Professor Tim Chappell, Director of the OU Ethics Centre, writes about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Is there a place for them? Should athletes be putting their health at risk to achieve medals? And will competing become more about the size of your wallet than your physique?
With the Olympics bearing down on us, and with the sprinter Dwain Chambers and the cyclist David Millar appealing their lifetime bans in order to be eligible for the London 2012, perhaps it's time to have a think about the place - if any - of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.
Before we look at these arguments more closely, I think we should step back to ask ourselves - what are we doing in sport anyway?
Whether as competitors or as spectators, we're looking for glorious, exceptional, superlative physical performances. But that doesn't mean that we want to see (or run) the fastest 100m sprint that anything can do. (If it did, we'd go and watch a jaguar, or get in a Jaguar.) It means that we want to see the fastest 100m sprint that a human can do.
With drugs in the picture, is it really about what humans can do any more? I'd say not. I'd say watching a drugged performance is more like watching what drugs can do, and the money that buys them. I'd say it’s about taking things away from the competitors and giving them to the market. Where's the glory in that?
Or think of it another way. Remember when you were two, and your game was to try and jump across a puddle two feet wide? This game is fine if you’re toddler sized, boringly easy if you’re an adult-sized adult. The logical conclusion of enhancing athletes' performance is that at least some of our games will go the way of the toddler's puddle game. Do we want that? Do we want to outgrow the games we play?
Climbing is a case in point here. If you stick bolts in it, you can get up any rock. This is what makes climbers get so angry on the subject of bolts. If you want to rattle a climber's cage ask him what his favourite climb is, then tell him you think it should be bolted. Provided it hasn't been already, of course.
Of course, if we did outgrow our current games by drugs or magic or whatever, no doubt we’d invent some other games. Fine. No more football - time to switch to quidditch... But the point for the moment is just this: athletics with drugs is, at best, a different game from athletics without. And when some of the competitors are playing one game and others the other, the whole activity gets into hopeless confusion.
Not just confusion, though; corruption as well. It's quite easy for the participants in a sport to be fairly severely exploited. Here's something that can happen: a naïve young boy from the slums with no prospects at all is taken up by a rich promoter and turned into a boxer. The boy makes some money, sure. The promoter makes more. And the promoter doesn't end up brain-damaged. If this happens (and I'm not saying it does, just that it can), then it seems to me that the boy has been pretty severely exploited for the enrichment of the promoter, and the entertainment of those who like watching boxing.
'In practice, if there is no regulation, individuals will not be free to decide. They will have no choice but to take the drugs because everyone else is taking them'
So compare the case in athletics where someone achieves fantastic performances by taking steroids for 20 years. Think about the kind of horror-stories we used to hear regularly from the Soviet Union about 50-year-old steroid-raged moustachioed ex-shot-putters with cataracts, duodenal ulcers, and severe weight problems. These people have been sacrificed for our entertainment. Are we happy with that? I don't think we should be.
Of course, athletes in the Soviet Union were forced to take performance-enhancing drugs. That doesn't mean it's a whole lot better to “leave individuals free to decide” what drugs they take. In practice, if there is no regulation, individuals will not be free to decide. They will have no choice but to take the drugs because everyone else is taking them. Here as elsewhere, by regulating the state serves the role that it's there for in a genuinely liberal settlement. It can regulate in a way that actually increases citizens' freedom, rather than decreasing it.
Also of course, not all performance-enhancing drugs are bad for you. Or like caffeine, they're a bit bad for you, but not very. Or their long-term effects are unknown. And there are drug therapies which involve not taking things rather than taking them, which seems just like giving up alcohol to perform better... surely some of these therapies must be all right?
Yes, there are grey areas. But there are often are grey areas in life. The fact that some things are grey doesn't mean that nothing is black or white. We can be quite clear about the kinds of performance-enhancing drugs that we most want to eradicate, and work backwards from those cases to the less obvious ones.
I suggest that the two things most worth eradicating are really harmful drugs and really expensive drugs. We should ban the harmful ones because, well, because they're harmful; we should ban the expensive ones because they turn what ought to be a competition between physiques into a competition between wallets. And once we know what we think about the clear and easy cases, we may find ourselves in a better position to think about the marginal and difficult ones.
Find out more:
- Professor Tim Chappell
- The OU Ethics Centre
- Free study unit: The Ancient Olympics: Bridging past and present
- More about philosophy on OpenLearn
- Study with the OU: Philosophy
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