Antidoping policy regulates and punishes the use of substances that are listed on a Prohibited List (PL). These substances are colloquially known as ‘performance-enhancing substances’. There is very little empirical evidence of enhancement for most of the substances on the PL raising the possibility that the perceived enhancement of performance experienced by an athlete is a placebo effect. A placebo effect is a response to an inert substance that is strongly influenced by psychological and social cues in the surrounding environment. (...) It is our contention that, given the lack of proper empirical testing of the substances on the PL, it is in fact the appearance of a substance on the PL that has the strongest performance-enhancing effect in elite athletes. This disconnect between science and WADA’s code raises the question of what we really object to: real performance enhancement achieved using substances on the PL or performance enhancement that occurs because WADA has told us that the substance will enhance performance by placing it on the PL? In this case, antidoping policy would punish those who believe the performance-enhancing myth at the heart of the PL thus leading to a deeply flawed policy that creates its own victims. (shrink)

Sport doping is not a recent phenomenon. Athletes have used many forms of performance enhancements going back to antiquity. Within the sport philosophy literature, sport doping is entangled in a multitude of ethical discourses, some denouncing, and some supporting, doping in sport. Our aim is to use a systematic approach to classify ethical discourses put forward by scholars focused on doping. To take stock of these ethical discourses, and to advance the sport philosophy literature on doping, this paper provides an (...) empirical account of the types of arguments used in the peer-reviewed sport philosophy literature. This empirical account is intended to provide a map of the ethical discourses in circulation, to highlight the most common arguments, and to show where other types of arguments are absent or less well developed. To map the ethical discourses, the authors use an ethical discourse typology from a university-based ethical reasoning program. (shrink)

The landscape of sport shows conspicuous discursive and material disparities between the responses to openly violent on-field transgressors and the responses to other kinds of transgressor, most notably drug users. The former gets off significantly lighter in terms of ideological framing and formal punishment. The latter—and drug users in particular—are typically demonised and heavily punished, whilst the former are regularly lionised, dramatised, celebrated and punished less severely. The preceding disparities cannot be upheld from the standpoint of morality in general or (...) from that of a Broad Internalist sport ethic. Consideration of the consequences, actions, motives and vices involved in the respective categories fails to support them. Nor is support provided by the notion that sports are tests of the physical skills and virtues that the obstacles presented are designed to foster and promote, and behaviour that threatens the opportunity to exercise those excellences or have competitions determined by them should be the subject of critical moral scrutiny. Openly violent on-field transgression does not fare at all well by the yardstick of Broad Internalism. Robust investigation of and ultimate change in the values underpinning the disparities is warranted. (shrink)