Neuroética y deporte, ¿ Una difícil relación?

Abstract

This work shall analyze whether or not the recent studies on neuroethics and neighbour disciplines have a critical impact on the ethical reflection on sports. Given Jonathan Haidt's and Joshua Greene's works on neuroethics, our moral behaviour seems to be mainly rooted in emotive mechanisms within our brain. If this is true, then sports supporters' behaviour can easily be explained by appealing to such emotive brain mechanisms. However, they will turn the efforts to apply the moral principle that is supposed to regulate the sporting world-the fair play principle-into useless efforts. I shall give two counter-arguments that will show, firstly, that supporters' misbehaviour cannot be totally explained by pointing out to several neural-natural-mechanisms, and, secondly, that our brains' make-up can, nevertheless, make sports supporters more willing to abide by the fair play principle. Therefore, sport ethics' aims are not undermined by neuroscientific knowledge.