Sports and Bioethics

BETH 736 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course introduces students to key public health and bioethics debates in the world of sports. First, we examine the ethics of using (and administering) performance-enhancing drugs, conflicts of interest that arise with team physicians, and the ways that coercion, consent, and paternalism are conceptualized in the treatment of sport injury and the practice of sport medicine. 

Second, students are introduced to various moral considerations involving sports and mental health. This includes elite athletes deciding to prioritize their mental health over public pressure to win or compete, recent public health studies on sports gambling, and how the use of native mascots in team sports impacts the mental health of indigenous communities. A substantive part of the course focuses on the prevalence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in American football. Throughout this discussion, students are invited to consider why the ethics of fandom deserves serious bioethical inquiry, especially in light of the role fans play in encouraging, celebrating, and taking pleasure in violent sports. 

As sport plays a central role in naturalizing hierarchies of bodies and producing racialized and gendered norms, the seminar also explores timely subjects like: the rise of trans moral panics in sport; how sport governing bodies rely on colonial logics of ability and disability to reinforce racialized ideals of sexual difference; and the ways that sport's "culture of risk" relates to dominant views of race, masculinity, and femininity. 

Finally, the seminar considers various ethical arguments made against the very nature of competition and how these arguments can inform public health conversations around sports, work, schooling, and other activities central to the our "culture of competition".