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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 6
Lesson 10: Enhancement: What, if anything, is wrong with “doping" in competitive sports?Enhancement: What, if anything, is wrong with “doping" in competitive sports?
In this Wireless Philosophy video, we discuss the ethics of performance-enhancing drug use in competitive sports. To what extent is the opposition to such “doping” really based on safety concerns? Why are athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs thought to be cheaters who don’t deserve to win? If these drugs were safe, legal, and widely accessible, would they still diminish the value of athletic achievements?
View our Bioethics learning module and other videos in this series here: https://www.wi-phi.com/modules/bioethics/. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
In this WiPhi video, we’re going to ask: what’s wrong with using
performance-enhancing drugs? Some of the biggest
scandals in the world of sport have to do with the use of
performance-enhancing drugs. Cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped
of his seven Tour de France titles after he was found to have used
performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career. Russia faced a four-year ban
on participation in the Olympics and other major
international sporting events in response to findings of
extensive organized doping schemes. Countless individual athletes have
been stripped of their trophies and titles as a result of doping allegations. But what’s wrong with doping? In many of the most famous cases,
the answer is simple: it’s against the rules. If you break the rules,
your victory doesn’t count. Doping is cheating. Case closed. But that’s not really what we’re asking. Why is the use of performance-enhancing
drugs generally banned? Why is doping against the rules? One answer has to do with safety. Many of the drugs athletes use to
enhance performance are dangerous. Hence doping might be
prohibited for the same reason hockey players are required
to wear protective gear: as a measure intended to
protect athletes from harm. Still, safety concerns don’t
get to the heart of things. For one thing, athletes routinely engage in
behaviors during their training that, considered in themselves,
are extremely dangerous. Indeed, their sport may
itself be extremely dangerous. And anyway, it doesn’t seem like
the root of our criticism of doping is that those who do it are being unduly reckless. For a lot of people, if you win with the help of
performance-enhancing drugs, that means your victory doesn’t count. You don’t deserve to win. Why not? There’s a saying that
winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. But that’s not really true. What about victories where: your opponent was secretly paid to lose, you unwittingly broke the rules, the win was due to an officiating error. These wins don't really count. Or, at the very least,
they come with an asterisk. That’s because a genuine
victory is one you achieved because you were better
than everybody else. You deserve to win only when you win because of your mastery of the sport. Cheating on a test is wrong, in part, because it undermines
the purpose of the test, which is to establish how much you know. When you cheat you are, in effect, lying: you’re deliberately representing
yourself as knowing things that, in fact, you don’t. If we think about it this way, cheating in an athletic
competition is wrong point of the competition is
to establish who’s the best whose mastery reigns supreme. Here too, cheating can be seen as a kind of lying: you’re deliberately
representing yourself as deserving to win in
virtue of your mastery but you’re not. So maybe the problem with doping is that
it opens the door to undeserved victories. But that just leads to another question: why does doping mean
you don’t deserve to win? Most great athletes have some natural
advantages over most other people they’re faster, taller, stronger,
more nimble, and so on. But while these natural gifts may
be necessary for athletic greatness, they’re not sufficient for victory. The winner of the Tour de France isn’t determined by
picking the competitor with the most impressive natural
advantages for cycling. the winner is the competitor whose mastery of their natural strengths enabled
them to surpass the rest of the field. So real greatness results from perfecting your natural strengths through sustained, disciplined effort. When you use
performance-enhancing drugs, though, you improve your level of
mastery purely passively, without any effort on your part. That diminishes the
value of your achievement. If you then go on to
defeat a competitor whose achievement is
actually more impressive, and who would have won had
you not had the help of the drugs, then you’ve claimed a
victory you don’t deserve and cheated them of one they do deserve. However, this argument assumes that
only some competitors are doping. What if all competitors used
performance-enhancing drugs, the same way all cyclists
wear aerodynamic helmets? Wouldn’t this mean that the victory once
again went to the most deserving competitor? One argument made in
Lance Armstrong’s defense is that doping was so
commonplace in competitive cycling, that no one could claim it
gave him an unfair advantage indeed, not to dope would be to
accept an unfair disadvantage. But even if performance-enhancing
drugs were safe, legal, and widely available, many people would still think that
they diminish the value of a victory. Setting aside concerns
about safety and fairness, there is a widespread conviction that meaningful victories in sport reflect what the athlete
can achieve without help from biomedical enhancements. What do you think?