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Ethical Dilemmas In Sports

Decent Essays

My real life situation is based on drug scandal in sports. Daniel Spencer Tonks, a former England Under16 rugby union player, tested positive for the steroid stanozolol in February. The first British rugby player given a four year ban for taking steroids says doping in the sport is widespread."There is a lot of pressure on players to be bigger, faster and stronger as they are the players who get picked,” "I wouldn't say it was coaches saying you should take something, more the fact the players want to be the best at their sport.” he said.

This lead to my knowledge question “How can we decide between competing ethical claims?”

Claim
Fairness is one of the ethical principle that is supporting on banning performance enhancing drugs
“Fairness …show more content…

Performance enhancing drugs goes under gamesmanship which the principle is winning everything even though by cheating rather than sportsmanship which is not simply to win but winning with honour by trying your best without cheating.

“The spirit of sport is the celebration of the human spirit, body, and mind” (Savulescu, 2004)
Performance enhancing drugs improve a person strength, endurance, speed
It violates the spirit of sport
Tonks didn’t train as hard as other player to be at the same level- He stated that “There is a lot of pressure on players to be bigger, faster and stronger”, so he have decided to take drugs instead of doing more training

Drugs can lead to health risk to athletes.
Anabolic steroid can increase sportsmen’s muscle mass and strength as it produced testosterone
PED can cause heart damage, liver damage and an increased risk for blood clots
People have died from PED before
Referring to RLS, Tonks stated that “It can mess your body up, your mind up, and can have harsher effects than just ruining your rugby …show more content…

We should only allow drugs that are safe and eliminate drugs that are unsafe. There is a argument for this policy based on fairness: “provided that a drug is safe, it is unfair to the honest athletes that they have to miss out on an advantage that the cheater enjoy.” (Savulescu, 2004) If drugs are legal in sport, we would develop drug to be safer for the athletes. But if drugs are illegal like how it is now, black market will be producing drug which the quality of drugs can not be assured, this leads to health risk of

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