Julian Savulescu

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“Sport Originally Evolved As A Way Of Showing Off Our Genetic Fitness”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

There are hundreds of baseball players who’ve gotten special dispensation to use amphetamines in one form or another for “medical reasons,” which makes little sense. Yet a player trying to rehab from a legitimate injury with use of HGH under a doctor’s guidance isn’t allowed to do so. There are enough loopholes and inconsistencies in every sport’s drug policy to boggle the mind. 

From “A Doping Manifesto,” Julian Savulescu’s Aeon argument in favor of the allowance of some sorts of PEDS:

“Sport originally evolved as a way of showing off our genetic fitness. Displaying great speed, strength, intelligence, ingenuity and co-ordination in public demonstrated to potential mates your capability to survive and reproduce. It appears that we haven’t come far. One French study by Charlotte Faurie, Dominique Pontier and Michel Raymond published in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2004 reported that: ‘Both male and female students who compete in sports reported significantly higher numbers of partners than other students, and within the athletes, higher levels of performance predicted more partners.’ Perhaps because of the status bestowed by athletic prowess, sportsmanship – the spirit of sport – has come to embody the values we promote in society as a whole. As Dick Pound of WADA said: ‘You respect the rules, you respect your opponents, you respect yourself. You play fair. I think that bleeds over into life as well.’

The values behind the spirit of sport are defined by WADA as: ethics, fair play and honesty; health; excellence in performance; character and education; fun and joy; teamwork; dedication and commitment; respect for rules and laws; respect for self and other participants; courage; and community and solidarity.

Sport is meant to show humans ‘at their best’. It allows us to demonstrate determination, striving, struggling and conquering. Sport is also meant to capture the human spirit. That’s why, the argument goes, if doping were legal it would still be cheating, because sport would no longer be testing those fundamental human virtues and capacities, but would merely showcase the wonders of the modern pharmaceutical industry (or your other favourite supplier of dope).

Yet doping is not always contrary to these values.”

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“We Wait Until Technology Is Upon Us Before We Act”

April 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ethics, let alone laws, can’t keep up with the accelerating pace of science and technology. Growth is exponential and often unexpected, and different nations have varying rules of engagement. It’s difficult to come up with any universal policy. Biotech, in particular, will be messy and dangerous. From a post about the implications of synthetic yeast by Julian Savulescu at Practical Ethics:

“Back in 2010, I blogged about Craig Venter’s creation of the first synthetic organism, Synthia, a bacteria.

Now, in 2014, the next step has been made by a team at John Hopkins University, the use of synthetic biology in yeast, which, whilst still a simple organism, has a similar cell structure to humans (and other more complex organisms): a nuclei, chromosomes and organelles. The engineered yeast has been reproduced to over 100 generations, passing on its new DNA.

The pace is breathtaking. Moore’s law describes a phenomenon in computing, where computer capacity (so far) doubles every two years. Kurzweil uses Moore’s law to predict the: a state where humans no longer control, or even comprehend, the progress that technology continues to make.

It’s difficult to measure scientific progress in the same way as computer power, but it’s clear that leaps in progress are now measured in years, not decades. Yet still we wait until technology is upon us before we act.

Consider a parallel technology: cloning. The earliest intimations of cloning were perhaps in 1885, when Hans Dreisch successfully divided sea urchin embryos. Yet it was not until Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1998 that we began to become concerned and consider deeply thoughts on human cloning. A moratorium on human cloning research was put in place in the US, and a ban in Europe. In industry, cloned animals are used in farming already, yet the EC and UK governments are apparently at loggerheads about whether to allow this to continue.

Synthetic biology, I believe, has far greater potential than straight forward cloning. But this potential includes great harms as well as great benefits.“

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“We Have Exhausted The Human Potential”

July 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

When performance-enhancing drugs are used every day by the average person–and that will happen–it won’t be possible to hold athletes accountable anymore. A section from a provocative post by Julian Savulescu at Practical Ethics which was inspired by runner Tyson Gay’s recent failed drug tests

“We reached the limits of human performance in sprinting about 20 years ago. To keep improving, to keep beating records, to continue to train at the peak of fitness, to recover from the injury that training inflicts, we need enhanced physiology. Spectators want faster times and broken records, so do athletes. We have exhausted the human potential.

