Seeing the effects your score on one exam had on your lifelong potential to get the job, the house, the partner you desire, let's assume your child is about to enter her Leaving Cert year.

Earlier this year pharmaceutical researchers in California began testing CX717, a drug with active ingredients called ampakines which enhance receptors in the brain, with the idea that it may treat Alzheimer's Disease. Double-blind studies revealed that CX717 substantially improves memory. It was even suggested that ampakines could also be used to treat ADHD or even jet lag.

Or. . . give your kid the extra brain power to boost her Leaving Cert by 100 points.

If I could sell you this pill, and you had the spondulicks, the queue would stretch from Dalkey to Dundrum to buy a year's supply.

Now explain to me what the ethical difference is between using a drug to enhance performance in an academic setting and an athletic one.

Last week's Tour de Farce follies, with the race leader just the latest to be disqualified because of the presence in his system of performanceenhancing drugs, should if anything be proof that attempts to remove these drugs from sport are increasingly futile. There are good arguments for enforcing this set of rules in the closed universe of the Tour de France:

such incidents damage the image of the sport and this makes it less likely that large corporations will want to plonk down 5m apiece to be a top-tier sponsor for a year.

The failure to enforce its will just makes the sport's officials seem incompetent.

But all of this sturm und drang seems, at least to me, to be based on a faulty premise . . .

or at least one that is unproven: taking performance- enhancing drugs is morally wrong. There are other arguments against enhancement that get trotted out. It may be unsafe . . . but so is the alcohol I drink. But that's my lookout, and if the second glass of wine makes me more convivial company, you'll thank me. But mostly, it's this idea that enhancement is a unique offence against 'equality' or 'fairness', an assumption that underpins the clumsy moralising of cycling officials or do-gooders from the World Anti-Doping Agency. (There's a sign right there that you're on shaky ground . . . 'doping', not 'performance-enhancing' . . . an Orwellian sleight-of-hand, sticking the practice with an emotive, less descriptive, label. ) The ethical argument against enhancement is limited to sentimental bilge about "levelling the playing field".

But the world is not a level playing field. In every arena of life, the only equality is before God . . . or at least the undertaker. Taller people with paler skin stretched over more symmetrical features who grew up in stable, loving households of above-average income, education and nutrition for centuries have had enormous advantages before they even get out of bed.

We make rules to foster competition without coercion, among people who are intrinsically equal in their moral worth, and therefore equal in their rights to life and liberty, but may be radically unequal in intelligence, strength and justice. Enhancement, like it or not, is an attempt to push the limit of human performance.

Unless we plan to finish what the Nazis started and purge the human genome of someone's notion of the flawed DNA, we will always have inequality. The enhancements of the privileged to overcome genetic or environmental disadvantage . . . immunisation, eyeglasses, asthma drugs . . .

eventually become accessible to the masses.

The problem isn't that the desire for enhancement is morally wrong. It's that currently it's only the rule-breakers benefit. And it is only the fact that it's against the rules, and therefore not equally accessible to everyone, that separates the Tour de France from the enhanced Leaving Cert students.

If there is a Tour de France next year, you'd better believe there will be performanceenhancing drugs. The ethical assumption for their ban will be no more persuasive than it is today.

And don't complain to me about Sara not getting her CX717 because you can't afford it. If it were up to me, we'd put it in the water.