Before I forget, I must mention something about the Barcelona meeting (Ethics and Philosophy of Emerging Medical Technologies, Institut Borja de Bioetica, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain), since sport appeared in a good handful of papers including:
Keynote paper on Therapy and Enhancement
Professor Ruth Chadwick
Argued in favour of the term ‘improvement’ rather than enhancement, as a basis for characterising the ethical issues arising from emerging technologies.
Ethical norms for research on biomedical enhancement using human subjects
Professor Max Mehlman
Max has written considerably on genetic enhancement and regularly uses sport as a case study in his work. The military was also a theme and there are some great analogies between sport and the military.
Honorary session for Lennart Nordernfelt
Thomas Schramme
Schramme developed a case to inquire into the concept of ‘health’ the focus of this session and a tribute to Nordenfelt who gave an introduction and reply. Schramme’s case discussed Lily, an athlete who wanted to jump 2m. He argued that Nordernfelt’s work would argue that her inability to jump this high would qualify as failing to meet a vital goal and that, therefore, we could characterise it as an illness that should be alleviated by medicine. In short, we would characterise her less than healthy.
Schramme rejected the idea that this inability should be characterised as an illness and rejected the idea that the realisation of all vital goals falls within the proper role of medcine. Nordenfelt agreed with Schramme’s conclusion, but did not accept that Lily’s interest to jump 2m could be described as a vital goal. Being the best is not a reasonable expectation, but being good is.
Athlete or Guinea Pig? Sports and Enhancement Research
Nancy M.P. King and Richard Robeson
Argued that medicine for the athlete should be characterised as enhancement research, but currently it is not. This led to some interesting debates about whether sport technology should go through a more rigorous liability check and whether this should be connected to anti-doping policy. I argue for this in my 2005 piece in the European Journal of Sport Science, though their emphasis is on medical procedures. I wonder whether blood spinning might fall within this category.
Finally, there was my wee paper Posthuman Medicine & Imagined Ethics
Developed posthuman theory in relation to transhumanism and cyborgology and subsequently argued for the need to consider imagined ethical issues. Used the gene doping case as an example of an ‘imagined ethical’ debate.
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