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Cover image of Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports
Cover image of Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports
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Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports

Ethical, Conceptual, and Scientific Issues

edited by Thomas H. Murray, Karen J. Maschke, and Angela A. Wasunna

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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...

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.

Reviews

Reviews

A fascinating book for those interested in sports studies, for athletes and other sport professionals, and even for armchair quarterbacks... Highly recommended.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
304
ISBN
9780801893612
Illustration Description
1 halftone, 2 line drawings
Table of Contents

List of Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Historical and Cultural Context
Chapter 1. Putting Doping into Context: Historical and Cultural Perspectives
Chapter 2. The Context of Performance

List of Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Historical and Cultural Context
Chapter 1. Putting Doping into Context: Historical and Cultural Perspectives
Chapter 2. The Context of Performance Enhancement: An Athlete's Perspective
Chapter 3. Reflections on the "Parallel Federation Solution" to the Problem of Drug Use in Sport: The Cautionary Tale of Powerlifting
Chapter 4. The Role of Physicians, Scientists, Trainers, Coaches, and Other Nonathletes in Athletes' Drug Use
Chapter 5. Performance-Enhancing Technologies and the Ethics of Human Subjects Research
Chapter 6. Toward an Understanding of Factors Influencing Athletes' Attitudes about Performance-Enhancing Technologies: Implications for Ethics Education
Part II: Conceptual Maps and Ethical Implications
Chapter 7. Ethics and Endurance-Enhancing Technologies in Sport
Chapter 8. Fairness in Sport: An Ideal and Its Consequences
Chapter 9. Annotating the Moral Map of Enhancement: Gene Doping, the Limits of Medicine, and the Spirit of Sport
Chapter 10. Genetic Enhancement in Sport: Ethical, Legal, and Policy Concerns
Chapter 11. In Search of an Ethics for Sport: Genetic Hierarchies, Handicappers General, and Embodied Excellence
Part III: Current and Future Science
Chapter 12. Genetic Doping in Sport: Applying the Concepts and Tools of Gene Therapy
Chapter 13. Technologies to Enhance Oxygen Delivery and Methods to Detect the Use of These Technologies
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Angela A. Wasunna, LL.M., LL.B.

Angela A. Wasunna is the assistant director of international affairs at Pfizer, Inc., and the coauthor of Medicine and the Market, also published by Johns Hopkins.