The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports

To almost all sports fans, doping in sports is an issue of near-religious importance, says Julian Savulescu. According to the Australian bioethicist and moral philosopher, fans celebrate people of extraordinary physical ability who dedicate themselves to training to perform an athletic feat to perfection—but when they augment their abilities with drugs and enhancers, fans can feel personally wronged as if a crime has been committed against them. Just look at what happened to Lance Armstrong.

Time to wake up and smell the steroids, he says. As director of the Uehrin Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Savulescu has garnered quite the reputation for his controversial views on subjects ranging from cloning to the end of the world, —and sports are no exception. On his radar since 2000, about why Lance Armstrong was right to use doping and why we are living in a “fairyland” if we think it isn’t going on—even if testing doesn’t catch it.