Edited by Thomas H. Murray, Karen J. Maschke, and Angela A. Wasunna
Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2009
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This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts in bioethics, sports, law, and philosophy to examine the need for regulating such athletic performance–enhancing technologies as steroids and gene doping.
The use of performance–improving drugs in sports dates back to the early Olympians, who took an herbal tonic before competitions to augment athletic prowess. But the permissibility of doing so came into question only in the twentieth century as the popularity of anabolic steroid use and blood doping among athletes grew. Sports officials and others—aided by the development of technologies to test participants for proscribed substances—became concerned over the physical safety of athletes and competitive fairness in sporting events.
In exploring the culture, ethics, and policy issues surrounding doping in competitive athletics, the contributors to this volume detail the history and current state of drug use in sports, analyze the distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable usages, evaluate the ethical arguments for and against permitting athletes to avail themselves of new means of improving athleticism, and discuss possible future doping technologies and the issues that they are likely to raise. They explain how and why some athletes resort to doping and assess what the fair opportunity principle means in theory and practice and how it relates to the concept of an equal opportunity to perform.
This frank discussion of doping in sports includes accounts by former elite athletes and offers an illuminating exchange over the meaning and value of natural talents and genetic hierarchies and the essence of fair competition.
Table of Contents
Part I: Historical and Cultural Context
1. Putting Doping into Context: Historical and Cultural Perspectives
John Hoberman
2. The Context of Performance Enhancement: An Athlete's Perspective
Angela J. Schneider
3. Reflections on the "Parallel Federation Solution" to the Problem of Drug Use in Sport: The Cautionary Tale of Powerlifting
Jan Todd and Terry Todd
4. The Role of Physicians, Scientists, Trainers, Coaches, and Other Nonathletes in Athletes' Drug Use
Gary A. Green
5. Performance-Enhancing Technologies and the Ethics of Human Subjects Research
Karen J. Maschke
6. Toward an Understanding of Factors Influencing Athletes' Attitudes about Performance-Enhancing Technologies: Implications for Ethics Education
Robert H. Donovan
Part II: Conceptual Maps and Ethical Implications
7. Ethics and Endurance–Enhancing Technologies in Sport
Thomas H. Murray
8. Fairness in Sport: An Ideal and Its Consequences
Sigmund Loland
9. Annotating the Moral Map of Enhancement: Gene Doping, the Limits of Medicine, and the Spirit of Sport
Eric T. Juengst
10. Genetic Enhancement in Sport: Ethical, Legal, and Policy Concerns
Maxwell J. Mehlman
11. In Search of an Ethics for Sport: Genetic Hierarchies, Handicappers General, and Embodied Excellence
Thomas H. Murray
Part III: Current and Future Science
12. Genetic Doping in Sport: Applying the Concepts and Tools of Gene Therapy
Theodore Friedmann and Eric P. Hoffman
13. Technologies to Enhance Oxygen Delivery and Methods to Detect the Use of These Technologies
Larry D. Bowers