The Moral Limits of Enhancement Technologies in Elite Sport

Abstract

Elite sport's anti-doping regime rests on three overlapping justifications -- fairness, a therapy/enhancement distinction, and health paternalism -- none of which, on close inspection, is as stable as official rulebooks imply. This perspective examines the fairness argument against enhancement and shows why it survives only in a narrower, enforceability-focused form once genetic luck is taken seriously as an unearned advantage of its own. It then traces how the therapy/enhancement line, never designed for bodies already trained and selected for biological extremity, is increasingly treated in the literature as an administrative convenience rather than a
principled boundary. Two live regulatory flashpoints are examined in detail: gene doping, where the ethical verdict against the
practice arrived well before any reliable means of detecting it, and sex-based eligibility rules for women's competition, where policy has arguably moved faster than the underlying evidence. We argue that a defensible position going forward must treat these cases separately rather than as instances of a single 'enhancement' problem, prohibiting what is genuinely unsafe and coercive while being
transparent about how much of current doctrine rests on contestable line-drawing rather than settled bioethical consensus.