ABSTRACT
The treatment-enhancement distinction draws a line between services or interventions meant to prevent or cure (or otherwise ameliorate) conditions that the people view as diseases or disabilities and interventions that improve a condition that people view as a normal function or feature of members of our species. This chapter considers various objections to the treatment-enhancement distinction: that it is difficult to draw, that it does not give people the boundary between what is obligatory and nonobligatory in medical interventions, and that it leaves people with hard cases that make the distinction seem arbitrary. It assumes that the treatment-enhancement distinction can be drawn in a reasonably clear fashion, even though there may be some gray areas and hard cases, and concentrates on its moral implications. Just as the treatment-enhancement distinction does not coincide with the obligatory-nonobligatory boundary, so too it does not coincide with the permissible-impermissible boundary.
