# Transcript

INTERVIEWER
In sport, enhancement is the name of the game and that’s what most athletes want to do, enhance performance and they’re prepared to do anything within the law and often things which are pushing at the edge or going beyond the law. How could you argue to an athlete that they shouldn’t be using techniques which are available to them for enhancement?
MICHAEL SANDEL
There are two obvious arguments. One is safety. Steroids for example have long-term medical risks. A second familiar reason is fairness. If there is a general ban in the Olympics on various forms of enhancement or blood doping or various forms of muscle enhancement then if user surreptitiously, illicitly it puts the other at a disadvantage, but I don’t think that safety and fairness are the only reasons to oppose genetic enhancement in sports.
INTERVIEWER
In your book The Case Against Perfection you use the example of Tiger Woods who allegedly had his eyesight dramatically improved from myopia to very good vision by laser technology. Now that seems to be perfectly acceptable – that he could have worn glasses and achieved a similar sort of effect. Why is that alright but an enhancement beyond that is not okay?
MICHAEL SANDEL
Right beyond safety and fairness my main objection to the use of performance enhancing genetic therapies, for example, has to do with the worry that it will corrupt sports and athletic competition as a place where we admire the cultivation and display of natural gifts. It will distance us from the human dimension of sport. If you imagine a future when it were possible to engineer a bionic athlete let’s say in baseball, which is my favourite sport, who could hit every pitch for a home run of 600 feet it would be maybe an amusing spectacle but it wouldn’t be a sport. We might admire the pharmacists or the engineer but would we admire the athlete? We would lose contact with the human dimension, the display of natural human gifts that I think is essential to what we admire and appreciate in sports.