Leon Kass of the President's Council on Bioethics and Eric Cohen of The New Atlantis (a "must read" publication if ever there was one) have a stimulating essay in the Washington Post on athletes and performance enhancement called "The Price of Winning at Any Cost."

We are a long way from the sporting days of "Chariots of Fire," when an Olympics-bound athlete could be censured for using a professional trainer. Today, although we still fuss about the use of steroids in sports, we are actually complicit in the growing dependencies of our gigantic heroes. We not only enjoy the spectacle of greater power and speed pitted against fiercer pursuit and bone-crushing tackles; we cannot readily articulate our unease with performance-enhancing drugs -- either in athletics or in many other activities.

That is partly because it is not easy to specify the ethical difference between enhancing performance through improved equipment, diet or training, and enhancing it through surgery, genetic alteration or drugs. How exactly are Air Jordan basketball shoes different from steroids? Why do we accept dietary supplements but reject blood-doping? Why is it okay for Tiger Woods to have surgery to obtain better than 20/20 vision, but improper for asthmatic runners to use amphetamine-containing inhalers? How shall we distinguish coffee to keep us awake from modafinil to enable us to go sleepless for days? If it is acceptable to give short children growth hormone to make them taller, why not give thin athletes steroids to bulk them up?

The absence of bright lines between these approaches does not make the territories themselves indistinct. With a little reflection, we can distinguish daily training for an upcoming race from running the race with the benefit of steroids.

This is true so far as it goes -- doing wind sprints and squat thrusts to train is not shooting 400 ccs of gym juice. But there's enourmous pressure for athletes to at least consider using performance enhancements whose negative consequences are not so large or immediate to serve as sufficient near-term deterrents.

So, should we want to, how do we convince athletes it's not worth the risk? Well, there are tougher penalties that may or may not work as intended.

And then there's a kind of consciousness-raising effort. Kass/Cohen try it here:

We are well on our way to gaining greater biotechnical power to reengineer the human body and mind, all in the service of "superior performance." What kind of society might we become? We might come to see human running and dog races, singers and synthesizers, linebackers and robots, as little different from one another. Human athletes, here mostly for our entertainment or our use, might become little more than props. We might lose sight of the difference between real and false excellence, and eventually not care. And in the process, the very ends we desire might become divorced from any idea of what is humanly superior, and therefore humanly worth seeking or admiring. Children, as President Bush noted in the State of the Union address, would be sent the wrong message: "that there are shortcuts to accomplishment and that performance is more important than character." We would become a society of spectators, and our activities mere spectacles. Worst of all, we would be in danger of turning our would-be heroes into slaves, who exist only to entertain us and whose freedom to pursue human excellence has been shackled by the need to perform -- and conform -- for our amusement and applause.

Appeals to the "kind of society we might become" rarely, to my mind, work in the short run. I'm increasingly of the belief that only some horrible event -- say, a juiced home-run hitter on his way to belting 71 home runs collapses at the plate -- can have that kind of effect. In the meantime, fans take the Clinton-gays-in-the-military approach to juiced athletes: don't ask, don't tell.

UPDATE: I should add that I think a horror scenario of the kind I mention above is highly unlikely. And this unlikelihood poses a huge problem for those who want to make sure a ban on performance enhancing drugs has some teeth (just as it does for those who want to regulate biotech generally). More on this topic later.