Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Volume 5, Issue 4, Page 359-361, November 2011.

The Caster Semenya debacle touched off by the 2009 Berlin World Athletics Championships resulted finally in IOC and IAAF abandonment of sex testing, which gave way to procedures that make female competition eligibility dependent upon the level of serum testosterone, which must be below the male range or instrumentally countered by androgen resistance. We argue that the new policy is unsustainable because (i) the testosterone-performance connection it posits is uncompelling; (ii) testosterone-induced female advantage is not ipso facto unfair advantage; (iii) (...) the new policy reflects the gender policing impulses endemic to sport as well as the broader cultural impulses to monstrify women and to doctor women who have nothing wrong with them; (iv) female?male performance disparities are not the only reason for sex-segregated sport, but co-exist with respectable cultural and practical reasons, which (v) provide a powerful case for allowing athletes to compete in the sex category congruent with their gender identity. (shrink)

Human enhancement, in which nanotechnology is expected to play a major role, continues to be a highly contentious ethical debate, with experts on both sides calling it the single most important issue facing science and society in this brave, new century. This paper is a broad introduction to the symposium herein that explores a range of perspectives related to that debate. We will discuss what human enhancement is and its apparent contrast to therapy; and we will begin to tease apart (...) the myriad intertwined issues that arise in the debate: (1) freedom & autonomy, (2) health & safety, (3) fairness & equity, (4) societal disruption, and (5) human dignity. (shrink)

Emerging technologies are increasingly used in an attempt to “enhance the human body and/or mind” beyond the contemporary standards that characterize human beings. Yet, such standards are deeply controversial and it is not an easy task to determine whether the application of a given technology to an individual and its outcome can be defined as a human enhancement or not. Despite much debate on its potential or actual ethical and social impacts, human enhancement is not subject to any consensual definition. (...) This paper proposes a timely and much needed examination of the various definitions found in the literature. We classify these definitions into four main categories: the implicit approach, the therapy-enhancement distinction, the improvement of general human capacities and the increase of well-being. After commenting on these different approaches and their limitations, we propose a definition of human enhancement that focuses on individual perceptions. While acknowledging that a definition that mainly depends on personal and subjective individual perceptions raises many challenges, we suggest that a comprehensive approach to define human enhancement could constitute a useful premise to appropriately address the complexity of the ethical and social issues it generates. (shrink)

Objections to the use of assistive technologies in elite sports are generally raised when the technology in question is perceived to afford the user a potentially “unfair advantage,” when it is perceived as a threat to the purity of the sport, and/or when it is perceived as a precursor to a slippery slope toward undesirable changes in the sport. These objections rely on being able to quantify standards of “normal” within a sport so that changes attributed to the use of (...) assistive technology can be judged as causing a significant deviation from some baseline standard. This holds athletes using assistive technologies accountable to standards that restrict their opportunities to achieve greatness, while athletes who do not use assistive technologies are able to push beyond the boundaries of these standards without moral scrutiny. This paper explores how constructions of fairness and “normality” impact athletes who use assistive technology to compete in a sporting venue traditionally populated with “able-bodied” competitors. It argues that the dynamic and obfuscated construction of “normal” standards in elite sports should move away from using body performance as the measuring stick of “normal,” toward alternate forms of constructing norms such as defining, quantifying, and regulating the mechanical actions that constitute the critical components of a sport. Though framed within the context of elite sports, this paper can be interpreted more broadly to consider problems with defining “normal” bodies in a society in which technologies are constantly changing our abilities and expectations of what normal means. (shrink)

The majority of – usually moral – problems inherent in elite sport, such as whether athletes should be able to take particular drugs, wear particular clothing, or utilise particular tools, arguably stem from a conceptual one based on faulty logic and competing values. Sport is a human enterprise that represents a multitude of human compulsions, desires and needs; the urge to be competitive, to co-operate, to excel, to develop, to play, to love and be loved, and to find meaning in (...) one's existence. From the perspective of an amateur athlete, this pluralism is possible. When one is involved in athletics at the lower echelons, the values that one holds in relation to sport are fluid and flexible; they are prioritised according to a myriad of other influences that are contingent to a particular situation. As such, the reasons that the general population participate in athletic activities and the values they consequently ascribe to it are complex and wide-ranging and thus fall into the sociological realm. The philosophical problem with value in sport is found at the highest level, the professional platform, where discordant values are espoused, particularly the value of ever increasing quantifiable performance. The athletic events at the Olympic Games are the archetypal manifestation of this Citius , Altius , Fortius aphorism and yet when taken to its logical conclusion becomes evidently absurd. (shrink)

Jane English, a pioneer in feminist sport philosophy, mentioned one simple idea that has received insufficient attention, but its consequences are of great importance for decreasing discrimination...