PEDs and human meaning

LISTEN. Before class this afternoon I'm meeting again, as I've done annually near the close of the past several Fall semesters (but on Zoom this time), with a Sports Management class concerned specifically with the ethics of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in sports. They submitted some questions yesterday. Here are my first stabs at answering, from my own bioethical point of view.

• Based on The Case Against Perfection (by Michael Sandel), why is it that we need to rely solely on our natural abilities? Aren’t we already doing things that stretch our natural abilities? Athletes “stretching” their natural abilities on the basis of training, conditioning, and practice is fundamentally different from extending and enhancing those abilities (or compensating for comparative deficiencies of ability) via PEDs that provide a nontransparent advantage to users and create an “uneven playing field” between competitors. That is of course the point of PEDs: to acquire and exploit a covert, nontransparent advantage. 
• What is the difference in the performance enhancement things we are already doing as opposed to performance enhancement drugs? What is the bright line drawn between these two? The line may not be terribly bright, but it’s the difference between achieving one’s native potential by working hard to develop and express it, vs. exceeding one’s native potential by shortcut and artifice. Could Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa ever have hit so many HRs without PEDs? Hard to know, but it’s pretty clear that they would not have done so. They took a shortcut, they enhanced their performances, and thus skewed the possibility of realistic comparison and assessment vis-a-vis their peers.
• Currently some athletes are being tested for PEDs more frequently than others in the NFL, do you think this is ethically correct? Why or why not? Depends on why. Is there some reason why testing can’t be universal and consistent? Are they past offenders? Is there good reason to suspect they’re more likely than their peers to be abusing PEDs? Or are they being singled out arbitrarily? If the latter, that’s not ethically correct.
• Many believed that Dolly the cloned sheep’s birth was morally incorrect because it was agreed by scientists to be unsafe, so if that has any correlation to PEDs, would you consider them to be morally incorrect since they are not all approved? ”Unsafe” need not imply “morally incorrect,” unless we stipulate safety as an overriding moral criterion. PEDs are objectionable in spectator sports, from a fan’s point of view at least, not because of the risk they may pose to a player’s safety but because they subvert our appreciation of an athlete’s natural gifts and achievements.
• The Savulescu* article mentions that all kinds of doping could be eliminated, but it would require 24-hour surveillance and other intrusive restrictions on the athletes. While highly unlikely to be executed, what kind of moral and ethical dilemmas do you think this would cause if it were done? (Note: go over the examples given in this article) Athletes are people too. If we value privacy as a human right, constant surveillance (etc.) is an unacceptable violation. (I’m not yet familiar with the examples in question, you’ll need to catch me up.)
• Do you think taking performance enhancement drugs can destroy the true spirit of sports? Yes. As Murfreesboro’s own Grantland Rice said, it’s all about “how you play the game.”
• 6 a. Do you think all performance enhancement drugs should be illegal to take? Including painkillers and anti-inflammatory? No, if painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs are deemed PEDs then (in my opinion) they should be exempted on the grounds that they are (or should be) universally available. What else should be? I would leave that to an ethics board to delineate precisely… but their charge should be to prohibit any PEDs that are not uniformly distributed and that render a nontransparent advantage.
• 6 b. Should drugs like mental stimulants that function only to increase brain function and decision making be outlawed in sports? Examples include Ritalin, Adderall, etc. Probably… but I’d leave that determination to the ethics board.

To those Qs & As, I've added:

In my Environmental Ethics course we recently discussed Bill McKibben's Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? He writes, after noting the meaningful experience he'd had of besting a previous personal (though unexceptional) marathon best...

So, here's what begins to worry me: with the new technologies we're developing, it's remarkably easy to wash that meaning right out of something even as peripheral as sports. In fact, we're very close to doing it. Erythropoietin, or EPO, is a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells. Happily, we have learned to produce it artificially, so we can give it to people suffering from anemia and to those who must undergo chemotherapy. It is remarkable medicine for the repair of problems in our bodies. Apparently, it was given to the cyclist Lance Armstrong when he was being treated for the testicular cancer that almost took his life... [he] also took EPO (and testosterone and human growth hormone and probably some other stuff) en route to seven Tour de France victories after his recovery from cancer. It enabled him to climb the Alps with a dash and grit never seen before. People thrilled to watch, transfixed by his epic ascents, and when he launched a charity, Livestrong, they joined by the millions, strapping on yellow plastic bracelets to commemorate the power of the human will. And then it emerged that it wasn't a triumph of the human will at all. Sure, he'd worked hard, but he'd done it in concert with those drugs. And for almost all of us, that robbed his victories of any real meaning. He was stripped of his titles, and the charity he'd founded asked him to step aside. “What people connect with is Lance's story,” an official of his foundation said. “Take charge of your life.” But it turned out that that wasn't really his story; instead, it was "find an unscrupulous doctor who will give you an edge. It wasn't dash and grit; it was EPO. Barry Bonds's home runs were towering, awesome—and then it became clear that they were the product only in part of diligence, application, skill, gift. They were also the product of drugs. We test athletes for those drugs now, in an effort to keep sports "real," to prevent the erosion of their meaning--because otherwise, it is all utterly pointless."

McKibben concludes: "...faster isn't really the point. The story is the point." And,

If something as marginal (though wonderful) as sports can see meaning leach away when we mess with people's bodies or remove them from the picture, perhaps we should think long and hard about more important kinds of meaning. The human game, after all, requires us to be human.

We'll discuss.

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* I've now had a glance at Julian Savulescu's "Doping Manifesto"...

Central to human progress (in life, as in sport) has been our ability to understand the world and ourselves, and modify these for the better. If this is admirable in life, why is doping against the spirit of sport? Doping expresses the spirit of sport. To be human is to be better. Humans are not like racehorses, flogged by the whip of the jockey: they are their own masters. The choice to be better is an expression of that, and so performance enhancement embodies the spirit of humanity.

Yes, but as Bill McKibben says: "better" doesn't just mean faster (or stronger, or able to hit balls further, etc.), in the absence of a "story" of how an athlete achieved greater speed, strength, or power (etc.) by means of commitment, perseverance, and character. Especially character. Without such a story, being better is deprived of the human context that makes sports and games mean something to us. When meaning "leaches away" from an activity, any activity, the game has gotten away from us. Game over.

To Savulescu's point about "mental doping"... 

"If mental doping is the use of substances to change our willpower, desires, and perception of pain, then using cocaine counts as mental doping." Sure. But analagesics and anti-inflammatory drugs? If we're talking about dosages great enough to entirely mask serious injury, sure. But I can't agree that they should be entirely prohibited. In moderation, I don't see how their use would leach the meaning from athletic competition.

More broadly, I'm not sure I grasp or accept the mental/physical distinction Savulescu wants to draw. Where is that "bright line"? 

Finally, though, I agree in principle: "doping that departs from optimising normal physiology, especially that which pushes us into different realms of existence," changes our games beyond meaningful recognition. "The human game, after all, requires us to be human."