If I’m lucky, when I ask my undergraduate students why you shouldn’t punch a stranger in the face, I hear “because it’s wrong” rather than “because I’d get in trouble.” In either case, though, that question is enthusiastically answered. The follow-up question, “what makes punching a stranger in the face wrong?” however, generates more than the usual number of puzzled faces, and a return to silence. Part of teaching philosophy is pushing past the “it just is” or “I don’t know” answers that students tepidly offer under professorial compulsion.
Asking baseball fans — students of The Game, even — “what makes the use of performance-enhancing drugs wrong?” generates the same puzzled faces and responses.
At least, after the obvious answer “because it’s cheating” is ruled out; though tempting, that is probably not why most believe use of performance-enhancers is wrong. For that answer generates no objection to the claim that performance-enhancers should be made legal, such that using them would not count as cheating. If one believes they should be banned, they are wrong first and illegal second; they are illegal because they are wrong, not wrong because they are illegal.
Put another way, if you believe the answer to “why shouldn’t you use performance-enhancing drugs?” is “because it’s cheating” or “because I might get in trouble,” then you would have no reason not to use them if baseball simply lifted the ban, and no reason to say that baseball shouldn’t lift the ban.
Let’s agree for arguments’ sake that cheating is wrong, and if performance-enhancers are illegal, it is wrong to use them. But the use of performance-enhancing drugs was not cheating in baseball until 2004, which means that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez failing a 2003 drug test does not make them cheaters. And it means Mark McGwire wasn’t a cheater when he hit 70 home runs in 1998, and it means Barry Bonds wasn’t a cheater when he hit 73 home runs in 2001. So why isn’t McGwire in the Hall of Fame? Why is it plausible that 7 time MVP Bonds won’t get there either? There is obviously a moral element involved in the controversy over performance-enhancers that is independent of cheating.
The problem is that it is just not obvious what exactly the moral element is, or what it is about performance-enhancers that people believe is wrong. As my students are forced to recognize (via relentless bullying), nothing “just is” right or wrong. Instead, there must be something about punching a stranger in the face or using performance-enhancing drugs that makes them right or wrong.
Different moral theories give different explanations. Utilitarians, for example, would say that punching someone in the face is wrong because the sum of pain it causes is greater than the sum of pleasure it causes. Kantians would say that David Ortiz (potentially) lying about whether he knew of the results of the failed 2003 drug test was wrong because lying treats the person lied to as a means to the liar’s ends, rather than as the “ends in themselves” that all people deserve to be treated as. But the general point is that in the eyes of the philosopher, any moral judgment or evaluation ultimately must be backed up by an appeal to a theory that accounts for what makes something right or wrong. (Even “because God says so” counts as such a theory, though this leads to the Euthyphro problem). But what is the moral theory or principal that explains what it is about performance-enhancing drugs that makes using them wrong?
Despite all the moralizing and condemnation from Congress, fans, and bloggers, there is remarkably little reflection on this question. In lieu of a more Socratic method, permit me, then, some armchair anthropology — a hypothesis as to the moral theory or principle that underlies the rash of judgments.
Many people operate — implicitly, probably — with what I’ll call the “religious concept” of the person. This religious concept holds that there is a Way People Are, and this Way is Natural and Right. This Way, perhaps crafted in the image of God, is immutable and unchanging, an essence, if you will (and even if you won’t).
If the Natural is Right, then the Unnatural is Wrong. If there is a Way People Are which is natural and right, then there is some other deviant Way People Could Be, which is unnatural and wrong. And because this Way People Are is Essential, and so unchanging, the religious concept of person believes that tampering with- and so changing- what is natural is itself unnatural and wrong.
