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Abstract
The use of certain performance-enhancing drugs (PED) is banned in sport. I discuss critically standard justifications of the ban based on arguments from two widely used criteria: fairness and harms to health. I argue that these arguments on their own are inadequate, and only make sense within a normative understanding of athletic performance and the value of sport. In the discourse over PED, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” performance has exerted significant impact. I examine whether the distinction makes sense from a moral point of view. I propose an understanding of “natural” athletic performance by combining biological knowledge of training with an interpretation of the normative structure of sport. I conclude that this understanding can serve as moral justification of the PED ban and enable critical and analytically based line drawing between acceptable and nonacceptable performance-enhancing means in sport.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Sigmund Loland is a member of the Ethics Panel of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The position is unpaid, and the Ethics Panel is a consultative and not decision making body.
Notes
1. For a collection of essays on PED and ideas of “the natural” see Tolleneer, Sterckx, and Bonte (Citation2013). See also Hilvorde et al. (2007), Wasserman (2011), Agar (2011), Galston (2011), and Murray and Murray (2011).
2. See, for example, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/natural. Accessed June 30th, 2017. For a classic tale of “natural” talent in sport, see Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural (New York: Hartcourt Brace) with baseball pitcher “natural” Roy Hobbs (played by Robert Redford in a 1984 film adaptation) as the leading character.
3. For a general view of the biology of human development and adaptive capacities, see Mayr (Citation1997, 227–47).
4. See Kenney, Wilmore, and Costill (Citation2015, 1–28) for an outline of paradigmatic premises of exercise physiology.
5. When it comes to inequalities in system strength, current efforts are inadequate. In elite sport in particular, there is strong correlation between system strength and sporting success (Bosscher et al. 2015). Moreover, attempts to regulate financial inequalities are challenging and sometimes contra-productive (Peeters and Szymanski Citation2014). Still, the very existence of such efforts indicates that the ideal of equal conditions is considered relevant and is given extensive validity in sport.
6. For a review and discussion of the fair equality of opportunity principle, see Arneson (Citation2015).
7. Body size, in particular body weight, can be impacted by athletes to a certain extent. One example can be boxers moving between weight classes for tactical reasons. Still, there are obvious limits to such tactics. A heavyweight boxer can never adjust to the featherweight class, and vice versa. The rationale for classification remains the same: Significant inequalities in body size are outside of athlete's sphere of control and responsibility and undermine the meritocratic aspect of sport.
8. It has to be said, though, that sports are not completely consistent in classification matters. On the one hand, there is classification according to biological sex in a series of sports in which sex does not really matter, such as in shooting and sailing. On the other hand, classification according to body size could be applied outside of combat sports and weight lifting, for instance, in sports such as basketball and volleyball, in which body height is crucial to performance. For critical discussions of fair equality of opportunity in sport, see Loland (Citation2002, 151ff.) and Murray (Citation2009).