Bioethics Research at The Hastings Center

Garrison Colloquium: Doping and Sports Provides Entry Point to Issues of Human Enhancement

The motto of the World Anti-Doping Agency is “Play True,” but what “playing true” entails is not always clear to athletes and sports administrators, nor have philosophers yet sorted it all out. In the November 2004 installment of Bioethics Seminars, an ongoing lecture series held at The Hastings Center, Thomas H. Murray, president of the Center and chair of WADA’s Ethical Issues Review Panel, compared doping in sports to the Cold War arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States: if one athlete uses anabolic steroids, other athletes may feel coerced into taking them as well -- and they all may be looking for something still stronger. Where split seconds can mark the difference between a gold medal and finishing at the back of the pack, doping, despite recent scandals, is irresistible to some athletes. But some athletes still compete without using drugs, while others sometimes, despite years of training, drop out of competitive sport altogether.

Doping in sports is also woven into larger social concerns, Murray suggested. It “opens the door onto the world of human enhancements that we must inevitably confront.”

Gene transfer, an emerging development in the history of sports doping, is an example of what Murray called the “performance principle,” that is, the idea that the point of sport is to maximize performance by any and all means.. Gene transfer involves introducing a synthetic gene that can remain functional within the body for months or years and produce naturally occurring proteins that build muscle. This technique is good news for those suffering from muscle-wasting diseases, such as muscular dystrophy. But it is also intriguing news for those athletes who feel they need a little help to make the grade, for the genes introduced may be indistinguishable from those that occur naturally. This means that officials may find it nearly impossible to prevent athletes from using synthetic genetic treatment to boost performance, and that the ideal of fairness in sporting competitions may suffer a severe blow.

As Murray explained, some in the sport world argue that if it can happen, let it happen; resistance is futile. Others, he said, hold a Promethean view: We should celebrate our bodies’ malleability and make it conform to the standards we set. If we can run faster and lift heavier weights, this is good and does not compromise notions of fairness and equality.

Murray countered these views by saying that rules in sport need not be arbitrary in any ethically troublesome way. Five players on each side constitute a basketball game, not because five is the only possible number—it could be four or six--but experience shows that five per side permits a lively contest that highlights what we find to be interesting and even admirable when basketball is played well. It is precisely the constraints -- the rules -- that we place on athletes when they compete, Murray argued, that brings out their “natural talents” and allows us to witness “the best of human ability and virtue.” To preserve this ethic and to “play true,” Murray said we need clear and firm ethical standards and good monitoring systems to make sure they are enforced.

In the Hastings tradition, members of an audience of about 30 wanted to know how such distinctions between natural and unnatural enhancements were possible. Isn’t coffee an “unnatural” stimulant? What about spectacles? Aren’t they an ocular enhancement? Murray admitted that distinctions between what is and is not permissible can be hard to make, but not, he argued, impossible. For example, if someone on rollerblades entered the New York Marathon, would we count her as a legitimate contender? Rollerblades are no more “unnatural” than fancy running shoes, but anyone who understands what the Marathon means has no difficulty seeing that rollerblades violate the spirit of that event. Caffeine is certainly a stimulant, but it is not currently banned probably because it is available to all, inexpensive, and ubiquitous—try any coffee house. The same cannot be said for gene transfer or tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), a steroid distributed by BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative) that was undetectable by the standard laboratory tests for steroids. Allowing such enhancements as manipulated genes and sophisticated chemicals would likely lead to a de facto two-tiered system of competition, in which the enhanced would compete with the enhanced, and dope-free athletes would compete against each other. Setting limits on what athletes do to their bodies to win, Murray said, is one way to preserve the spirit of sport and to keep “what is meaningful and beautiful in sport” alive.

In addition to chairing WADA’s Ethical Issues Review Panel, Murray served for over fifteen years on the United States Olympic Committee’s drug oversight body and was principal investigator on Ethical, Conceptual & Scientific Issues in the Use of Performance-Enhancing Technologies in Sports, a Hastings research project that explored, with the help of philosophers of sport and prominent athletes, how notions of fairness and competition have been influenced by the development of new drugs and technologies.

Last Updated: 11 July 2006