Go for Bronze!
Written by Roman Gaehwiler
Within research of happiness sports incorporates a scientifically approved instrument in order to fight mental depression. Therefore, the excretion of endorphines during physical exercise is capable to generate what a frog might experience when birth-rates decrease – pure delightment! Hence, frogs do not believe in princesses, but in storks.
Nevertheless, the general increase of average Body-Mass-Index (BMI) implies that many people tend to prefer the phlegmatic state of unhappiness and ignore the psychological effect of sports. As a matter of fact, in terms of public happiness in sports we might better take on an utilitaristic standpoint. Therefore, it might be legal to question our single-winner orientation like Hans Lenk used to in his piece „Dopium fürs Volk“ (Denkperlen 06, 2007 merus Verlag). With regard to the sporting performance of a marathon-runner for instance, thousands of participants experience rushes of satisfaction, although they did not perform world-record time. Consequently, it is not the athletic result which makes us happy or unhappy rather it is about the assessement. This might also be the reason why a bronze-medallist tend to be happier than his/her component at the other end of the podium. Additionally, targeting the maximation of happiness could be identified as „friends“, because in order to gain more individual happiness you have to share it. Friends are those people who like you, although, they know you. Applied to sports such derivation would suggest to engage in team-sports.
To come to a conclusion, it is easy to be happy, but it is hard to be easy. Some day in life you will be the pigeon and another one maybe the historical monument or statue. But, with the aid of sports you will learn to fly no matter what you are.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Thanks a lot to Dr. med. Eckart von Hirschhausen for creative inspiration and essential insights.
References: Dr. med. Eckart von Hirschhausen; Glück kommt selten allein…, Rowohlt Verlag, Juni 2009
Gender Competition Preserves Natural Traits of Competitive Sports
Written by Roman Gaehwiler
In western communities the degree of gender equality and emancipation represents an important indicator to level sophistication and liberalism. In sports, however, sexual discrimination is taken for granted. As a result of strict sex segregation, there’s no opportunity for women to measure their abilities with male opponents. Consequently, either sport seems to lack social development or the emancipation of female athletes is not an issue worth considering. Tamburrini and Tännsjö declare this state as “strange” arguing as follows: “The best response to this argument may be to offer women the possibility of genetically becoming as strong as men”. In fact, this would mean to genetically alter the natural female hormone-balance in order to increase testosterone serum-concentration. Finally, that may result in transforming women into men rather than providing equality. In fact, such an act would undermine the ideology of emancipation and therefore foster the issue about gender distinction more acutely. Additionally, Susan Sherwin and Meredith Schwartz respond that “this solution misses the fact the problem of oppression for women is not that men are ‘naturally’ superior and women are struggling to ‘catch up’ to the male ideal.” Furthermore, the problem may have origin in the masculanization of society and “the construction what is ‘best’ reflects male talents, and those activities that are perceived as female are systematically undervalued.” Apparently, this discussion and the tolerance of gender distinction in sports prove the pleasant fact that the acceptance of natural differences and individual traits are still welcome, even in times of “levelling the playing field” and genetic enhancement debates. As a matter of fact, the nature of competitive sports is about the measurement of differences. Hence, when artificial performance enhancing substances tend to level the playing-field the existence of sexes is able to preserve some natural traits of competitive sports.
Are Dopers better Sports(wo-)men?
by Roman Gaehwiler
The crusade against artificial performance enhancement in sports is varicoloured and almost exhaustively debated. Nevertheless, there are still several approaches from the athlete’s perspective which are worth to consider. On the one hand, there is the noble and doubtlessly essential pedagogic approach fostering the educative aspect implying that the misapplication of pharmaceuticals and psychotropic drugs is medically and morally intolerable. In this respect, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency such behavior is also ment to represent a prohibitive action against the «ethos of sports». On the other hand, we probably have to reflect that ingesting specific pharmaceutical performance enhancers displays one possible interpretation of the «ethos of sports». Admittedly, this is a polarising thesis which may be highly challenging at first sight. However, the intrinsic motivation to do everything within your repertoire of opportunities in order to achieve your individual goals demonstrates a typical trait of the so-called ethos of sports. As a matter of fact, doing this during competition as a mean to improve your punctual ability to perform could be interpreted as a dubious performance enhancing practice. In contrast, it is believed that a significant part of athletes help themselves with banned substances exclusively in order to increase their amount of training. In this reference, sports(wo-)men inject peptidehormones such as erythropoietin (EPO) to extend their individual endurance training or ingest anabolic steroids to shorten the interval between the different training-sessions and improve recovery. Concerning this, it might be appropriate to re-evaluate the term «ethos of sports» within an anti-doping framework. On behalf of definition-oriented coherence athletes might meet this specific aspect of the ethos while taking performance enhancing substances for training purposes.
