Our old Friend Peter Singer on Sports and Drugs
Peter Singer, the utilitarian Professor of bioethics at Princeton University has written about whether the use of performance-enhancing drugs in athletic competitions is immoral. Given what you know about Singer’s work, what do you think his position on that important moral question would be?
Here’s a snippet:
At the elite level, the difference between being a champion and an also-ran is so minuscule, yet it matters so much that athletes are pressured to do whatever they can to gain the slightest edge over their competitors. It is reasonable to suspect that gold medals now go not to those who are drug-free, but to those who most successfully refine their drug use for maximum enhancement without detection.
As events like the Tour de France turn farcical, bioethics professor Julian Savulescu has offered a radical solution. Savulescu, who directs the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and holds degrees in both medicine and bioethics, says that we should drop the ban on performance-enhancing drugs, and allow athletes to take whatever they want, as long as it is safe for them to do so.
