Doping in Sport

Global Ethical Issues

Angela J. Schneider, Fan Hong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000143218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book considers ethical arguments about performance enhancing drugs in sport in a global context. It examines:
* The forces that are bringing about the debate of ethical issues in performance enhancing drugs in sport
* The sources of ethical debates in different continents and countries
* The variation of ethical arguments in different cultural, political, ideological and sports systems.
Whilst there has been a significant body of work that has looked at the importance of ethical issues in performance enhancing drugs in sport - there has been little, if any, consideration of the various ethical concepts in different countries and cultures involving sport. This is a major omission. This book fills the gap and provides a thorough review and analysis of the ethical literature on performance enhancing drugs in sport in the global society. It makes a major contribution to the worldwide anti-doping campaign in sport.
This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Sport In Global Society.

Fair is Fair, Or Is It?: A Moral Consideration of the Doping Wars in American Sport

William J. Morgan

The Atlanta Olympic Games of 1996 were widely regarded, as one commentator colourfully put it, as 'a carnival of sub-rosa experiments in the use of performance-enhancing drugs'. This despite the fact that some 2,000 of the 11,000 athletes were tested for banned substances, and around $2.5 million was spent on such testing. [1] For all that effort and money, only two athletes tested positive and no medals were forfeited. The reasons why these testing procedures proved so ineffective are attributable to a number of factors, not least the infelicity of the tests themselves. But another important reason why these efforts were so spectacularly unsuccessful was due to an ambivalence on the part of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) themselves about catching violators, owing to the fear that if they turned up too many athletes using performance-enhancing drugs the public would be reluctant to support Olympic sports any more. By contrast, in the just-completed 2004 Athens Games a record number of positive drug tests were reported. These results reflect, among other things, improvements in the drug tests themselves (though it is still relatively easy for the slightly sophisticated and wily to get around them), and perhaps most of all a greater will and resolve on the part of the USOC and the IOC to catch violators of the drug ban.

But does this newfound will to catch athletes using these drugs constitute real moral progress or not? I am inclined to think not, even if it must be granted that it did at least address the hypocrisy of the USOC's earlier half-baked efforts to stem the flow of drugs into American sports. My scepticism here is that the sort of hunter-hunted struggle this technical testing approach set in motion to expose and punish violators of the performance-enhancing drug ban, had little if anything to do with what could reasonably be called moral efforts to level the playing field, despite pronouncements to the contrary, and almost every thing to do with morally questionable efforts to get athletes to tow the company line at any cost. More precisely, I regard the USOC's greater determination to catch drug users by, among other things, lowering the standards of what constitutes reasonable evidence of such use, as a breach of fairness as morally egregious as the unfair use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes that it was supposed to discourage, if not stop.

My argument for this, somewhat controversial, claim will proceed as follows. I begin by highlighting the sense in which the notion of fair play speaks not just to a moral feature that is widely thought pivotal to the conduct of sport, but widely thought pivotal to the conduct of American life in all its various forms - which goes a long way toward explaining why sport has the strong hold on the American national psyche that it does. I next offer an analysis of fair play in which I distinguish and discuss two of its most important strands, namely, fair play as a reciprocal regard for the interests of individual participants in sport, and fair play as what Butcher and Schneider aptly call 'respect for the game'. [2] I then try to show how the current anti-doping strategy adopted by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), following the lead of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), undermines these two moral principles of fair play, and so is as morally blameworthy as the unfair doping strategy pursued by athletes obsessed with winning - does the old saw 'two wrongs don't make a right' sound familiar? Finally, I will close by arguing that if we are really morally serious about dealing with the doping problem in sport, then we will have to look for a moral solution to what is at bottom a deep moral malaise, and not, as is customary in contemporary America, seek a technical solution for what is wrongly perceived to be essentially a technical problem. At the very least, that means taking a hard moral look at the great emphasis we place on winning in sport as evidenced by the outsized economic rewards we attach to it.

Fair Play and American Culture

My focus on fairness in this regard is not an autobiographical quirk but a national and cultural one. By that I mean that the ideal of fairness in its many iterations (for example, fair play, fair dealing, fair outcome, fair trial, et cetera) is a way of moral thinking Americans almost instinctively entertain when they reflect on their characteristic social practices and institutions, though one they share with the members of other English-speaking nations. What is more, it is also a characteristic feature of American sporting life, which is why most Americans get their first lessons on how to treat one another fairly early on in their sporting lives, and continue to draw inspiration from, and be guided by, its moral prescriptions well into their adult sporting lives, both as participants and spectators. It is little wonder, then, why sporting metaphors figure so prominently in spreading the moral message of fair play to other spheres of American life, perhaps most notably to the political realm. As George Fletcher thus opines, it 'is a striking feature of English and American culture [that] we cannot think about human relations without thinking about sports and the idiom of fair and foul play'. As he goes on to observe, 'this is not true in French, German, Russian, Italian, or any other major language or culture of the West', which explains further why when the concept of fair play does manage somehow to find its way into the moral vocabularies of other peoples, the Israelis and the French to be precise, it is accounted as an 'untranslatable American idea'.[3]

