Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports: Ethical, Conceptual, and Scientific Issues

Bioethics

by Thomas H. Murray

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.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Thomas H. Murray; Faculty Affiliate
President and CEO, The Hastings Center
Thomas H. Murray, President and CEO, The Hastings Center, was formerly the Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, where he was also the Susan E. Watson Professor of Bioethics.

Murray serves on many editorial boards and has been president of the Society for Health and Human Values and of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Among other current posts, he serves as Chair of the Ethical Issues Review Panel for the World Anti-Doping Agency, as International Expert Advisor to Singapore’s Bioethics Advisory Committee, and is Vice Chair of Charity Navigator.

Murray has testified before many Congressional committees and is the author of more than 250 publications. He is also editor, with Maxwell J. Mehlman, of the Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues in Biotechnology.

Murray is currently PI of The Hastings Center’s project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, on ethics and synthetic biology. He is writing a book on values, drugs and sport with the working title Why We Play.

In 2004, Murray received an honorary Doctor of Medicine degree from Uppsala University.