the ethical confusion — even the ethical cluelessness — that characterizes many of those who advocate for a posthuman future:
This sort of contextual cluelessness is rampant in the world of techno-optimism. Software designer Ramez Naam has suggested that “the debate over human enhancement is at heart a debate over human freedom. Should individuals and families have the right to alter their own minds and bodies, or should that power be held by the state? In a democratic society, it’s every man and woman who should determine such things, and not the state.”But who, after all, is making the key decisions determining how research on human enhancement should be supported, advanced and applied? It’s people such as those at the meetings I just described.I suspect the last thing on Earth that Naam would want is for “individuals and families” — most of whom know little about the relevant science and technology — to be involved in making these choices. What he really means, I suppose, is that “individuals and families,” playing their roles as consumers, will get to exercise some modest amount of choice in the matter, after products are developed and marketed, and perhaps in response to the ways that the Joneses next door are enhancing their children. Yet if this is Naam’s idea of freedom, it is a disturbingly shriveled version of the real thing.
Clearly, there is more at stake than steroid use by professional athletes. Is there no limit to what humans should do to enhance “performance?”
See Daniel Sarewitz, “Will Human Enhancement Make Us Better?,” The Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2005.

Fans tuning in for Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast may have been looking for an all-American sports spectacle. What they got–at least in the halftime show–went far beyond anything related to athletics. Instead, America’s families were subjected to a burlesque of pornographic images, erotic music, and Janet Jackson’s exposed flesh.

“I can’t honestly remember the first time I bet on baseball.” Pete Rose may not remember when he began his gambling on baseball, but he knows full well where it has led him–to a lifetime ban from the sport he once hoped to personify. Now, “Charlie Hustle” is trying to hustle his way into the baseball Hall of Fame.