Beyond Punishment: Doping, Deterrence, and Moral Disengagement

When athletes use performance enhancing drugs, they violate the nature of sport. With the recent doping scandals in Olympic and professional sport, current deterrence methods do not appear to be effective. Thus it is important to better understand why athletes engage in Performance Enhancing Drug (PED) use. Evidence associating doping with moral disengagement is accumulating and suggests that mechanisms of moral disengagement may play an important role in facilitating doping by allowing athletes to rationalize their PED use. We suggest that a more detailed understanding of moral disengagement could assist in reducing PED use in the future.