Why Less Praise for Enhanced Performance? Moving beyond Responsibility-shifting, Authenticity, and Cheating, towards a Nature-of-Activity Approach

Many appeal to responsibility-shifting, authenticity, or cheating arguments to support the intuition that less praise is due enhanced agents. In this chapter, the authors present original empirical data that show a connection between the less praise intuition (LPI) and the public’s negative attitude toward pharmacological performance enhancement. They then draw on examples from performance enhancement in sport and professional contexts to demonstrate that these arguments for LPI are not sound or leave something out, and they develop a better justification for LPI. On this account, praise is diminished by the presence of enhancers not because praise is shifted to someone else, because it is due to an inauthentic self, or because an otherwise good performance is blemished by cheating but because enhancement may change the nature of activities in which actors are involved and thus we need different yardsticks to assess their performance.