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[Expositions 2.2 (2008) 153–156] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.153 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Enhancement and Cheating

REbEccA RoAchE

Future of Humanity Institute 
Oxford University

A common worry expressed about the use of pharmacological cognitive  
enhancements such as Modafinil and Ritalin is that using them constitutes 
cheating (Fukuyama 2002; henderson 2008). Those who enhance in this 
way are better placed to beat their unenhanced peers to the top educational 
qualifications and jobs; accordingly, enhancing is unfair. Is this worry justi-
fied?

The worry about cheating is often bound up with other worries about  
enhancement. These include concerns about safety, addictiveness, and acces-
sibility. These concerns can be addressed independently of the concern about 
cheating, and so, to avoid complicating matters, let us assume that cognitive 
enhancement is safe to use, that it is non-addictive, and that it is accessible 
to everyone, not just the rich. ought we still to be worried about the fairness 
of cognitive enhancement? Well, in the absence of these ancillary concerns, 
one of the issues that remain is that those who choose not to enhance will 
be at a disadvantage, left behind in the race for the best qualifications and 
jobs by their enhanced peers. Is this fair? Should people be free to use drugs 
like Modafinil and Ritalin to get ahead, or should education authorities and 
employers ban such enhancement, perhaps introducing urine tests to ensure 
that this ban is enforced, as cambridge neuroscientist Sir Gabriel horn has 
recently been quoted to suggest (henderson 2008)?

We can start with a terminological point. Whether or not the use of cogni-
tive enhancement drugs constitutes cheating depends on whether the use of 
such drugs is forbidden in the rules of the game. currently, the rules to which 
students and employees must adhere typically forbid activities like plagia-
rism, forging references, and lying about one’s educational and employment 
history—and those students and employees who break these rules can expect 
to be punished. Rules against the use of cognitive enhancement drugs are not 
currently widespread. ought they to be?

The answer to this question depends on what we think is more important: a 
level playing field on which students and employees can compete equally for 



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qualifications and jobs, or the value of the achievements made through such 
competition. In some areas of life, the main purpose is to advance knowl-
edge, and so maximizing the achievements made is plausibly more important 
than having a level playing field. As Anders Sandberg has commented, “that 
many of the theorems of the mathematician Paul Erdös were proven under 
the influence of amphetamines does not diminish their intellectual brilliance 
or importance” (Sandberg 2008). And, in the quest for a cure for cancer, if 
it turns out that cognitively enhanced scientists would be able to discover a 
cure more quickly than unenhanced scientists, then using cognitive enhance-
ment could result in millions of lives being saved. In other areas of life, it is 
extremely important to remain alert and focused. For those working as airline 
pilots or surgeons, the consequences of a lapse in concentration could be dire. 
cognitive enhancement could help prevent such lapses. These examples dem-
onstrate that, while fairness is important, avoidably slowing the advancement 
of scientific knowledge or reducing the alertness of airline pilots and surgeons 
is too high a price to pay to ensure that those who do not wish to enhance are 
able to compete on a level playing field.

In other areas of life, however, competition is more important. A key pur-
pose of education in schools and universities is to enable students to compete 
for the best qualifications. Should cognitive enhancement be banned in such 
contexts? There are at least two good reasons to answer “no” to this question. 
First, even if competition for qualifications is a valuable aspect of education, 
it is not the only valuable aspect. As well as enabling one to gain educational 
qualifications, studying also enables students to understand more about the 
world and the people in it, and to enrich themselves intellectually and cultur-
ally. If it turns out that cognitive enhancement enables students to increase 
the extent to which they understand the world and enrich themselves, then 
banning it in the interest of ensuring fairer competition for qualifications 
would be too hasty. In order to decide whether or not to ban it, we would first 
need to assess whether the value to be gained from banning it and thereby 
ensuring a fair competition would outweigh the value to be gained from 
allowing students to enjoy the non-competitive aspects of education more 
intensely with the aid of cognitive enhancement.

however, banning cognitive enhancement in education would not ensure 
that students are able to compete on a level playing field. This is the sec-
ond reason to answer “no” to the question posed above. consider that, even 
without access to drugs like Modafinil and Ritalin, most students have to 
compete with other students who are naturally more intelligent, disciplined, 
alert, and focused. As such, most students are already at a disadvantage.  



