Drugs in Sport and Human Enhancement

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2015

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

The report from the World Anti-Doping Agency couldn't have been clearer. Russian athletes were involved in state sponsored cheating and the IAAF was involved in bribery and corruption. Admittedly it's not exactly the stuff of Chariots of Fire, but what are the real moral boundaries that have been transgressed? If you think elite sport is all about individual talent and dedication you're sadly mistaken. Top athletes in all sports are supported by multi-million pound programmes that ensure they get the best of everything - including scientists who maximise their nutrition and medical treatment. If you come from a country that can't afford to pay for it, you're already handicapped. And if your son or daughter is showing some sporting promise you better get them in to a private school quickly. Half the UK gold medal winners in 2012 were educated privately and the pattern is repeated in almost every sport outside football. Sport is many things, but fair is not one of them, so why single out performance enhancing drugs in sport when we positively embrace them in other aspects of our lives? Has anyone turned down Viagra because it might give them an unfair advantage? As science progresses the possibility of human enhancement is becoming an everyday reality. Drugs to enhance memory and attention and to enable us to be smarter? Why not? If this all sounds like some kind of dystopian nightmare don't fret because there's a growing interest in the field of bio-medical moral enhancement to make us better people as well. Human enhancement - physical and moral on the Moral Maze, but beware, listening could give you an unfair advantage. Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk with Giles Fraser, Claire Fox, Melanie Phillips and Anne McElvoy. Witnesses are Ellis Cashmore, Martin Cross, Dr Rebecca Roache and Nigel Warburton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.
0:03.6	Good evening. Doping is as old as sport itself.
0:07.1	The ancient Greek athletes dose themselves with magic mushrooms minced up with bull's testicles.
0:12.6	Olympic marathon runners a century ago may do with strychnine and champagne.
0:17.4	Of course, what Russia's apparently been doing is both state-sponsored and on an almost industrial scale.
0:23.9	But should it come as a shock? Should we be outraged? And why?
0:27.8	Because the playing field is not level. It's mostly private schools that have them for a start.
0:33.2	Half the UK's gold medalists in 2012 went to public, i.e. private schools. Top sportsmen and
0:39.4	women are supported by multi-million pound programmes, doctors, nutritionists, high-altitude training.
0:44.2	That's why champions come mainly from rich countries. Why are performance-enhancing drugs wrong
0:49.1	when all sorts of other ways of obtaining competitive advantage aren't? Sports's not fair, life's not fair.
0:56.0	We seem happy to use Viagra, certainly a performing, enhancing drug
0:59.9	in what some men at least regard as a competitive sport.
1:03.3	More seriously, science is giving us all sorts of technologies
1:06.5	to enhance our abilities, attention, memory, ways to enable us to work more, faster, smarter.
1:12.2	What should we really think about them?
1:15.0	And what about the talk of biomedical moral enhancement, drugs or genetic modification, to make us better people?
1:22.1	Is it dopy to be outraged about doping?
1:24.9	Our moral maze tonight, the panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on The Times, Anne McClevoy, senior editor at The Economist, Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas and the Anglican Priest and polemicist, Charles Fraser. Anne McClevoy, you were, I now know, a noted gymnast. Were you ever tempted to pop something to pep you up? I was never technologically enhanced.
1:45.4	That may have accounted for the fact that I'm not a more famous gymnast.
1:48.9	So I'm particularly interested in this subject, Michael,
1:51.3	and I do think I'm very strongly of the view that sport needs to be clean
	...

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