The key argument was that it was "unhuman" due to its risks. Åke Andrén Sandberg stated his four main arguments against doping. While I think his example was a bit contrived, he has an important point in that legalisation doesn't automatically solve the problems. In the end, the legalised doping system would have to get back to checking athletes anyway, not winning much. The core of his argument was that if doping was allowed, there would still be an incentive to hide the fact that one had a new kind of doping since it would give oneself an advantage, and this would slow the promised benefits of legalisations such as development of safer enhancing drugs.
Søren Holm critiqued the idea that doping could be allowed under medical control from an economic/game theoretic perspective. Not unlike the current anti-doping regime, of course. Add to this the public choice aspects of control organisations that would have an incentive to continue and expand this regime, and you get a fairly serious narrowing of autonomy. Hence there would be a tendency to make people officially support the control, strengthening it and leading to a groupthink situation.
#4PEAKS POWER OUTLET FREE#
This would produce obedience, including a reduction in free speech and thought - daring to speak out against the official view is often seen as disloyalty to the group and draw a suspicion that the dissident might be a doper. It would require control mechanisms (formal or informal) that demand compliance and punish disobedience. Here our difference might be due to my more individualistic perspective.Ī more serious problem, based in the relational theory she used herself, is that active resistance could also reduce autonomy. While her argument about the bandwagon effect likely is true (especially given Sören Holm's lecture), it is not clear to me that one can enhance autonomy by banning anything. She also pointed out that the age where such modifications were most likely to be taken would be adolescence, a period not known for its carefully weighed judgements. Her main argument was that competition would make it irrational not to use genetic doping, everybody would be forced to take it and hence allowing its use would narrow autonomy. Susan Shewin argued against allowing genetic modifications and suggested that society should actively resist their use. The result is that non-athletes might get far better therapies and health than athletes, with the doping regulations isolated within an enhancement-accepting society. My basic argument is that use and acceptance of enhancing treatment in society is increasing (but might not become the total mainstream - it is not inconceivable to see a stable split between bioconservatives and dynamists), and that many therapies while not developed for enhancement purposes also have enhancing effects. My own lecture was a brief discussion about how the development of enhancing medicine for non-sports use will force rethinks of doping and enhancement within sports. This fits well in with a health consumer perspective, regardless of why a person gets into touch with the medical professions. He suggested a patient concept based on being exposed to medicine: a patient is someone who is vulnerable in relation to the medical profession, and hence a bearer of patients rights. Claudio Tamburrini pointed out that sports medicine in some ways is more paternalistic towards athletes than would ever be allowed in public health care the privacy and autonomy of the patients are infringed to a great extent by doping testing and obligatory treatments. Sports medicine seeks to secure a level of health conducive to athletic performance, which is a far greater level than ordinary health and with no apparent requirement to be just - here there is no rationing of health care resources. As Christian Muthe explained, normal health care seeks to secure a certain level of health in a just way. Sports medicine itself is interesting, since it has goals that are different from ordinary medicine. Hence the ethics and politics of doping is a highly relevant area, with many interesting issues that carry over to other enhancements. It also gives enhancement a bad name, and opposition to doping is also the source of many rules that prohibit enhancing drugs.
Doping is many ways a testbed of future human enhancement. I'm utterly uninterested in sports, except for doping. I of course briefly blogged about it at CNE Health, but here is the long version. This week I attended the International Conference on Sport Medicine Ethics organised by the Stockholm Bioethics Centre and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University.
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