The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is the primary global organization responsible for implementing rules against doping in sport. A central element of its mission is the requirement that elite athletes submit their whereabouts information for every day of the year to their relevant Anti-Doping Organization (ADO), in order to facilitate no advance notice out-of-competition doping testing. These requirements have attracted considerable criticism, including the claim that they invade elite athlete privacy in a legally or ethically unacceptable manner. The validity of these claims is threatened by the contestedness of the concept of privacy, which arises from the many different uses to which the concept is put, including in legal and philosophical contexts. Resolving this conceptual confusion requires taking an explicit position on various questions of philosophical methodology, themselves subject to contention. As an alternative to such abstraction, and particularly given the need for a philosophically defensible yet pragmatic policy application, I argue that privacy is best conceived of as the absence of certain contextually relevant harms to the person, which arise in relation to such underlying normative values as fairness between competing athletes. In the specific context of elite athlete whereabouts requirements, I maintain that privacy concerns arise principally in relation to surveillance, intrusion, and breaches of confidence. Of these, the first and second face legal difficulties in the UK, on the basis of European legislation concerning human rights and maximum working time. Ethical problems also arise due to WADAs undifferentiated application of the whereabouts requirements, which ignores the heterogeneity of different types of sports and their respective vulnerabilities to doping. I argue that WADAs whereabouts requirements ought therefore to be revised to (a) ensure that they do not conflict with established law, and (b) respect the very different sets of circumstances entailed by the heterogeneous world of elite sports.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:678468 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | MacGregor, Oskar |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42914 |
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