All these divisions — Natural and Unnatural, Right and Wrong — require a sharp line dividing them. If you hold this religious concept of the person, then, it is rational to worry about Frankenstein’s monster, mutants, and anything that might erase the sharp lines. Republican Kansas Senator and Christian Evangelical Sam Brownback’s recent introduction of a bill to ban human-animal hybrids because they would “blur the line” between species is an exemplar of this worldview. (He also complained that such hybrids would “challenge the very definition of what it means to be human”; unless he just doesn’t want to spring for a new edition of Webster’s, this is an Essentialist’s lament if I ever heard one.)
It should be clear how opposition to performance-enhancers fits into this picture. Because performance-enhancers are artificial. i.e., unnatural, and change the Way People Naturally Are, they are therefore wrong. The drug designers are yet another case of science run amok, as in Frankenstein. These drug designers are able to alter nature and “play God,” able to give the players superhuman or monstrous strength. The ingestion of such unnatural substances into the natural body blurs the line between the natural and artificial, and so blurs the line between what a person deserves due to his own “natural” or intrinsic abilities, and what he is able to do when enhanced by external agents, undeservedly. This appears a crime against the meritocracy that is baseball.
The problem, though, with the moralizing about performance-enhancing drug use is that simply describing — or believing in — the religious concept of person is not an argument for its truth. In other words, simply because the view that the use of performance-enhancers is wrong falls out of (or is entailed by) the religious concept of person doesn’t mean that the use of performance-enhancers is in fact wrong, or that the religious concept of person is true. Needless to say, this view carries quite a bit of metaphysical baggage, and many of its claims are quite controversial, and so the belief that the use of performance-enhancers is wrong cannot simply rely on this picture for justification without significantly more metaphysical and theological argument.
It is true there might be other reasons to object. One might worry about the adverse health effects of performance-enhancers, and argue that Major League Baseball should ban anything so dangerous, especially as any young person growing up hoping to make the big leagues would be forced to take the drugs in order to compete with his enhanced competition. Though this line of thought is reasonable, it generates no objection to the Jose Canseco-endorsed claim that chemists and doctors should devote resources to creating safer performance-enhancing drugs for use by all athletes. If health concerns were alleviated, this argument cannot be employed to object to the advocacy of the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
After reflection, we may be left only with the vague or nagging sense that performance-enhancers are wrong, and that something creepy is going on. At every moment of our lives, we are each faced with the question “what should I do?”. When that ballplayer is faced with a decision whether to take certain chemicals that might allow him to continue to do what he loves, or provide for his family’s long term financial security, and he is wondering if using them is wrong, he should hear more than “it just is.”
Bonds photo here
“Oh God”/George Burns photo here
Jonah Goldwater
Jonah Goldwater is a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York , where he is writing his dissertation in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. He also teaches at Baruch College in Manhattan. Jonah won a Most Improved Player ...
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john says:
The moral overtones of drug use tend to obscure the comparability issue--which is not so much right or wrong as it is problematic. The problem is simple: even if the drugs were made legal today and used by all, comparing records with those set in the past (when the same drugs were not available) becomes impossible, and spoils the fun! This dilemma arises every time technology changes a sport, most recently in the world of swimming, where hi-tech suits are soon to be banned because of the ridiculous number of new world records being set (at an international competition reported on just today, there were more world records set than there were events).
Baseball Collectibles says:
Very nice blog. I am a baseball player and like this blog.
Scott P. says:
Of course the use of PEDs is cheating, and not just since 2004. Cheating is any attempt to defeat the principle of a level playing field by gaining a surreptitious advantage not available to everyone else. That's the definition I use to determine whether my students are cheating. By that definition, PED use, whether in 1909 or 1999, was cheating.
maxr says:
I agree with your religious concept theory, but how do you square it with the apparent lack of concern/outrage about PEDs in other sports? See, e.g., Shawn Merriman of the San Diego Chargers being suspended by the NFL for taking steroids, but nevertheless managing to avoid the congressional circus that enveloped MacGuire, et al.?