As a result : Indeed, athletes using performance enhancing substances may be (by definition) better sportsmen in the sense of the ethos of sports because they (are able to) train more in order to reach their goals compared to «clean» combatants.
However, another serious ethical issue emerges some steps further in the process. As a matter of fact, unphysiologically elevated training quantities result in musculo-skeletal detrition at least in the long-term perspective. Consequently, athletes get treated with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in order to fight the pain caused by chronic tissue-overstress. Unfortunately, NSAIDs do not imply any preventive characteristics. Hence, as long as the individual athlete is obliged to continue regular competitions tissue damage is going to aggravate silently. To come to a conclusion, in short notice official bodies engage intensively to keep up the athlete’s capacity in order to participate for the benefit of an entertaining sport event. As a consequence, while adhering to such kind of inconsistent anti-doping practice governing bodies indirectly encourage professional athletes to undergoe illegal artificial performance enhancement. Hence, solely fighting the symptoms is not equal to disease-eradication. Thus, merely antagonizing the outcome (-> pain due to overstress) is somehow close to diplomatic ignorance of a basic complex of problems (-> doping).
Should one have a tummy tuck?
“Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
As our wealth increases, more and more of us undergo cosmetic surgery: From tummy tucks, breast enlargements and nose jobs to hair transplants and face-lifts: You name it—and pay—they fix it.
Even though cosmetic surgery has grown to become a multi billion-dollar industry, it is looked at with some suspicion. Many feel that there is something superficial and, perhaps, slightly desperate about undergoing surgery for aesthetic reasons. In academia, at least, although a hair transplant and a teeth bleaching might pass, chances are that a breast enlargement would raise eyebrows.
It is not be unlikely, however, that the eyebrows in question would be both plucked and colored—for we already do quite a bit to enhance our looks. We work out, try to dress well, shave, and go to the hairdresser. We make sure we get tanned during summer. Some of us are on a diet, wear make up, or dye our hair.
Considering the Instrumentalization and Exploitation of Elite Athletes
Why did Wladimir Klitschko and David Haye not wear helmets during their boxing fight a few weeks ago? Actually, they do tend to wear them during training, but obviously not when an official boxing match takes place. Why not? Presumably, it is because wearing helmets could foster tactical fights and finally turn them into unspectacular victories won on points.
Instead of impressive knock outs, swaying hulks and eye-rolling fighting-machines, an audience would have to content itself with scampering human rocks and rare surprise effects. From another perspective, boosting knock outs (or not wearing helmets) could even be seen as a degrading or even a humiliating act against an athlete’s integrity. Nevertheless, professional boxers accept this system because they also get their salary after being vanquished and humbled. Still, a slightly unpleasant taste of something between modern slavery and exploitation cannot be denied.
Furthermore, participating at an excellent level automatically implies taking on a kind of role model responisibility. Often, still adolescent athletes are meant to be ambassadors of virtues such as fairness, consideration and respect. But unfortunately, within a Darwinistic framework like sports you cannot reach the top of the pyramid while considering the needs of your competitor. Moreover, the regular monitoring of athletes actually undermines their status as role models, since it stigmatizes athletes as people who, without surveillance, will behave improperly. [1] Hence, to put an athlete in charge of being an ambassador of moral traits may be utopian. Rather it should be the other way round. Elite sportsperson represent qualities and insufficiencies of the specific society they were born and raised in and therefore, tend to be seen as a mirror of society. In fact, they’re not. Sports, including athletes as its protagonists, are rather boosters of human traits because performing at limits confesses which values we actually stand for. Expecting athletes to exhibit superior moral traits because they occasionally appear on a screen responding to questions, is not unfair, but naïve. Therefore, enforcing a sportsperson to bear the burden of being a centre of moral competence while gasping for breath might be a deportation of this specific « educational » responsibility.
A further aspect of instrumentalization is going to be obvious while conceding that the system of modern sports industry actually promotes doping. To substantiate this provocative thesis, I would like to make the connection to the Tour de France 2011 or similar intense competitions requiring weeks of top performance. The main reason why cyclists began abusing performance enhancing methods in such an excessive manner is certainly not because they were poorly prepared for the race. It is because the setting of the competition itself (in this case the TdF) demands inhuman physical capacities. To cycle 3’430.5 kilometres within 23 days and only 2 days of recovery cannot be healthy at all. Despite the fact elite sport does not much concern health these numbers imply a daily distance of 149.15 km on average, of course under contest conditions. Additionally, all of the six high mountain stages take place in the second half of the Tour (superfluous to mention that every of them is above 152 km with exception of the last one). Notably, not the length of each single stage, which is questionable, it is more about the short interval between the stages and the repetition for more than three weeks. Due to the fact that the human body depends on regular nutrition, hydration and recovery to keep a natural level of performance such a race-calendar, at least indirectly, suggests the intake of performance enhancing substances . In fact, during the Tour, cyclists get infusions for nutrition and hydration [2] because the human body is physiologically not able to restore its stock this fast (until next competition starts, normally on the subsequent day). Finally, we have to keep in mind that the Tour de France is only one of several long-distance events in the race-calendar.
