Horse racing has begun to enter an economic decline in many countries, notably represented by a decline in revenues in betting volumes. A number of reasons may be attributed to this: the success of...

In light of the World Anti Doping Agency’s 2013 Code Revision process, we critically explore the applicability of two of three criteria used to determine whether a method or substance should be considered for their Prohibited List, namely its (potential) performance enhancing effects and its (potential) risk to the health of the athlete. To do so, we compare two communities of human guinea pigs: (i) individuals who make a living out of serial participation in Phase 1 pharmacology trials; and (ii) (...) elite athletes who engage in what is effectively ‘unregulated clinical research’ by using untested prohibited or non-prohibited performance enhancing substances and methods, alone or in combination. Our comparison sheds light on norms of research ethics that these practices exacerbate with respect to the concepts of multiplicity, visibility, and consistency. We argue for the need to establish a proper governance framework to increase the accountability of these unregulated research practices in order to protect the human guinea pigs in elite sports contexts, and to establish reasonable grounds for the performance enhancing effects, and the risks to the health of the athlete, of the methods and substances that might justify their inclusion on the Prohibited List. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the legal case involving the Court of Arbitration of Sport, the Union of European Football Associations, and the Turkish team Eskişehirspor to analyze the leg...

Individual athletes, coaches and sports teams seek continuously for ways to improve performance and accomplishment in elite competition. New techniques of performance analysis are a crucial part of the drive for athletic perfection. This paper discusses the ethical importance of one aspect of the future potential of performance analysis in sport, combining the field of biomedicine, sports engineering and nanotechnology in the form of ‘Nanobiosensors’. This innovative technology has the potential to revolutionise sport, enabling real time biological data to be (...) collected from athletes that can be electronically distributed. Enabling precise real time performance analysis is not without ethical problems. Arguments concerning data ownership and privacy; data confidentiality; and athlete welfare are presented alongside a discussion of the use of the Precautionary Principle in making ethical evaluations. We conclude, that although the future potential use of Nanobiosensors in sports analysis offers many potential benefits, there is also a fear that it could be abused at a sporting system level. Hence, it is essential for sporting bodies to consider the development of a robust ethically informed governance framework in advance of their proliferated use. (shrink)

This article presents a theorized and conceptually informed method for the undertaking of an ethics audit organization. At an operational level, the overall integrity of an organization, it is argued, may be evaluated through the application of a conceptual frame-work that embraces the inter-related themes of individual responsibility, social equity and political responsibility. Finally, a method is presented for ethics audit which was developed in the auditing of a national public sector sports organization: sportscotland. This emphasizes the significance of key (...) personnel (individuals and in groups) in producing and reproducing the organizational ethos, whilst recognizing the importance of anonymity and confidentiality throughout the process. The theoretical terrain of the ethics audit is articulated through a consideration of ethics as applied moral philosophy, equity as social justice and corporate governance as the moral health (or otherwise) of a public sector sports organization. (shrink)

In this essay, we respond to Angelo Corlett’s criticism of our paper ‘Ethics, Brain Injuries, and Sports: Prohibition, Reform, and Prudence’. To do so, first, we revisit certain assumptions and arg...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of Schadenfreude - the pleasure felt at another’s misfortune - and to argue that feeling it in the course of health care work, as elsewhere, is evidence of a deficient character. In order to show that Schadenfreude is an objectionable emotion in health care work, I first offer some conceptual remarks about emotions generally and their differential treatment in Kantian and Aristotelian thought. Second, I argue that an appreciation of the (...) rationality of the emotions is crucial to our self-understanding as persons in general and nurses in particular. Third, I present a critique of Portmann’s (2000, When Bad Things Happen to Other People. London: Routledge) defence of Schadenfreude with examples from both nursing and medical scenarios. Specifically, I show how his exculpation of the emotion in terms of low self-esteem and a commitment to justice are not compelling. I argue that we are active in the construction of our emotional experiences of Schadenfreude, how we may indeed ‘nurse’ the emotion, and thus become culpable for them in ethical terms. (shrink)

Sports occupy an interesting ethical space from a pedagogic point of view, being included in physical education curricula in most Western countries. The approach of physical education to sports as vehicle for ethical education is too limited when it is restricted to their minimal functional, constitutive and regulatory goals. This essay’s aim is to argue the extent to which the ethical potential of physical education can embrace more than functional purposes, or whether that will be neglected in terms of limited (...) educational aspirations. We present data from nineteen exploratory interviews with experienced philosophy, sports and physical education researchers and teachers, from six different nations, concerning the ethical potentiality of physical education. We highlight five ethical themes: (i) the regulatory and normative structure of sports; (ii) the spirit of sports and its internal values; (iii) the right playing/doing of sports; (iv) the overcoming in sports; and (v) sports as an opportunity for a supererogatory ethics as fertile ground for future operationalization of the potential of physical education for ethical education through sports.El deporte ocupa un interesante espacio ético desde un punto de vista pedagógico, integrándose en los curricula de educación física en la mayoría de países occidentales. El planteamiento de la educación física como vehículo de la educación ética es limitado cuando restringido a sus objetivos mínimos funcionales, constitutivos y regulatorios. El objetivo de este estudio es discutir si el potencial ético de la educación física puede ir más allá de los propósitos funcionales, que considerados aisladamente constituyen un desperdicio de la experiencia pedagógica del deporte. Para conseguirlo, presentamos datos de diecinueve entrevistas exploratorias con experimentados investigadores y profesores de filosofía, deporte y educación física relacionadas con las potencialidades éticas de la educación física. La muestra incluye individuos de seis diferentes nacionalidades, cuyo trabajo demuestra preocupaciones con el tema. La argumentación resulta de cinco temáticas principales: (i) Estructura normativa y regulativa del deporte; (ii) El espírito del deporte y sus valores internos; (iii) El bien hacer deportivo; (iv) La superación deportiva; (v) El deporte como oportunidad de una ética supererogatoria como contexto fértil para la concretización del potencial ético de una educación deportiva. (shrink)