Lance Armstrong was recently stripped of his Tour d’ France titles under accusations that he used illegal performance enhancement techniques to win. Several years ago Senator Mitchell conducted an investigation into the prevalence of doping in Major League Baseball. Last summer, the London Olympics entertained its own discussion of fairness in sports when Oscar Pistorius raced with his titanium cheetah legs. We can make a distinction between training techniques and drugs, prosthetics, implants, and treatments for performance enhancement, although the line between these two quickly blurs. For example, the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) considers training in a high altitude environment a legal training technique, but blood transfusions of the athletes’ own hyper-oxygenated blood, an enhancement technique. Both accomplish the same ends, but one is legal, the other is not.
For this paper, I will provide a framework by which we can make distinctions between training techniques, therapeutic techniques, and enhancement techniques. We can draw ethical lines between therapy, training, and enhancement techniques in sports based on a design (or teleological) perspective of the body by considering therapy as “fixing the design,” training as “optimizing the design,” and enhancement as “going beyond the design.” One’s worldview influences one’s ethical system. The prevailing worldview in sports assumes a mechanistic view of the body and a scientific approach to training. This paper will seek to use a design perspective of the body as a common language to draw ethical lines that allows for new technologies to also be assessed in a consistent fashion.