Question What exactly is the moral/ethical problem with a professional athlete taking performance enhancing drugs? I'm talking about a talented professional who carefully weighs the known risks and side effects of such drugs and decides their use is necessary for him/her in order to be competitive in their sport. Shouldn't this just be a personal decision? Aspiring beauty queens are allowed to get plastic surgery, and athletes are allowed to get "corrective" laser eye surgery (significantly improving their perfectly normal distance vision)...

Accepted:
November 16, 2005

Comments

Given the rules in place in most professional and amateur sports, anathlete who takes performance enhancing drugs will be typically beguilty of some form of deception. But I think you're asking whether thereis a moral justification for the putting those rules into place. Ithink there is. Many performance enhancing drugs are dangerous (e.g.,EPO), and a policy that prohibits their use looks likely to reduce thesignificant harms that their use may produce to the user and to others.This seems to provide a moral basis for such policies.

Whatabout concerns for the individual liberty of adult athletes? In somecases our concern for harm overrides the presumption in favor of suchliberty. Consider that the use of performance enhancing drugs bytalented professionals may have a tendency to promote the use of suchdrugs in others. And if the use of steroids were allowed, there wouldlikely be (even more) pressure on all athletes to use them so as tocompete with users.

What about a performance enhancing drug thatwas not harmful? I can't see any good moral reason for prohibiting theuse of such a drug. But there might be other sorts of reasons.Professional athletes are entertainers, and one of the things we valuein entertainment is the manifestation of human skill at a very highlevel. Sport and other forms of entertainment are like art in that way.The use of performance enhancing drugs tends to undercut our sense thatsport is valuable and enjoyable because it allows us to experience highlevels of skill and human achievement. Maybe this is a broadlyaesthetic reason for prohibiting performance enhancing drugs.

I agree with Aaron that a central reason why taking performance enhancing drugs is wrong is that this action violates existing rules and so undermines standards of fairness that are so important to sport and to the enjoyment of sport by others.

With respect to the content of these rules, I imagine that an historian of sports would have an interesting story to tell about the differing conceptions of competition that have been in place at various times and places, and I would bet that "fair sport" in the past has encompassed a variety of personal risks by athletes and many approaches for maximizing athletic skill and achievement. One could certainly imagine ethical defenses of rules and practices that admit more risk than our current rules--reducing harm is an ethical basis for those rules, but need not be the only basis for constructing rules about sport.