Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports

The use of enhancments cause a particularly

loss of autonomy because it is ultimatly futile. If everyone had to use enhancmentsto be competitive, enhancments would not offer anyone any advantage. An athlete might hope by using enhancments he or she would achieve

a greater advantage than the next person.If we are primarily intrested in preventing harm, we ought to invest our money in research on developing safer enhancments, rather than preventing their use. Athletes are never created equal at the moment of competition. They share lots of unfair advantages,some are born with greater natural abilities. Some have wealthy parents or the good luck not to get injured.One ansewer is that it is fair to permit people to benefit

from the distribution of natural abilities and good fortune because factors lie outside our control. But this is simply not true. For example, we can make competition more fair by creating handicapping to level the uneven playing field created by natural talent and luck. This would increase the role of pure effort and determination, making victory more earned therefore more deserved . Alternativly, we could use enhancments to increase fairness, by allowing them to be used by those who are disadvantaged by nature. Enhancments might enable athletes with disabilities to compete in the real rather the "special" Olympics. In all due respect , performance enhancing drugs must be banned because, according to those who make the rules of sports, using them is unethical. One reason is that it may allow an athlete to aviod putting all the hard work required to be a successful

competitor. Imagine if athletes using enhancments could walk away with Olympic medals without going through the ordeals of practice and conditioning. The medal wouldb seem unearned and undeserved. Although it might be argued that an athlete who uses banned substances

jeoprodize the health of competitors by making it necessary for them to do so as well.