Steroids and the dangers of sports
How should we handle the health risks associated with athletics?
Sam had a good post on the problems with George Will’s “naturalistic” argument against steroid use in baseball. I think many of the people who are strongly opposed to steroid use in sports would struggle to articulate a clear and coherent theory to support their belief. This is certainly not to say that there aren’t very compelling arguments for prohibiting steroid use but I think the issue is more complex than most peoples basic intuitions would lead them to believe.
I would like to consider another of the common arguments against steroids; that they should be banned because of the health risks associated with them. Under this theory, it would be irresponsible and immoral to allow athletes to use these substances. This argument is sometimes dismissed by critics as paternalistic; if athletes are willing to accept the personal risks associated with steroid use who are we to tell them no?
A problem with this objection is that we as fans bear some responsibility for creating a culture that encourages steroid use. We celebrate the accomplishments of athletes and also put enormous pressure on them to succeed. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, both of whom have been implicated in the steroid scandal, were lauded as icons when they chased Roger Maris’ home run record in 1998.
When evaluating the choice of an athlete to use steroids we also have to consider the factors that cause the athlete to make his or her decision. It’s disingenuous to create a climate that in many ways encourages the use of unsafe performance enhancing drugs and then absolve ourselves of guilt by saying it is the choice of the players.
The more logical objection to those who seek to ban steroids because of their health risks is to question how dangerous steroids actually are. I won’t attempt to evaluate these empirical debates but it is worth noting that if we ban steroids in part because of their health risks perhaps we must also more thoroughly consider the safety hazards present in other sports.
Take the example of football, often considered the most popular sport in America. Studies have shown that NFL players are significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer’s and depression. Additionally, spinal cord injuries poses a significant danger, as an average of two teenagers a year are paralyzed a year playing football in Texas alone.
The dangers of steroids are certainly a legitimate issue but the dangers of other sports should not be ignored. There is often a tension between sports and safety. We detest steroids but we love the home run, we worry about concussions but we stand and cheer whenever there is a jarring tackle. Safety is of course not the only concern in life; after all, nearly everyone believes that the convenience that automobiles provide outweighs the injuries and fatalities they contribute to. But how much risk is it ethical to expose athletes to in the name of entertainment?
-Luke
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- Unequal advantage and baseball steroids
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- Should sports be protected from international politics?
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This article got me thinking, and I wanted to say a few words on a possible alternative reason to ban steroids. I don’t really know if I believe this, but it’s a try:
Perhaps the simple answer to why steroids should be banned in sports is simply that this is not what we want sports to be about. Specifically, there is no moral reason to ban steroids, and I will attempt to explain away our intuitions that there are. This seems like a blunt point, so let me try expand on it with some sophistication.
John Rawls, among others philosophers, have said that desert is an institutional artifact. By this he means that a person deserves simply what the rules of the institution he is under says he deserves. Thus, a baseball player deserves say, a championship, if he has followed the rules of baseball and the rules say he deserves a championship. This means that desert, in itself, is neutral in regards to justice – if the institutions are unjust, then the desert is unjust as well. This also means one of the reasons we have to create just institutions is to make sure that the right people deserve the right things. But the reasons for the rules we create for institutions are not always moral reasons. In this case, I think that they’re not, but our intuitions are confused into thinking they are because of the concept of desert.
If steroids were not banned in sports, then persons with steroids would in fact deserve their accomplishments. Again, to emphasize, this is not a moral point, simply a consequence of the rules for that particular league. Athletes with the better steroids, or with better access to steroids, would deserve to perform better than athletes lacking such resources (all else being equal). But this is simply not what sports is about. Or more accurately, this is not what we want sports to be about. This is not a moral point – it is a point about what we like when we watch sports. Sports is after all, a societal construct. It would be fine to have competitions of who can have the best steroids, but we don’t want say, baseball, to be this competition.
Let’s look at what I think might be a parallel case. It is my understanding that the last time the Yankees won the World Series many anti-Yankee fans were angry (I don’t follow baseball, so this may not actually be accurate – if it isn’t, think of it as a convenient fiction to illustrate a point). The charge was that the Yankees were so rich they were just able to buy the best players, in effect, buying a championship (there appears to be no salary cap in baseball). But surely the Yankees deserved their championship – they didn’t cheat, they did what it took to win a championship. The Yankees hardly acted immorally, and there seems to be no moral imperative to stop the Yankees winning in this way. But people thought that the Yankees shouldn’t have deserved to win. This is because baseball is not about which franchise is the richest. This is presumably why we have salary caps in other sports. Not for any moral reason, but simply because that’s what we want as a society when we consider sports.