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Oxford Debates – Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport – Proposer’s opening statement

Oxford Debates – Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport – Proposer’s opening statement

[This is the first post in the Trinity term Oxford University 
Online Debate. Feel free to comment on any of the debate either at this blog or over at the official debate website. Votes can be cast after the concluding statements – between 5th and 9th July]

by Julian Savulescu

Two great sporting events are about to commence. Le Tour de France and the Football World Cup. Doping will play a part in both of these. In every professional sport where doping could confer an advantage, there is doping. Even if it is not widespread and even if you don’t know about it.

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Torture, but do no harm

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration redefined acts that were previously recognised as torture and thus illegal as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (EITs). From then on subjecting detainees to, for example, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and exposure to extreme temperatures could be legal. The line between torture and EITs is a fine one: the classification depends on the level of pain experienced.  

A report issued by the advocacy group ‘Physicians for Human Rights’ has revealed that to ensure that the aggressive interrogation practices conducted by the CIA qualified as EITs they were monitored by doctors and other medical personnel who guaranteed that the legal threshold for  ‘severe physical and mental pain’ was not crossed (NY Times, 6 June 2010).

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The ethics of geoengineering – comments welcome

Should we encourage or avoid large scale environmental manipulation, for example in order to reduce climate change?

Measures such as carbon dioxide capture or ocean iron fertilisation have the potential to mitigate global warming, but what ethical issues are raised by these technologies? How should we take into account the potential risks of such measures, and how should they be weighed against the risks of inaction?

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The Brainy or the Rich: who should inherit the Earth?

Does it matter if Britain is ruled by toffs?

Nineteen British Prime Ministers attended one extremely expensive boarding school for boys on the far western outskirts of London, an astonishing statistic. David Cameron is the latest Old Etonian Prime Minister.

Tomorrow the nominations close for the Labour Party leadership and commentators (many of them Oxbridge-educated) have decried the fact that the main candidates ‘look the same’: white, forty-something, and, most damning of all, graduates of Oxbridge. Cameron, like almost his PM predecessors, studied at Oxbridge (Oxford, in his case). Two thirds of his Cabinet are products of Oxbridge. And you are much more likely to get into Oxbridge if you are from a wealthy background.

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