Is it wrong to aim for zero tolerance and performances which are within natural human limits? No, but it is not enforceable.

The strongest argument against doping is safety. The harm inflicted on East German athletes must never be repeated. But anything is dangerous if taken to excess. Water will kill you if you drink enough. As sport has shown over last 20 years, performance enhancers can be administered safely. They could be administered yet more safely if it was brought out into the open.

Of course there is no such thing as risk-free sport. But we need a balance between safety, enforceability, and spectacle. Elite sport itself is fundamentally unsafe, as Team Sky’s Edvald Boassen Hagen and Geraint Thomas, both nursing fractures from recent cycling crashes can tell you. It was entirely appropriate to enforce the wearing of helmets to limit the safety risks. But it would be inappropriate to limit the race to only straight, wide roads, or to remove downhill racing or to take any number of other measures that would increase safety but ruin the sport as a spectacle and as a cultural practice. It would be a waste of time to take other measures, such as limiting the amount of time or the speed that riders can train at, even on the grounds of safety. It could not be enforced.

Enforceability requires a reasonable limits.“

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“Parents Should Choose Those Genes Or Choose Those States Which Will Promote A Better Life For The Child”

March 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a debate called “Making Better Babies,” a passage in which Oxford ethicist Julian Savulescu argues that is not just an option but an obligation that we genetically modify our descendants:

“So if we accept that we should treat diseases and use genetics to prevent disease in our offspring, my argument is that we should also value those traits and the genetic contributions to those traits which affect how well our lives and our children’s lives will go.

Now I have in the past controversially argued that we have a moral obligation to do this. Currently it’s legally impermissible to select these sorts of traits in Australia, and I think this is profoundly wrong. However, more strongly not only do I think that people should be able to do it, they should do it.

Why do I say that? Well, if I said to you, people should protect their children from disease, it’s uncontroversial. But if disease is only important because it makes our children’s lives worse, so too parents should choose those genes or choose those states which will promote a better life for the child. 

We have many obligations. We have an obligation to provide good diet and education to our children, to stop climate change, to alleviate global poverty. We have obligations to ourselves and our families. We have many competing obligations. One of those obligations is to try to ensure that our children have the best lives possible and the best advantage when they start life.” (Thanks Practical Ethics.)

 

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“We Should Actively Give Parents The Choice To Screen Out Personality Flaws In Their Children”

August 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An Oxford professor wants us to genetically engineer “ethically enhanced” babies. This will not go over well. From Richard Alleyne in the Telegraph:

“Professor Julian Savulescu said that creating so-called designer babies could be considered a ‘moral obligation'” as it makes them grow up into ‘ethically better children.’

The expert in practical ethics said that we should actively give parents the choice to screen out personality flaws in their children as it meant they were then less likely to ‘harm themselves and others.’

The academic, who is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, made his comments in an article in the latest edition of Reader’s Digest.

He explained that we are now in the middle of a genetic revolution and that although screening, for all but a few conditions, remained illegal it should be welcomed.”

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“It Is Easier For Us To Harm Each Other Than To Benefit Each Other”

July 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of an argument by Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson at Philosophy Now in favor of using bioenhancement to develop human morality:

“For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small groups for limited resources. Thanks to evolution, we are supremely well adapted to that world, not only physically, but psychologically, socially and through our moral dispositions.

But this is no longer the world in which we live. The rapid advances of science and technology have radically altered our circumstances over just a few centuries. The population has increased a thousand times since the agricultural revolution eight thousand years ago. Human societies consist of millions of people. Where our ancestors’ tools shaped the few acres on which they lived, the technologies we use today have effects across the world, and across time, with the hangovers of climate change and nuclear disaster stretching far into the future. The pace of scientific change is exponential. But has our moral psychology kept up?

With great power comes great responsibility. However, evolutionary pressures have not developed for us a psychology that enables us to cope with the moral problems our new power creates. Our political and economic systems only exacerbate this. Industrialisation and mechanisation have enabled us to exploit natural resources so efficiently that we have over-stressed two-thirds of the most important eco-systems.

A basic fact about the human condition is that it is easier for us to harm each other than to benefit each other.” (Thanks Browser.)

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