Head to Head: Should We Allow a Doping Free-for-All?

You could say the job of the sports fan is not only to cheer but to jeer. Take the Rio Olympics. American sprinter Justin Gatlin, who has been suspended in the past for doping, entered Olympic Stadium before his 100-meter race to resounding boos. Competitors are also a part of the ritual. After winning a gold medal, American swimmer Lilly King wagged her finger to mock her Russian competitor Yulia Efimova, who previously had been suspended for doping.

To philosopher Julian Savulescu, the boos and censures ring with, if not outright hypocrisy, short memory spans. “Caffeine is a performance-enhancer,” he says. “It used to be banned and now it’s allowed.” Savulescu, a native Australian, who directs the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, has been one of the loudest critics in recent years of doping policies. Sports governing bodies have had restrictions in place for decades, he says, and have had little effect. Athletes will always find a way to beat the system, he says, and like most sports fans, Savulescu laments that doping creates an uneven playing field.

But unlike most fans, Savulescu thinks the solution is to make doping legal in sports. For over a decade he has worked on the intersection between biotechnology and ethics, building the case for his view that we are masters of our nature and ought to use biotechnology to shape it to our and society’s benefit. Savulescu, not surprisingly, has his own boo-birds, bioethicists who say he treads morally shaky ground. Robert Sparrow, a philosophy professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is an applied ethicist who has brought a critical eye to the role of technology in our lives, and not been shy in the past about stating where he thinks Savulescu goes astray.

On a recent evening, Nautilus brought the two philosophers together to debate doping in sports and defend their moral views. In a classroom at Monash University, the two thinkers got riled up over a range of subjects. They included a hypothetical Olympics games with no restrictions at all on performance enhancements, whether women athletes with high levels of testosterone should be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and if swimmers born with webbed fingers present an unfair advantage.

Should the Russian