Quiz Feb.16

The Case Against Perfection, ch2-Bionic Athletes

1. As athletic enhancement increases, what fades?

2. Does Sandel think the main problem with enhancement is that it undermines effort and erodes human agency?

3. What do genetically altered athletes corrupt?

4. Sandel thinks Lasik surgery to correct normal vision would be an acceptable enhancement for a golfer under what condition?

5. Does Sandel allege an ethical problem with mega-calorie diets?

6. What is "far-fetched" about the view that the rules of a game are arbitrary?

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DQ:
1. A devil's advocate might say, of the complaint that an enhanced performance is less impressive, that if it's so easy to hit 70+ home runs on steroids then more than just two should have been able to do it. The implication is that, enhanced or not, elite athletic accomplishment is entertaining and exceptional. What do you think?

2. Do you agree that we should be a more humble and less "promethean" species, more appreciative of the gift of life and less willful, less confident in our ability to "remake nature, including human nature"?

3. "Striving is not the point of sports; excellence is." (28) Agree? Were McGwire's and Bonds's achievements less excellent than Ruth's and Maris's?

4. Is it clear to you where we should draw the line between "natural gifts" and artificial enhancements? Isn't medical science an expression of culture, itself in turn a natural evolutionary adaptation on the part of our species? Aren't nature and culture on the same continuum? Or does this attitude extend a blank check for any and every humanly engendered aleration as equally "natural"?

5. Do transfusions, hormone injecctions (EPOs), altitude training, and genetic modifications all share the same ethical status, if their effect on performance is the same? 33

6. What threatens "the integrity of [a] game"?
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	Oxford Academic (@OUPAcademic)
2/12/16, 6:40 PM As life expectancy increases, so should our understanding of the issues surrounding #aging - especially in #medicine bit.ly/1T5ignD

	Rose Eveleth (@roseveleth)
2/14/16, 7:46 AM Male biology students consistently underestimate female peers, study finds washington.edu/news/2016/02/1…

• Some Christians believe God rewards the faithful. So why did I get Stage 4 cancer? nyt
Death goes in and out of fashion. The topic lingers behind euphemisms for a few years, and then someone calls it forth again: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with her disciplined “On Death and Dying” in 1969; Susan Sontag with her angry but profound “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and the empathetic follow-up “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” in 1988; Derek Humphry, implausibly, with his suicide handbook “Final Exit” in 1991; Sherwin Nuland with his magisterial “How We Die” in 1993; more recently, Joan Didion with her agonizingly precise “The Year of Magical Thinking” in 2005; and Atul Gawande with his humane “Being Mortal” in 2014. Each of these books argues, one way or another, for a continuum between life and its conclusion. The gloss of youthful vitality can persuade us that life is for the living, but life is also for the dying, and repudiating that ultimate punctuation escalates our anxiety and deprives us of final dignity. Time and again, we must clarify our individual and collective beliefs about how the last chapter changes the rest of the narrative. “Or not to be” is not in fact a question. (continues at Andrew Solomon, The Good Death...)

	Longreads (@Longreads)
2/15/16, 5:48 PM Triplets, a legal battle, and murky ethics in the surrogacy industry: lgrd.co/1Wo7MyR @Slate#longreads pic.twitter.com/NzsaGJBZAD

	bioethics.net (@bioethics_net)
2/15/16, 5:24 PM #Bioethics: If U.S. continues to ignore CRISPR regulation we wont be ready for the futureow.ly/Ymq58 pic.twitter.com/yJlpaOhqTz

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The late David Carr on Black Mirror, MicroSoft's HoloLens, and our dwindling experience of "actual unencumbered reality."

Micah Hester's colloquium talk at Vandy presented several ambiguous cases of "brain death" and "biological death," including that of Jahi McMath...

Breaking Up With My Meds By DIANA SPECHLERThe drugs I take for anxiety, depression and insomnia have helped, but I’ve decided to quit.

THE NEW OLD AGE Continued Questions on Benzodiazepine Use in Older Patients By PAULA SPAN A new reports that among 65- to 80-year-old Americans, close to 9 percent use drugs like Valium, Xanax, Ativan and Klonopin.

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‘The Patient Will See You Now,’ by Eric Topol, reviewed by Sandeep Jauhar, nyt bk rev 2.13.15. 

Despite awesome increases in computational power, I think it is premature to conclude that doctors’ judgments — not to mention their healing touch — can be rendered by computers. In an illustrative vignette, Topol writes about a plane flight he was on in which a passenger lost consciousness soon after takeoff. In the air, Topol performed a smartphone examination of the patient, including checking an electrocardiogram, measuring blood pressure and doing a cardiac ultrasound. The patient was fine, but despite this investigative tour de force, Topol curiously concludes that the passenger did not require a doctor on the plane to make the diagnosis. “All that was needed were the tools to collect the data,” he says. This, I believe, is wishful thinking.
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Another old Sandel post:
Walk on air

...today’s always a gift, and that’s why we call it the present. Dare we open it? (No peeking? How about peak experiencing?)

