Recently, there have been discussions about whether or not inter-collegiate football should be eliminated in the US. This article philosophically assesses the arguments for its elimination as well as the arguments proffered against its elimination. While a variety of arguments are discussed, a new one is brought into the foray of philosophical investigation, one that combines the unfairness and economic arguments: the health care and medical costs to others argument. It is believed that this argument is sufficient to justify the (...) elimination of inter-collegiate football. (shrink)

In the ethical discussion of anti-doping, a number of normative arguments rely on empirical premises. The truth of these premises, however, often remains unverified. This article identifies several...

We ask why pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE) is generally deemed morally unacceptable by lay people. Our approach to this question has two core elements. First, we employ an interdisciplinary perspective, using philosophical rationales as base for generating psychological models. Second, by testing these models we investigate how different normative judgments on PCE are related to each other. Based on an analysis of the relevant philosophical literature, we derive two psychological models that can potentially explain the judgment that PCE is unacceptable: (...) the “Unfairness-Undeservingness Model” and the “Hollowness-Undeservingness Model.” The Unfairness-Undeservingness Model holds that people judge PCE to be unacceptable because they take it to produce unfairness and to undermine the degree to which PCE-users deserve reward. The Hollowness-Undeservingness Model assumes that people judge PCE to be unacceptable because they find achievements realized while using PCE hollow and undeserved. We empirically test both models against each other using a regression-based approach. When trying to predict judgments regarding the unacceptability of PCE using judgments regarding unfairness, hollowness, and undeservingness, we found that unfairness judgments were the only significant predictor of the perceived unacceptability of PCE, explaining about 36% of variance. As neither hollowness nor undeservingness had explanatory power above and beyond unfairness, the Unfairness-Undeservingness Model proved superior to the Hollowness-Undeservingness Model. This finding also has implications for the Unfairness-Undeservingness Model itself: either a more parsimonious single-factor “Fairness Model” should replace the Unfairness-Undeservingness-Model or fairness fully mediates the relationship between undeservingness and unacceptability. Both explanations imply that participants deemed PCE unacceptable because they judged it to be unfair. We conclude that concerns about unfairness play a crucial role in the subjective unacceptability of PCE and discuss the implications of our approach for the further investigation of the psychology of PCE. (shrink)

Despite the numerous instances of PED use in professional sports, there continues to be a strong negative moral response to those athletes who dope. My goal is to offer a diagnosis of this response. I will argue that we do not experience such disdain because these athletes have broken some constitutive rule of sport, but because they have lied about who they are. In violating the constraints of their own public narratives, they make both themselves and their choices unintelligible. This (...) worry becomes especially profound as we care greatly about who our athletes are. Using cases from both athletics and US politics, I argue that certain kinds of lies so violate our understanding of who a person is that we can no longer recognize them as the person we took them to be. Fundamentally, I believe that PED users have lied about something central to their public narratives. I develop this view through an examination of narrative identity, primarily focusing on J. David Velleman’s work on agency and self-constitution. I do not claim that the athlete using steroids is nonidentical to who she would be in the absence of steroid use, but that through use of PEDs, she has misled us about an important component of her pubic narrative and this is difficult for us to reconcile. Ultimately, this has implications for sport as well as other other aspects of human social life. (shrink)

In this article, we critically discuss different versions of the fairness objection to the legalisation of neuro-doping. According to this objection, legalising neuro-doping will result in some enjoying an unfair advantage over others. Basically, we assess four versions. These focus on: 1) the unequal opportunities of winning for athletes who use neuro-doping and for those who do not; 2) the unfair advantages specifically for wealthy athletes; 3) the unfairness of athletic advantages not derived from athletes’ own training ; and 4) (...) the unfair health care costs imposed on everyone as a result of athletes’ use of neuro-doping. We conclude that none of these versions offer a convincing principled fairness-based objection to legalising neuro-doping. (shrink)