Lance Armstrong and the Contagion of Unethical Behavior
November 1st, 2012
Article, Crisis Management, Donor Matters, Ethics in the News, New Ethics for New Issues, Uncategorized
(As first published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on October 23, 2012) The dangers of the Lance Armstrong doping scandal reach far beyond performance-enhancing drugs. When the news of Lance Armstrong’s doping allegations hit what we thought was the media and judicial nadir this summer, a friend of mine’s upstanding, informed, college-bound son irritably commented that he didn’t see the point of “all of this.” If everyone does it—and everyone does, according to him—why not legalize it? What he was saying, as many others have, is that taking performance-enhancing drugs has become normalized within our ethics framework—even though it...