The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#2My problem with doping isn't moral. Is that in pursuit of sponsors people will literally kill their athletes, with or without their knowledge.
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#3My problem with doping isn't moral. Is that in pursuit of sponsors people will literally kill their athletes, with or without their knowledge.
Exactly. It's like safety regulations in car racing. Racers get put into a hard position where they have to choose between safety and winning, because safety equipment costs weight and money that could be used to go faster. Regulations eliminate that choice and allow people to compete while maintaining some baseline level of safety.
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#4We could just start new sports leagues that allow doping. It would be interesting to watch the NFL if people were bigger and angrier than they already are.
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#5I don't necessarily have a problem with professional athletes doping in a black box, i.e. free of influencing others. Professionals should be fully aware of the health effects of "riding the bicycle," and it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.
I always thought, however, that the big issue with steroids was the role that athletes play in the lives of children and teenagers. It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids. I was under the impression that professional athletes using steroids influences budding athletes to use steroids both directly ("I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids") and indirectly (feeling pressured to use PEDs in order to compete). I seem to remember this being a controversial topic in the news 10-15 years ago.
Steroid use in professional bodybuilding isn't as big of a deal as steroid use in professional sports. While part of that is attributable to the goals of those respective fields, another part is attributable to bodybuilders not being widespread role models in the way that baseball or basketball players are.
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#6Why are musicians allowed (and maybe expected) to use performance enhancing drugs, while athletes may not?
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#7We could just start new sports leagues that allow doping. It would be interesting to watch the NFL if people were bigger and angrier than they already are.
[deleted]
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#8I am not aware of any system of morality in which "but everyone else did it" is considered to be a watertight argument.
I feel strongly about matter, having competed in weightlifting, because of the recent influx of steroid apologists into the weightlifting community. The question of whether PEDs should be allowed is distinct from whether they are allowed.
A sport is an arbitrary collection of objectively determinable athletic trials. It doesn't really matter how they start. Two people want to see who is the "best" at something, so they compete.
Eventually there is an argument about who won. Alex thinks Bob has cheated, because Bob used a technique or technology that Alex thinks grants an unfair advantage.
So Alex and Bob agree to rules. These rules create the space of permissible actions in which the arbitrary trials take place. For example, for sprinting, the rules create a space in which driving a sports car is excluded.
Eventually a name is attached. What is the sport?
The sport is the rules. It follows that actions taken outside the rules, even if unobserved, are not part of that sport. Consider the sprinting example: if the stadium lights go out and I drive to the finish line in 5 seconds, did I win, given that nobody detected my action? No: I did not win. I was incorrectly observed to be first, but I did not win.
If you argue that it's based on the observation, it still requires rules against which the observation is applied. If instead you argue that there are no rules, then you do not have a defined athletic trial -- you can sprint, I can throw, and both of us claim to be the best pistol shooter at the end of the contest.
That is, sports is a positivist legal framework. There is no "real" sport outside of the rules. The rules are the sport. If you break them, even unobserved, then by definition you cannot win and have not won, even when you appeared to.
The nature of modern professional sports being what it is, this means that most winners are the 20-something-th placegetter. But there's a reason we have separate words for "truth", "honour" and "glory".
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#9We could just start new sports leagues that allow doping. It would be interesting to watch the NFL if people were bigger and angrier than they already are.
> We could just start new sports leagues that allow doping.
The experience of powerlifting federations is that cheating will continue to happen in the tested versions of a sport. The cachet for winning "naturally" is higher.
Re: The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
#10Why are musicians allowed (and maybe expected) to use performance enhancing drugs, while athletes may not?
Music isn't, in general, a head-to-head contest between individuals or teams with an objectively determinable way of keeping score.