Ethical issues in performance enhancement research methods
Saturday, October 14, 2023
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM ET
Location: Chasseur (Third Floor)
Human enhancement is a perennial issue in bioethics, but little performance enhancement research exists in the clinical literature. In this paper, following a brief discussion of where "performance enhancement" fits into the larger enhancement literature, we report the results of a review of the performance enhancement research literature—that is, not the bioethics literature on human enhancement, but clinical research on interventions explicitly used for performance enhancement. We identify three broad methodological issues with performance enhancement research that limit its scientific and social value: small samples, restrictive inclusion criteria, and low quality endpoints. We then illustrate the depth of these problems using the most studied form of enhancement in existence today: caffeine. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these issues for ethical study design, and the possibility of research into enhancement technologies that pose greater than minimal risk.
Samuel Angelli-Nichols – Philosophy – University of Massachusetts Lowell; Yara Omar – Philosophy – University of Massachusetts Lowell