If you want to argue that athletes shouldn’t be using PEDs because they may suffer terrible health consequences, feel free. It’s risky business. But arguing that enhancement should not occur at all is futile. We’re all going to be enhanced in the future. It’s not a matter of if it will be done but how. In “The Case for Enhancing People” in the New Atlantis, Ronald Bailey examines pretty much every angle of the topic, including the potential inequality of our brave new world. An excerpt:

“Those who favor restricting human enhancements often argue that human equality will fall victim to differential access to enhancement technologies, resulting in conflicts between the enhanced and the unenhanced. For example, at a 2006 meeting called by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Richard Hayes, the executive director of the left-leaning Center for Genetics and Society, testified that ‘enhancement technologies would quickly be adopted by the most privileged, with the clear intent of widening the divisions that separate them and their progeny from the rest of the human species.’ Deploying such enhancement technologies would ‘deepen genetic and biological inequality among individuals,’ exacerbating ‘tendencies towards xenophobia, racism and warfare.’ Hayes concluded that allowing people to use genetic engineering for enhancement ‘could be a mistake of world-historical proportions.’

Meanwhile, some right-leaning intellectuals, such as Nigel Cameron, president of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, worry that ‘one of the greatest ethical concerns about the potential uses of germline interventions to enhance normal human functions is that their availability will widen the existing inequalities between the rich and the poor.’ In sum, egalitarian opponents of enhancement want the rich and the poor to remain equally diseased, disabled, and dead.

Even proponents of genetic enhancement, such as Princeton University biologist Lee M. Silver, have argued that genetic engineering will lead to a class of people that he calls the ‘GenRich,’ who will occupy the heights of the economy while unenhanced ‘Naturals’ provide whatever grunt labor the future economy needs. In Remaking Eden (1997), Silver suggests that eventually ‘the GenRich class and the Natural class will become … entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.’

In the same vein, George J. Annas, Lori B. Andrews, and Rosario M. Isasi have laid out a rather apocalyptic scenario in the American Journal of Law and Medicine:

The new species, or ‘posthuman,’ will likely view the old ‘normal’ humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist.

Let’s take their over-the-top scenario down a notch or two. The enhancements that are likely to be available in the relatively near term to people now living will be pharmacological — pills and shots to increase strength, lighten moods, and improve memory. Consequently, such interventions could be distributed to nearly everyone who wanted them. Later in this century, when safe genetic engineering becomes possible, it will likely be deployed gradually and will enable parents to give their children beneficial genes for improved health and intelligence that other children already get naturally. Thus, safe genetic engineering in the long run is more likely to ameliorate than to exacerbate human inequality.” (Thanks Browser.)