Gift is Michael Sandel’s keyword in today’s Bioethics chapter, too, as his Case Against Perfection continues in chapter two. He’s an anti-doping anti-perfectionist (with the world’s most popular course on justice), worried that we’ll design ourselves right out of the possibility of accomplishing our own goals and, ultimately, achieving meaningful lives.

“Bionic Athletes,” enhanced by various means (not restricted to pharmaceuticals), have looked the gifthorse of natural (some will say “god-given”) athleticism in the mouth (he says). They’ve corrupted their respective sports and compromised our capacity to appreciate their gifts and their games.

So what? Games are only, well, games. Arbitrary, unimportant, meaningless. Right?

Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s not the central argument here. Let me just say, though, that I’ve experienced at least a few glorious afternoons in the bleachers that felt anything but “meaningless” – they felt like what James Carse calls “infinte games,” played for their own sake and experienced as ends in themselves. Never mind, though, for now.

Sandel’s clear insinuation is  that we’re in danger of killing the biggest game of all, the game of life. If we make winning by all means the only thing, we’ll be robbing life of intrinsic interest, meaning, joy. Joie de vivre is the greatest gift; the dopers and cheaters and transhumanist dreamers may yet prove to be our greatest killjoys.

The deeper danger of enhancement and genetic engineering is that they represent a kind of hyper-agency, a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires.

At stake, Sandel says, is “an appreciation of the gifted character of human powers and achievements.” Such appreciation reflects a “religious sensibility” that is grateful but humble, and not so presumptuous as to try and replicate those powers. Hmmm.

Do nature’s gifts require and reward such self-abnegating gratitude? Does the “religion of humanity”?

There follows an interesting comparison, interesting at least to baseball fans, of Pete Rose and Joe DiMaggio.

Then, a surprising and at least overstated (probably false) claim: “striving is not the point of sports; excellence is.” I think Sandel really does not want to say that, does not mean what his words may convey. He wants to block the kind of ambitious striving that lusts after (say) seven medals at the Tour de France, or 73 suspiciously -amped Home Runs, or a shortcut to the marathon finish line. But surely he does not oppose striving against one’s own previous limitations to overcome internal resistance and achieve more than we knew we could.

Don’t some admirable athletes (and humans in general) possess a gift for striving?

I do think Sandel’s right to point out that “success” in baseball must continue to mean a 70% (or so) failure rate, in order to sustain our interest. I also agree that Judge Scalia is full of peanuts when he calls all rules “arbitrary.”

Sandel did an interesting Philosophy Bites interview worth hearing. His Harvard lectures on justice are wildly popular. He was also described in a recent profile as a “rock star.”

Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement (Part Two: “Walk on Air”) also raises crucial questions about the genetic gift of a sweet and happy disposition, and how well- or ill-advised we and our heirs might be to experiment with re-gifting happiness via biogenetic interventions and therapies. There are “big winners in genetics’ happiness roulette” (the biggest are hyperthymic, “every day bathed in renewable elation”) and relative losers. It’s not fair. Can we level the playing field? Can “peak experience” be packaged and sold?

A few highlights from today’s Generosity:

People want to live longer and better. When they can do both, they will. Ethics is just going to have to catch up.

…we might still become the authors of our own lives.

One glance at the only available planetary future made having children at best
benighted and at worst depraved. Nulliparity— human build-down— was a moral imperative… she was already a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

Resolved: the human race would have been better off if the agricultural revolution had never happened. Resolved: the government should cap the salaries of professional athletes… Resolved: the human race will not survive its own ingenuity. Resolved: the cure for our chronic despair is just around the corner… Tonia Schiff can make the most cataclysmic debate almost as entertaining as reality itself.

Candace helps students understand that feeling good about themselves is more important than being “perfect…”

It took the species millions of years to climb down out of the trees, and only ten years more to jump into the fishbowl.

“If I knew a drug that produced sustained, intense, level, loving well-being without any trace of stupor or edge, I’d take it myself.” She cocked her head and twisted her lips. “You’d have to. Everyone else would already be on it.”

You have cause — so have we all — of joy.

Does generous [heart, joie, expansion, big feeling] include all those who are by nature genuine, generative, anyone pregnant with connections, keen to make more kin?

     Or is generosity a question of having the right blood, the innate germ of the genteel gentry?

Enough philosophy; she has sworn off it. Philosophy never consoled anyone.

I’d spent my whole life coming here, and now I was home. Everyone alive deserves to feel that way once.

Only once?

And so we’re off to BNA. Happy flight, kids. Walk on air.