So the moral, cultural and linguistic roots of fair play are unmistakably American ones, and equally unmistakably bound up with its rich sporting culture. It is for this reason that Progressive populist intellectuals and social reformers at the turn of the twentieth century seized on sport and its emphasis on fair play as a moral antidote to what they strenuously objected was an unfair distribution of wealth wrought by American industrial society in which a precious few became wealthy beyond their dreams and far too many of their countrymen were forced into poverty In fact, sport's commitment to fair play cut to the very moral centre of America itself, to its conception of itself as a moral commonwealth in which its democratic experiment to wean itself of the patrician manner and class-driven social hierarchy of the motherland, England, was widely regarded as its defining feature. For if political power is to be invested in the people, as it must in any true democracy, then the people must prove equal to the task socially, politically and, especially, morally. Democracies only work, in other words, if they are peopled by informed, conscientious citizens, who can be counted on to wield the power entrusted to them fairly. This is, to reiterate, what led Progressives to take a serious look at the fair play on display in sport, at what William James called 'the fixed machinery of conditions' (rules) that ensure the equal treatment of all of its participants, and to claim boldly that sport offers us a 'glimpse of what the "real" world ought to look like'.[4]

Two Principles of Fairness

That arguments both about athletes using performance-enhancing drugs and being tested for them in the United States have typically, but, of course, not exclusively, targeted their alleged fairness is no accident then, but a justificatory gesture most Americans naturally make when they want to assess the moral character of just about any social practice. This is especially the case in practices like sport where competition plays such a central role in determining athletic excellence. But it is important to understand how the concept of fairness is being understood and used in the present case in order to grasp the arguments made in its name. With this in mind, I want to argue that the sense of fairness at issue here is principally grounded in two principles of conduct: first, what I call, after Rawls, fairness as reciprocity among individuals involved in a joint, cooperative activity; and second, what Butcher and Schneider call 'fairness as respect for the game'.

Let's begin with the notion of fairness as reciprocity, which in sport has to do with how others in the competition should be treated in their respective bids for athletic distinction. There are two important features of fairness in this regard that need to be discussed.[5] The first is a straightforward insistence on the impartial observance and application of the rules that define the fundamental character of sport and how it is to be conducted. In this respect, fairness means 'equality of conditions' in which similar cases, as determined by the rules of the practice itself, should be treated similarly. The 'structure' of a practice, then, is fair if, and only if, it reflects a 'proper share, balance, or equilibrium between competing claims'.[6]

The second feature of justice as reciprocity sets out what counts as justified inequalities in practices like sport. For while fairness in and outside of sport requires 'equality of conditions' it does not require 'equality of results', which simply means that the benefits and responsibilities that accrue from participation in sport do not have to be apportioned in the same (identical) amount to each participant in order to be considered fair. Another way of saying this is that all 'arbitrary' distinctions between and among participants in sport that advantage one or more participants at the expense of other participants in the awarding of these benefits and responsibilities should be eliminated. For Rawls, distinctions and the inequalities that follow in their wake are arbitrary if they do not work out to the advantage of all members of the athletic practice community, and/or if the roles and positions with regard to which benefits and responsibilities are meted out in sport are not open to all according to their talents and capabilities.[7] On this second feature, therefore, a sport practice is fair if the goods and responsibilities gained by participants in it are reciprocally advantageous to all concerned, that is, mutually enhance the goods and qualities particular to the practice that make it so attractive to participants in the first place, and if the opportunity to engage in sport and partake of the goods it provides is open to everyone based on their relevant capabilities as determined by the rules and norms of the practice itself.

If we join these two strands of fairness as reciprocity together, it becomes clear that fairness in sport demands that everyone in sport be treated equally, in other words, that the rules of sport apply to all in relevantly similar ways, and that the distribution of benefits and responsibilities in sport be determined by a competition open to all on the basis of the relevant talent and capabilities of would-be participants and in such a way that does not diminish the goods that sport delivers that draws people to them. Dworkin's distinction between the right to equal treatment, 'which is the right to an equal distribution of some opportunity or resource or burden', and the right to treatment as an equal, which is the right 'to be treated with the same respect and concern as everyone else', is instructive in this regard. For equal respect and concern do not entail the identical distribution of some good in sport, for example, who gets to start or play a certain position in a game, so long as those goods are open to all based on considerations of merit.[8] Of course, ignoring this important distinction between equal respect and the identical distribution of some good in sport would itself be arbitrary and so manifestly unfair, since it would undermine the competitive quest for athletic excellence that makes sport the vital and engaging practice that it is, and, therefore, would prove mutually disadvantageous to the members of the sporting community.

