Enhancement and Cheating

Abstract

A common worry expressed about the use of pharmacological cognitive enhancements such as Modafinil and Ritalin is that using them constitutes cheating (Fukuyama 2002; henderson 2008). Those who enhance in this way are better placed to beat their unenhanced peers to the top educational qualifications and jobs; accordingly, enhancing is unfair. Is this worry justi-fied?The worry about cheating is often bound up with other worries about enhancement. These include concerns about safety, addictiveness, and acces-sibility. These concerns can be addressed independently of the concern about cheating, and so, to avoid complicating matters, let us assume that cognitive enhancement is safe to use, that it is non-addictive, and that it is accessible to everyone, not just the rich. ought we still to be worried about the fairness of cognitive enhancement? Well, in the absence of these ancillary concerns, one of the issues that remain is that those who choose not to enhance will be at a disadvantage, left behind in the race for the best qualifications and jobs by their enhanced peers. Is this fair? Should people be free to use drugs like Modafinil and Ritalin to get ahead, or should education authorities and employers ban such enhancement, perhaps introducing urine tests to ensure that this ban is enforced, as cambridge neuroscientist Sir Gabriel horn has recently been quoted to suggest (henderson 2008)?We can start with a terminological point. Whether or not the use of cogni-tive enhancement drugs constitutes cheating depends on whether the use of such drugs is forbidden in the rules of the game. currently, the rules to which students and employees must adhere typically forbid activities like plagia-rism, forging references, and lying about one’s educational and employment history—and those students and employees who break these rules can expect to be punished. Rules against the use of cognitive enhancement drugs are not currently widespread. ought they to be?The answer to this question depends on what we think is more important: a level playing field on which students and employees can compete equally for