Online research in philosophy

Background: Current anti-doping in competitive sports is advocated for reasons of fair-play and concern for the athlete's health. With the inception of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), anti-doping effort has been considerably intensified. Resources invested in anti-doping are rising steeply and increasingly involve public funding. Most of the effort concerns elite athletes with much less impact on amateur sports and the general public.

Moral status is a vexing topic. Linked for so long to the unending debates about ensoulment and the morality of abortion, it has recently resurfaced in the embryonic stem cell controversy. In this new context, it should benefit from new insights originating in recent scientific advances. We believe that the recently observed capability of somatic cells to return to a pluripotential state (a capability we propose to name 'reversed potency') in a controlled manner requires us to modify the traditional concept (...) of moral status and to consider it as referring not only to intrinsic properties (like 'to possess reason' or 'to be a person'), but also to extrinsic or relational ones. (shrink)

Background Current anti-doping in competitive sports is advocated for reasons of fair-play and concern for the athlete's health. With the inception of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), anti-doping effort has been considerably intensified. Resources invested in anti-doping are rising steeply and increasingly involve public funding. Most of the effort concerns elite athletes with much less impact on amateur sports and the general public. Discussion We review this recent development of increasingly severe anti-doping control measures and find them based on (...) questionable ethical grounds. The ethical foundation of the war on doping consists of largely unsubstantiated assumptions about fairness in sports and the concept of a "level playing field". Moreover, it relies on dubious claims about the protection of an athlete's health and the value of the essentialist view that sports achievements reflect natural capacities. In addition, costly antidoping efforts in elite competitive sports concern only a small fraction of the population. From a public health perspective this is problematic since the high prevalence of uncontrolled, medically unsupervised doping practiced in amateur sports and doping-like behaviour in the general population (substance use for performance enhancement outside sport) exposes greater numbers of people to potential harm. In addition, anti-doping has pushed doping and doping-like behaviour underground, thus fostering dangerous practices such as sharing needles for injection. Finally, we argue that the involvement of the medical profession in doping and anti-doping challenges the principles of non-maleficience and of privacy protection. As such, current anti-doping measures potentially introduce problems of greater impact than are solved, and place physicians working with athletes or in anti-doping settings in an ethically difficult position. In response, we argue on behalf of enhancement practices in sports within a framework of medical supervision. Summary Current anti-doping strategy is aimed at eradication of doping in elite sports by means of all-out repression, buttressed by a war-like ideology similar to the public discourse sustaining international efforts against illicit drugs. Rather than striving for eradication of doping in sports, which appears to be an unattainable goal, a more pragmatic approach aimed at controlled use and harm reduction may be a viable alternative to cope with doping and doping-like behaviour. (shrink)

As elsewhere, the ethical debate on embryonic stem cell research in Central Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland, involves controversy over the status of the human embryo. There is a distinctive Kantian flavor to the standard arguments however, and we show how they often embody a set of misunderstandings and argumentative shortcuts we term "embryological Kantianism." We also undertake a broader analysis of three arguments typically presented in this debate, especially in official position papers, namely the identity, continuity, and potentiality arguments. (...) It turns out that these arguments do not support the strong, quasi-personal status accorded to the embryos in these official opinions. (shrink)