The Ethics of Sports Technologies and Human Enhancement

This volume presents articles which focus on the ethical evaluation of performance-enhancing technologies in sport. The collection considers whether drug doping should be banned; the rationale of not banning ethically contested innovations such as hypoxic chambers; and the implications of the prospects of human genetic engineering for the notion of sport as a development of 'natural' talent towards human excellence. The essays demonstrate the significance of the principles of preventing harm, ensuring fairness and preserving meaning to appraise whether a particular performance enhancer is acceptable in the context of sport. Selected essays on various forms of human enhancement outside of sport that highlight other principles and concepts are included for comparative purpose. Sport enhancement provides a useful starting point to work through the ethics of enhancement in other human practices and endeavors, and sport enhancement ethics should track broader bioethical debates on human enhancement. As a whole, the volume points to the need to consider the values and meanings that people seek in a given sphere of human activity and their associated principles to arrive at a morally grounded and reasonable approach to enhancement ethics.

Thomas H. Murray is Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus at the The Hastings Center, USA. Voo Teck Chuan is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.

Acknowledgements Series Preface Introduction -- Part I: Preventing Harm -- 1 Fost, Norman. 'Banning Drugs in Sports: A Skeptical View.' The Hastings Center Report 16, no. 4 (August 1986), 5-10. D01:10.2307 /3563105 -- 2 Murray, Thomas H. 'The Coercive Power of Drugs in Sports.' The Hastings Center Report 13, no. 4 (August 1983), 24-30 -- 3 Kayser, Bengt, Alexandre Mauron, and Andy Miah. 'Current Anti-Doping Policy: A Critical Appraisal.' BMC Medical Ethics 8, no. 1 (2007), 2. D0I:10.1186 /1472-6939-8-2 -- 4 Holm, Soren. 'Doping under Medical Control: Conceptually Possible but Impossible in the World of Professional Sports?' Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 1, no. 2 (August 2007), 135-145 -- 5 King, Nancy M. P., and Richard Robeson. 'Athlete or Guinea Pig? Sports and Enhancement Research.' Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 1, no. 1 (January 2007). DOI: 10.2202 /1941-6008.1006 -- 6 McNamee, Michael. 'Ethical Considerations in Paralympic Sport: When Are Elective Treatments Allowable to Improve Sports Performance?' PM & R: The Journal of Injury, Function, and Rehabilitation 6, 8 Suppl. (August 2014), S66-75 -- Part II: Ensuring Fairness -- 7 Tamburrini, Claudio M. 'What's Wrong with Genetic Inequality? The Impact of Genetic Technology on Elite Sports and Society.' Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 1, no. 2 (August 2007), 229-238 -- 8 Murray, Thomas H. 'Making Sense of Fairness in Sports.' Hastings Center Report 40, no. 2 (2010), 13-15 -- 9 Carr, Craig L. 'Fairness and Performance Enhancement in Sport.' Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 35, no. 2 (October 2008), 193-207 -- 10 Edwards, S. D. 'Should Oscar Pistorius Be Excluded from the 2008 Olympic Games?' Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 2, no. 2 (August 2008), 112-125 -- 11 Van Hilvoorde, Ivo, Rein Vos, and Guido de Wert. 'Flopping, Klapping and Gene Doping: Dichotomies between 'Natural' and 'Artificial' in Elite Sport.' Social Studies of Science 37, no. 2 (April 2007), 173-200 -- Part III: Preserving the Spirit of Sport -- 12 Loland, Sigmund, and Hans Hoppeler. 'Justifying Anti-Doping: The Fair Opportunity Principle and the Biology of Performance Enhancement.' European Journal of Sport Science 12, no. 4 (July 2012), 347-353 -- 13 Loland, Sigmund. 'Technology in Sport: Three Ideal-Typical Views and Their Implications.' European Journal of Sport Science 2, no. 1 (February 2002), 1-11 -- 14 Juengst, Eric. 'Annotating the Moral Map of Enhancement: Gene Doping, the Limits of Medicine, and the Spirit of Sport.' In: Tom Murray, (ed.), Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports: Ethical, Conceptual, and Scientific Issues (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 175-204 -- 15 Bonte Pieter, Sigrid Sterckx, and Guido Pennings. 'May the Blessed Man Win: A Critique of the Categorical Preference for Natural Talent Over Doping as Proper Origins of Athletic Ability.' Journal of Medical Philosophy 39 no. 4 (August 2014), 368-386 -- 16 Hoberman, John. 'Listening to Steroids.' The Wilson Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Winter 1995), 35-44 -- 17 Miah, Andy. 'Rethinking Enhancement in Sport.' Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1093, no. 1 (December 2006), 301-320 -- 18 McNamee, Michael J. 'The Spirit of Sport and the Medicalisation of AntiDoping: Empirical and Normative Ethics.' Asian Bioethics Review 4, no. 4 (2012), 374-392 -- Part IV: Sport and Human Enhancement -- 19 Mehlman, Maxwell J. 'Cognition-Enhancing Drugs.' The Milbank Quarterly 82, no. 3 (2004), 483-506 -- 20 Lamkin, Matt. 'Cognitive Enhancements and the Values of Higher Education.' Health Care Analysis 20 (2012), 347-355 -- 21 Savulescu, Julian. 'Justice, Fairness, and Enhancement.' Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1093, no. 1 (December 2006), 321-338. -- DOI: 10.1196 /annals. 1382.021 -- Part V: Enhancement beyond Sport -- 22 Sandel, Michael. 'The Case against Perfection.' The Atlantic Monthly 293, no. 3 (2004), 51-62 -- 23 Bostrom, Nick. 'Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective.' The Journal of Value Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2003), 493-506 -- 24 Buchanan, Allen. 'Enhancement and the Ethics of Development.' Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 18, no. 1 (March 2008), 1-34 -- 25 Sparrow, Robert. 'A Not-So-New Eugenics: Harris and Savulescu on Human Enhancement.' Hastings Center Report 41, no. 1 (2011), 32-42 -- 26 Harris, John. 'Moral Enhancement and Freedom.' Bioethics 25, no. 2 (2011), 102-111 -- 27 Overall, Christine. 'Life Enhancement Technologies: The Significance of Social Category Membership.' In: Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (eds), Human Enhancement. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 327-340 -- 28 Landeweerd, Lauren. 'Asperger's Syndrome, Bipolar Disorder and the Relation between Mood, Cognition, and Well-Being.' In: J. Savulescu, R. ter Meulen and G. Kahane (eds), Enhancing Human Capacities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 207-217 -- 29 Daniels, Norman. 'Normal Functioning and the Treatment-Enhancement Distinction.' Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 9, no. 3 (2000), 309-322 -- 30 Outram, Simon M., and Eric Racine. 'Developing Public Health Approaches to Cognitive Enhancement: An Analysis of Current Reports.' Public Health Ethics 4, no. 1 (April 2011), 93-105. DOI:10.1093 /phe /phr006 -- Index