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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

It may be objected that, in aiming at a level playing field, we should ignore 
such “natural” advantages, and concentrate only on ensuring that students 
have equal opportunities to achieve the best grades given their existing abili-
ties. however, even this does not leave us with a level playing field. Some 
students are able and willing to employ personal tutors; others are not. Some 
students spend most of their time out of school studying; others spend their 
time out of school relaxing or working to earn money. Some students use 
caffeine or computer software to aid their studying—both of which are types 
of cognitive enhancement—others do not. Such practices ensure that, even 
without novel methods of cognitive enhancement, students do not compete 
on a level playing field. And, that schools and universities do not currently 
outlaw the use of personal tutors, caffeine, and studying outside of school 
suggests that maximizing the extent to which students compete on a level 
playing field is not as important as some opponents of enhancement suggest. 
An uneven playing field may even be seen as advantageous, in that it can 
drive students to work harder as they attempt to beat their peers. As such, it 
is far from obvious that we should aim to create a level playing field by limit-
ing the ways in which students can compete. At the very least, opponents of 
enhancement need to demonstrate exactly why using drugs like Modafinil 
and Ritalin is relevantly different from employing a personal tutor or drink-
ing coffee to remain alert.

There is something important to learn from the worry about unfair com-
petition, however. As far as possible, it is desirable to discourage the pursuit 
of what the economist Fred hirsch has called “positional goods”: those goods 
whose value to those who have them depends on others not having them. 
This is because the collective pursuit of positional goods is a waste of time 
and resources: as hirsch remarked, “if everyone stands on tiptoe, no one 
sees better” (hirsch 1977, 5). If the value of cognitive enhancement rests 
solely on its ability to enable one to compete better than others for things 
like educational qualifications, then its use should be discouraged. how-
ever, it is unlikely that the value of cognitive enhancement is exhausted by 
the positional goods it confers. We have seen that it may have value in ena-
bling people like scientists, airline pilots, and surgeons to do their jobs more  
effectively. And, even in education, where competition for qualifications plays 
a central role, cognitive enhancement could add value by enabling students 
to make the most of the non-competitive elements. There is a clear case for 
banning cognitive enhancement in education only if the value of education is 
exhausted by the competition for qualifications, because only in such a case is 
cognitive enhancement a purely positional good when used in the context of 



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education. There may be some who wish to argue that the value of education 
is indeed exhausted by the competition for qualifications, and that anyone 
who believes otherwise is an academic fantasist. however, if this is the case, 
then the qualifications for which students compete are themselves purely  
positional goods, and so the argument to ban cognitive enhancement also 
works to ban educational qualifications.

The worry about cheating is not, as a result, sufficient justification for ban-
ning the use of cognitive enhancement drugs. Arguably, the worry about  
enhancement and cheating is usually overblown. The most important con-
cerns about such enhancement are perhaps those that I initially disregarded: 
safety, addictiveness, and accessibility. Since these concerns are also among 
the most philosophically uninteresting, it should not be surprising that phil-
osophical debate about enhancement gravitates instead towards issues like 
cheating. As in many debates in applied philosophy, however, we must take 
care not to allow what is most interesting to distract us from what is most 
important.

References

Fukuyama, F.
2002 Our Posthuman Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

henderson, M.
2008 Academy of Medical Sciences Suggests Urine Tests to Detect Smart Drugs. 

The Times, 22 May 2008.

Sandberg, A.
2008 brain boosting and cheating in Exams: Four Responses. Practical  Ethics: 

Ethical Perspectives on the News blog (www.practicalethicsnews.com/practi-
calethics/2008/05/brain-boosting.html).

hirsch, F.
1977 Social Limits to Growth. London: Routledge and Kegal Paul.


