Current bans on sports and drugs rest on inadequate grounds. Prohibitions on drugs in sports should rely more on what it is permissible to ban, not on what "must" be banned. Further permissible prohibitions should enjoy democratic support at levels.

Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their ...

College students and suburban residents completed questionnaires designed to examine the tendency of scientific explanations of undesirable behaviors to mitigate perceived culpability. In vignettes relating behaviors to an explanatory antecedent, we manipulated the uniformity of the behavior given the antecedent, the responsiveness of the behavior to deterrence, and the explanatory antecedent-type offered- physiological (e.g., a chemical imbalance) or experiential (e.g., abusive parents). Physiological explanations had a greater tendency to exonerate actors than did experiential explanations. The effects of uniformity and deterrence (...) were smaller, and the latter had a significant effect on judgment only when physiological rather than experiential antecedents were specified. Physiologically explained behavior was more likely to be characterized as "automatic", and willpower and character were less likely to be cited as relevant to the behavior. Physiological explanations of undesirable behavior may mitigate blame by inviting nonteleological causal attributions. Keywords: person perception, volition, moral attribution, responsibility. (shrink)

There is growing public awareness of the ethical issues raised by progress in many areas of neuroscience. This commentary reviews the issues, which are triaged in terms of their novelty and their imminence, with an exploration of the relevant ethical principles in each case.