The Merits of Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 for the San Francisco Giants in major league baseball. This is the most home runs ever recorded by any player in a single season and it is this one season which will keep one of the greatest baseball players that ever existed out of the baseball Hall of Fame.

If we were to remove this season from Bonds’ records he would still rank in the top ten in almost all offensive categories, yet he has not been admitted into the hall of fame, why? Well this is because during the 2001 season Bonds was found to have been taking a variety of performance enhancement drugs which were banned from the game.

I recently thought about Barry Bonds and the current philosophical debate which revolves around human enhancement. It would appear that human enhancement undermines our achievements, even if the individual approves of human enhancement most organisations do not.

With the advancements that are being made in genetic enhancements it is very interesting to think about what impact genetically enhanced human beings might have on the world of sport. Let us take for example a genetic enhancement to enable people to become better athletes; I believe that this could cause two worrying scenarios to emerge. The first would be that it would get to the stage that only people who are genetically enhanced would be able to compete at the highest levels of sport. The second scenario would see genetically enhanced players being banned from the top levels of sport.

If we were to begin enhancing our abilities then the enhancement must take a certain element of credit for our excellence and thus it would work to undermine our excellence. If we compare this to what happened in the case of Barry Bonds, the fact that he has taken steroids or is believed to have taken steroids which enhanced his abilities is in my opinion the main reason why he has not been admitted into the Hall of Fame and why countless other players across a wide range of sports have been banned or suspended from participating at the highest levels or the sporting world.

Would the use of steroids and genetic enhancements differ in the eyes of sports governing bodies or would both these scenarios be viewed in the same manner?