Posted by John Eddy

KINS 380 – Doping in Sports and Society

KINS 380 is the class that I took to satisfy the Behavioral & Social Perspective. This class was taught by Dr. Eric Moore and Dr. Jo Morrison. This was definitely not a class I anticipated taking coming into Longwood, but it quickly turned into one of the most interesting classes that I took this semester. In this class, we dove into the ethics behind human enhancement, with a focus on its effects on sport. The majority of the grades for this class were for discussions and presentations. The assignments were divided into low stakes, mid stakes, and high stakes assignments. The only high-stakes assignment was our final presentation, which was in a debate format.

This class has certainly grown my perspective on human enhancement. I used to be one-hundred percent against any kind of enhancement, but after hearing Dr. Moore and Dr. Morrison put the effects outside the context of sport (of which I was most familiar with), and into the the context of academia and the fine arts, I began to understand why enhancement may not be as bad as I had originally thought. Over all of the concepts we talked about in class, we always framed our thoughts in terms of key ethical questions (fairness, responsibilities, outcomes, etc.).

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Linked above is the final paper that my group wrote for KINS 380. For our final debate, we argued FOR the use of enhancement in academics. This was an area that was well outside of my comfort zone, but after completing research on various cognitive enhancements and their effects, I felt comfortable in tackling the debate. This paper was written after the actual debate in order to offer our rebuttal to the oppositions argument, as well as provide another argument in our favor. Our key argument was that cognitive enhancement can lead to stronger applicants entering the job market after graduation, and we put an emphasis on the fact that the enhancement cannot do the work for the student. The students still have to put the effort in to do the work and to study in order to reap the most of the benefits of the enhancement.

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