Drugs in Sport
Cycling is, of course, the latest sport to be shaken up by accusations of widespread drug abuse. But why not allow drug use in sport? I don’t mean illegal drugs of course; those are illegal, and I’m not suggesting we make an exception for athletes. So let’s put that aside; given that a drug is legal but performance-enhancing, why is it wrong for an athlete to take it?
One reason is that taking drugs gives an unfair advantage, but this isn’t very telling as it stands. If doping were allowed then there would be no unfairness, and the drugs would merely give an ethically-neutral advantage just as training does. Nobody says that eating a high-protein diet gives a boxer an unfair advantage, just that if his opponent lives on salads then he’s a fool. The linked article gets into that a bit more; Rick Lewis’s answer that cheating means gaining an advantage by means other than hard work is interesting but ultimately, I think, feels arbitrary and is open to counter-examples (diet being an obvious example).
Another reason is that taking drugs is often harmful to the athlete, and so the rule serves to protect participants in the sport. Undoubtedly this is true in part, although training to the highest level in many sports is injurious to the long-term health of the athlete (perhaps more so in gymnastics than in snooker, admittedly). Furthermore, if a drug were chosen that did not cause harm to the person taking it, it seems unlikely that the ban would be lifted simply on those grounds.
Another reason is that it gives the sport a bad name. But this seems to be a political rather than ethical consideration, one of how things look to others rather than whether one has acted properly. What’s more, this one seems to depend on the others. certainly it would reflect poorly on the sport if its governing bodies failed to ban something that ought to be banned. The question is whether it ought to be banned or not; if the other reasons were put aside it would be hard to see why this one would still stand up.
Perhaps the strongest argument against drug-taking is simply that it’s cheating. The Gambling Act 2005, which becomes law this week, creates a new offence of cheating, but doesn’t define the term. Here’s the start of the relevant section:
- A person commits an offence if he-
- cheats at gambling, or
- does anything for the purpose of enabling or assisting another person to cheat at gambling.
- For the purposes of subsection (1) it is immaterial whether a person who cheats-
- improves his chances of winning anything, or
- wins anything.
I think there’s an assumption here that “cheating” is one of those things, like pornography, that you know when you see it. Or perhaps there’s an assumption that the rules of any game are sufficiently tight that cheating is a clear-cut matter (which seems doubtful). What’s interesting, and I think squares with our intuition rather well, is subsection (2), which defines cheating as a certain kind of (or member of a class of) acts rather than an act that has a certain outcome (an unfair win). You can cheat but lose, and it’s still cheating.
On this view, taking testosterone in order to compete in the Tour de France would be similar to moving the king two squares instead of one in the game of chess. It’s simply against the rules of the game, and the rules define the game. The Tour de France is a competition you can only win by playing the game of competitive cycling, and that game is defined by various rules including one about not taking testosterone. The ethical crime committed if you do take testosterone is that of trying to win the Tour de France without playing the game of competitive cycling.
It’s this view that enables us to propose, if we want to, liberalising the rules about drug use in sport. All we really say is that we want to revise the rules of the game — which means deciding to play a different game that’s substantially similar to the old one.