To conclude, doping is just an inevitable corollary. Especially, if we as spectateurs insist on the current aesthetic and entertaining standard of sports which actually involves boxers not wearing helmets or cyclists trying to make up with inhuman competition-settings. Even on that account, it might be inconsistent, maybe even hypocritical, to justify a ban by appealing on athletes’ well-being [3] like various anti-doping defenders do. As a result, sports governing bodies may ask themselves what they intent to provide to the ticket payers. Is it about sports, a fair competition or solely an entertaining show to celebrate the potential of modern biochemistry? Simultaneously, society, as a consumer of elite-sports, may re-evaluate its interpretation of the extraordinary skilled athlete who is regarded to represent idealistic moral traits.
[1] Current anti-doping policy: a critical appraisal. Kayser B, Mauron A and Miah A, published 29 march 2007, BMC Medical Ethics 2007, 8:2
[2] Dopium fürs Volk? Werte des Sports in Gefahr, Denkperlen 06, Hans Lenk, 2007 by merus verlag Hamburg.
[3] Constructing Winners: The Science and Ethics of Genetically Manipulating Athletes. A. J. Schneider and J. L. Rupert, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2009, 36, 182-206.
Enhanced Consequentialism: Up, Up… and Away?
Last week Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal featured a fun, and genuinely thought-provoking, cartoon. Click below to see the cartoon at FULL SIZE, then come back to hear my take on it:
Poor Superman, trapped in a spiral of consequentialist logic! If one really is as powerful as Superman, then it’s no use pleading for a bit of “me time” on the grounds that one’s individual decisions don’t make that much of a difference. For Superman, it really is true that “every second of quibbling is another dead baby.” Even if we let Superman assign a little more value to his own interests and projects (such as fighting criminals) than to those of everyone else, his preferences still completely disappear in the consequentialist calculus. He might find a life of turbine-operation incredibly miserable, but the loss of good to others if he stops is just astronomically large.
Fine, you’ll say: consequentialism makes outrageous demands of comic book characters. So what? Well, I’m about to argue, the rest of us may soon become much more like Superman in this regard – and if you’re a consequentialist, you don’t get a (moral) choice in the matter.
Ban the beets?
The hot new performance-enhancing drug is…beetroot juice!? (original paper)
Nitrates in food reduces the oxygen cost of some forms of exercise and improves high-intensity exercise tolerance. So the researchers gave half a litre of beetroot juice (which is rich in nitrate) or a nitrate depleted placebo to club-level competitive cyclists. The nitrate juice produced better cycling performance when compared to the placebo. On a 16.1 km race beet juice reduced the total time by 2.7% – not much, but presumably enough to matter in a competition.
In any case, this is fun for doping discussions. Should we ban athletes from quaffing beet juice?
Should we breed smarter children?
Last Sunday’s Melbourne Herald-Sun published an article reporting Julian Savulescu’s argument for enhancing the intelligence of babies through genetic modification. The argument turns on the social benefits of enhancement. Economic modeling has mounted a powerful case that widespread enhancement of IQ would produce a broad range of benefits. The work builds on previous research demonstrating the effects of reduced exposure to environmental lead. Public health measures aimed at reducing lead exposure caused a small but significant rise in IQ across the population, and brought social benefits including less welfare dependency, less imprisonment, fewer orphaned children, and so on. Continue reading
Nazi Eugenics Returns to Germany: The Paradox of Eugenics
The prestigious scientific journal, Nature, reports that Germans are poised to allow genetic testing of embryos for serious genetic disorders. This follows a recent judicial judgement that genetic testing of embryos for serious disorders did not fall under German laws that ban destruction of embryos. Now,
The Leopoldina, Germany’s national academy of sciences, has published a report strongly recommending that preimplantation genetic diagnosis of early embryos be allowed by law when couples know they carry genes that could cause a serious incurable disease if passed on to their children.
DIY enhancement: morphological freedom or self-harm?
by Anders Sandberg
Lepht Anonym is a DIY biohacker, extending her body and senses through implantation of home-made cybernetics in her own kitchen. (YouTube video of her lecture) Most of her work is about extending the sense of touch, using implanted magnets to acquire “magnetic vision” and (hopefully) an implanted version of the northpaw magnetic sense system besides the “usual stuff” of RFID implants.
She is critical of regular transhumanism, which she thinks is all talk. This is the real deal: “You just have to get deep enough to open a hole and put something in,” she says. “It’s that simple.” Of course, she has ended up in the hospital a few times. A new kind of self-harm all right-thinking people ought to save her from, or a valid form of self-expression that should be protected?
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