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A frequently invoked argument against the enhancement of human capacities through biotechnological innovations is that this would amount to cheating. The paradigmatic example is doping in sports, but recently the argument has also been raised against cognitive enhancement. Neuroscientist Stephen Rose expresses the common intuition as follows: "[...] with the cognition enhancing drugs-as with the use of steroids by athletes, their use, at least in a competitive context, is seen as a form of cheating, of bypassing the use for hard work and study." 1 And Michael Gazzaniga asks: "Why do we resist changes in our cognitive skills through drugs? It seems to me that it is because we think cognitive enhancement is cheating. If, somehow, someone gets better through hard work, that's okay. [....] But popping a pill and mastering the information after having read it only once seems like cheating." 2
In this paper, I will compare sports and education, two practices in which medical means are increasingly being used for enhancement purposes, 3 and analyse how the enhancement-is-cheating argument can be interpreted in both contexts. I will argue that although using enhancements can be a form of cheating, this is relatively easy to remedy by either changing the rules, or by instituting controls and sanctions. This does not, therefore, constitute a categorical objection to enhancement. However, there are some remaining worries that concern the specific goals and goods that are internal to both sports and education understood as "practices." These worries are less easy to articulate, but also less easy to dismiss.
CHEATING
Given the prima facie moral wrongness of cheating, it is remarkable that so little has been written on the subject in ethics. Perhaps this is partly caused by the lack of conceptual clarity. The term cheating is used, in common language, as indicating many different forms of deception and fraud that are intended to gain some benefit for oneself. Following one of the most thorough analyses available, cheating can be described as "the intentional violation of a rule, in order to gain an unfair advantage over others." 4 Cheating usually involves deception in order to hide that one is getting an unfair advantage, but I agree with Green 4 that deception is not the moral core of cheating....