Jonah Goldwater says:
interesting question, Maxr. from the point of view of my argument, and this is just off the cuff, and i suppose it might sound odd, but i'd say that there is less identification with football players as "people"- in the sense of sharing the Way People Are, as above- than there is in baseball. that is, football players, with their massive shoulderpads and helmets obscuring their faces resemble humanoid tanks. i'd say the worry or concern about steroids in baseball is that these ballplayers that we've recognized for so long as people so similar to us are turning into something else entirely with the help of artifical enhancers, whereas players in football are already 'something else', so much bigger and stronger, etc, and so the same ethical problem does not arise. that's my hunch, anyway.
Jonah Goldwater says:
J: You make a good point, but as you may know, some new baseball statistics try to address this problem by expressing a given player's numbers as relations to their contemporaries. OPS+, for example, says how much better than a league average OPS a player has (with some adjustments). And one can compare Babe Ruth's OPS+ to Barry Bonds, and see who was better relative to his own league. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement over simply comparing traditional "count stats" like homeruns, which also bear the mark of their time and place, as all stadiums have different dimensions, etc.
BC: Thanks!
SP: Good point about the secrecy of PED use. But the secrecy could be due to the common belief that PED use is wrong, rather than it actually being wrong. And their lack of universal availability may be due to the drugs being illegal, (rather than banned by baseball) which, in terms of the morality, puts the cart before the horse. as discussed above, if they are wrong because they must be used secretly, but they must be used secretly because they are illegal, that means that they are ultimately wrong because they are illegal, not illegal because they are wrong. but as i argued above, this doesn't suffice to show they are actually wrong. for in this case, just lift the ban, nobody has to do it in secret, and everybody wins!... unless it's morally wrong for some other reason.
maxr says:
Jonah: I think you might be partly right with respect to baseball players being more identifiable than tank-like football players, who we expect to be bigger and stronger than us anyway and so we're unaffected when they get caught juicing.
However, perhaps another side of this is that, although we revere football players as titans (with a lowercase "t"), we revere certain other athletes as Titans (with an uppercase "T"). Johnny Unitas is an all-time great at QB, but he doesn't nearly have the same stature in the sports pantheon as does Babe Ruth, etc. I think we expect that baseball is timeless, and so we want all eras to be equal; any progression in the present is, perhaps, seen as sullying the past. You also see this in other sports like cycling and the Olympics, which strive for a timelessness and place their greats up on a pedestal moreso than does the NFL.
Just my thoughts.
Jay Stevens says:
For me, it's a matter of "fairness," in the sense that, if legalized, not all players would have access to the drugs because of cost, doctor availability, etc & co. In essence, we'd be creating an arbitrary advantage to certain select players, either by class or by proximity to coaches or programs that dole out the PEDs. Think of it this way: would a kid from Spanivaw, Oklahoma ever have a chance to make the majors if, in a PED world, he doesn't have access to the drugs because he wasn't "discovered"?
Part of the mythos of baseball -- which ties into the egalitarian mythos of the country -- is that a kid from Spanivaw could play his way by dint of hard work and a healthy dose of God-given talent into the HoF. In America, we're all potential major leaguers. In this worldview, PEDs are a kind of unfair advantage, insider knowledge, even when legal -- unless you assume every kid in every sandlot would be given pills.
Then there's this: taking PEDs rewards the player without any corresponding sacrifice, like labor. (That's why, say, weightlifting or special baseball camps are okay, even if they favor the wealthy, say, as much as PEDs would: those activities imply work, which should be rewarded.) What about the protestant work ethic?
Perhaps you'd consider that just another way of defining "Natural" and "Unnatural." But I think there are legitimate societal concerns met and benefits provided by the belief in an egalitarian system that are separate from "Nature" or "God," which can be measured. Heck, baseball provides an example: the quality of baseball is unquestionably better since integration. Baseball is better by removing a barrier to participation -- skin color; wouldn't the same be true if another barrier to participation -- lack of access to PEDs -- were removed?