James J. Hughes sees such hair-splitting about what it means to cheat as pretty hopeless.
“In the ancient Olympics, the winners were taking all kinds of exotic medicines and herbal treatments. Eating raw bees. They were widely appreciated for that—jumping higher, throwing the javelin farther.” Hughes is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where he teaches health policy. He is also executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
“This anxiety about athletes cheating with self-medication is a relatively recent phenomenon. It coincides with the professionalization of sports. To be truly superhuman in their capacities, people train 12-hour days, are hooked up to computers, have swimming gear” that costs hundreds of dollars. “That’s natural—everything else is unnatural. It’s wildly inconsistent. There’s a certain amount of double-think. If you have a cold, you take antihistamines to bring you up to your natural level of performance. But in sports, you would be taken out of competition,” as some have.
“There’s a lot of hype around the alleged harm that people do to themselves” with enhancements, Hughes says. “But in head-pounding sports, you face a lifetime of disability. In soccer, heading the ball often enough lowers your IQ. Sports can be bad for people. Why not outlaw boxing? Boxing is proven to be bad for you. It’s not just that steroids are good or bad.
“How do you define who’s cheating and who’s not?” The dictionary defines it as “dealing dishonestly for one’s own gain.” But Hughes says, “It’s purely a social construct. Is a fat cat who rips people off with his company a cheater? Is a welfare queen with three kids a cheater? Some think so, some don’t.
“If you’re living in a hyperbaric tent—which is very expensive—to compete with some Ethiopian, for me that’s unfair competition. That’s basically buying your way to success. But not all people see it that way.”
There’s an open question, of course—is it worth the bother to even try to draw a line? Do fans care anymore about having sports heroes with integrity and honor and humility? Or do they just want to see amazing feats, and don’t much care how they are achieved? Plenty of money is made selling tickets and television time to sports as it exists.
For Nick Bostrom, the lesson is, we should not create rules in sport regarding violations that may be undetectable and that cannot be enforced. “To do so would be to reward cheaters with unfair advantage,” he says. Rules are fine as long as we can ensure openness and compliance. Bostrom is the director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute and a member of the philosophy faculty there.
“There is an arms race on between doping and detection. The winner will be the one who risks taking the most illicit drugs and gets away with it. The race is tothe luckiest cheaters.”
He supports the idea of choosing goals. They could be “protecting athletes’ health, making a sport more fun to play or watch, preserving valued traditions, setting salutary examples for the youth, or probing the limits of human performance—with or without enhancements.”
But then comes the sticky problem of how you accomplish this, as a practical matter, given our past and current failures. Bostrom comes down on the side of multiple leagues. “It is unlikely that one size will fit all. Just as we divide many sports into weight, age or sex classes, we might have different versions of the same sport that are more or less tolerant of doping.”
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