Now, it is important to make clear that fairness as reciprocity in both of its key senses above presumes that participants in sport will, at least in part, act as self-interested parties seeking their own particular advantages in and through it. Indeed, seeking such advantages is one of the driving forces of competitive sport itself, since competitors will, in their respective efforts to achieve athletic excellence, attempt to frustrate and deny their competitors' desires and efforts. This suggests that the importance of fair play in competition is to ensure that that self-interested pursuit does not get out of hand, that participants restrain their self-seeking ways out of regard for the fairness of the competition. And that regard is to be accounted as a distinctly moral one, which explains why fair play should be accounted as a genuine moral principle. For as Rawls aptly observes, a person 'whose moral judgments always coincided with his interests could be suspected of having no morality at all'.[9] So when participants in sport agree beforehand to abide fairly by the rules and relevant conventions of sport and not to tailor them to their own idiosyncratic interests and concerns, in other words, to apply those rules and conventions impartially to themselves as well as to their fellow competitors, they are acknowledging that the interpersonal relationships that bind them to one another in competitive sport are indeed moral ones they are mutually obliged to observe.

The moral reasons one has to curb one's self-interests in sport that are particular to fair play are, therefore, a species of what Scheffler calls 'relation-dependent' reasons.[10] That is, just as a relationship like friendship commits one to treat one's friends differently from the way one treats, say, strangers, so a competitive relationship in sport commits one to treat one's fellow competitors differently from the way one treats, say, strangers. Everything here, of course, hangs on what is meant by 'different treatment'. One thing it definitely does not mean is that whereas one is always free to treat strangers as mere means rather than as ends-in-themselves, one is not similarly free to treat friends or competitors as simple instruments of one's own egoistic gratification. For treatment of someone as an end, which is synonymous with treating them with equal respect, is something not only owed to strangers but to any moral agent properly so-called. Rather, different treatment in this instance means that in one's relationships to friends and competitors in practices like sport, though certainly not competitors in the market, one incurs special and rather robust responsibilities to significant others by virtue of the relationship in which they stand to one another that does not obtain for outsiders. For being someone's friend just means that one can ask of such a person, and, of course, they can ask of you, something one would neither be comfortable nor justified in asking of a stranger, for example, to lend you a substantial sum of money, or to make a far-reaching request, or to listen compassionately and as long as it takes to some sad event that has befallen you. Similarly, to be someone's competitor in sport means that you can ask of them, and once again, of course, they can ask of you, something that would neither be appropriate nor justified to ask of a stranger, namely, to take the competition as seriously as you do, to push you to achieve a level of excellence that may well be nigh impossible to achieve outside of the competitive encounter, to train hard, and so on. Of course, there are limits even to what we may legitimately request of friends or athletic competitors, but those limits go well beyond the range of what would be appropriate to request of strangers precisely because we do not incur the same moral responsibilities to strangers that we do to these significant others because we stand in no significant interpersonal relationship to them. So even though strangers should always be treated with equal respect, they are not entitled to the same moral consideration as our friends and athletic competitors are. That said, what goes for our friends and athletic competitors goes as well for the friends and athletic competitors of others with whom we have no connection and from whom we receive no out of the ordinary consideration, which we must, on pain of contradiction, reciprocally acknowledge as constituting special responsibilities that are as morally compelling and substantive as ours.[11] This is why in acknowledging the special responsibilities that flow from our most important relationships and that furnish us with good reasons for constraining our self-interests we are not violating the sacrosanct moral principle regarding the equal worth of all persons, the silly and morally dangerous idea that some people are more valuable than others.

Just how reciprocity figures in the principle of fair play should by now be fairly clear. For it is the notion of reciprocity that explains why individuals who possess no moral authority over one another and are engaged in a joint activity are themselves the ones who set the rules and norms that both shape their conduct and determine what is a fair share of the goods and responsibilities that flow from such cooperative activity[12] Crucial to the very idea of reciprocity, therefore, which by the way does not require 'a deliberative performative act' such a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Fair is Fair, Or Is It?: A Moral Consideration of the Doping Wars in American Sport
• 2 Are Doping Sanctions Justified? A Moral Relativistic View
• 3 Cultural Nuances: Doping, Cycling and the Tour de France
• 4 On Transgendered Athletes, Fairness and Doping: An International Challenge
• 5 Creating a Corporate Anti-doping Culture: The Role of Bulgarian Sports Governing Bodies
• 6 Doping in the UK: Alain and Dwain, Rio and Greg – Not Guilty?
• 7 The Japanese Debate Surrounding the Doping Ban: The Application of the Harm Principle
• 8 Doping and Anti-doping in Sport in China: An Analysis of Recent and Present Attitudes and Actions
• 9 Anti-doping in Sport: The Norwegian Perspective
• 10 Ethics in Sport: The Greek Educational Perspective on Anti-doping
• Index