Better than Human by Buchanan Allen

Author:Buchanan, Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

5 WILL THE RICH GET BIOLOGICALLY RICHER?

Remember Michelle and Carlos? They grew up and apart. Michelle became psychologically dependent on Ritalin. She became convinced that she couldn’t think well without it. When she didn’t take it, her lack of self-confidence impaired her ability to focus, and that reinforced her belief that she had to have it. She hated feeling drug-dependent and finally went cold turkey. Michelle’s experience with Ritalin dampened her enthusiasm for biomedical enhancements in general.

Carlos moved in the opposite direction. After graduation, he went into business with his father, but after five years he decided to go to law school. He quit smoking for health reasons but found that caffeine wasn’t enough to sustain his attention while plowing through dull cases. So in 2015 he began taking the first FDA-approved enhancement drug. Carlos’s enhancement drug, unlike Michelle’s, came through the front door, and he was completely satisfied with its effects. Carlos became a corporate lawyer. Michelle became a social worker specializing in the treatment of drug dependency. Carlos got rich; Michelle didn’t.

Fast forward a generation. By an ironic coincidence, Michelle’s daughter and Carlos’s son are competing for the same middle-management position in a big corporation. Carlos II gets the job. Because she has a friend in the personnel department, Michelle II finds out that he got it because his application included a “Certificate of Enhancement” from Bioboost, Inc., a company that tailors a complex cocktail of enhancement drugs to the customer’s individual genome. According to Bioboost’s advertisements, people who have the benefit of their product are smarter, less prone to depression, and miss fewer work days due to illness.

Some people in the scientific community think that Bioboost’s marketing campaign exaggerates the effectiveness of its product. Big corporations are aware of this, but they think the evidence is strong enough to show that Bioboost customers have an edge, other things being equal. In the case of Michelle II and Carlos II, other things were equal, so being Bioboosted was the tiebreaker.

Does Michelle II have grounds for complaint? Is she a victim of discrimination in hiring? Is it wrong for people who use biomedical enhancements to reap greater economic rewards? Does it matter whether the enhancements are very expensive? Is her predicament like that of a “clean” athlete who loses a race to a competitor who took a performance-enhancing drug?

Michelle II might not have been able to afford Bioboost (her mom is a social worker). But even if she could, she might have had scruples about this particular enhancement or enhancements generally. (That wouldn’t be surprising, given her mother’s bad experience with an earlier enhancement drug.) Should she be economically penalized for her reservations about enhancement? May be Carlos II had scruples, too; may be his desire to get the job overpowered them.

Carlos II says he doesn’t see a problem. What if the Bioboost package is so expensive that some otherwise qualified candidates can’t afford it? That’s true of tuition at the best colleges and law schools as well. Yes, it’s true that he could afford Bioboost because his family is rich.

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