Abstract
Despite the numerous instances of PED use in professional sports, there continues to be a strong negative moral response to those athletes who dope. My goal is to offer a diagnosis of this response. I will argue that we do not experience such disdain because these athletes have broken some constitutive rule of sport, but because they have lied about who they are. In violating the constraints of their own public narratives, they make both themselves and their choices unintelligible. This worry becomes especially profound as we care greatly about who our athletes are. Using cases from both athletics and US politics, I argue that certain kinds of lies so violate our understanding of who a person is that we can no longer recognize them as the person we took them to be. Fundamentally, I believe that PED users have lied about something central to their public narratives. I develop this view through an examination of narrative identity, primarily focusing on J. David Velleman’s work on agency and self-constitution. I do not claim that the athlete using steroids is nonidentical to who she would be in the absence of steroid use, but that through use of PEDs, she has misled us about an important component of her pubic narrative and this is difficult for us to reconcile. Ultimately, this has implications for sport as well as other other aspects of human social life.
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Notes
We do frequently also attach negative judgments to casual or habitual users of illegal drugs, suggesting a general disdain for substances users.
I agree with William Morgan, who claims that this distinction is social and tracks nothing metaphysical or natural (Morgan 2009).
I have chosen four white males from the US and Democratic politicians in an attempt to lower the number of potential confounding factors.
I do not have time to examine all of the potential dimensions of rule-breaking or cheating here, but will restrict myself to a couple examples.
Rules that restrict play along gender lines provide guidance by delineating what counts as “women’s basketball” and “men’s basketball”. Notably, transgender persons challenge such a distinction, but this extends beyond the boundaries of the current paper.
He did not lose by such a considerable margin as to make his candidacy a total embarrassment.
History seems to support this claim, as many unfaithful politicians have been allowed to maintain public careers. Bill Clinton presents an obvious example.
In many ways, his is a form of political corruption that we’ve come to expect and so fits nicely into a story about what it means to be a political figure.
He never bet against his own team and later admitted to a gambling addiction for which he sought professional help.
Intentionally “throwing” a game presents a difficult issue. In some respects, it is a failure to play the game properly as a desire to win is generally assumed in competition.
In discussing “character” in this context, I take myself to be using a fairly non-controversial folk concept. For this argument, we need not believe that character is stable across time, but merely accept that we have expectations of public figures. Baseball players are supposed to love the game. Politicians are supposed to respect laws.
His failure to attend the 2012 Democratic National Convention in his home state is especially noteworthy.
There are, of course, critics of the narrative. Most notable is Galen Strawson, who argues against both its normative and descriptive dimensions (Strawson 2004). While Strawson’s work focuses on the narrative for self-understanding, I am concerned with intersubjective means of understanding, which I believe allows me to side-step some of his criticisms.
Marya Schechtman’s work also focuses on the value of narrative self-constitution for understanding agency. However, Velleman’s focus on the intersubjective nature of the narrative makes it especially valuable for my current work, while Schechtman is primarily focused on personal identity (Schechtman 1996).
Harry Frankfurt writes beautifully on these topics and notes that lies, particularly those told by close friends, are painful because they throw our world into disarray and cause us to question our own judgment. (Frankfurt 1992) I agree that cases like those presented in this paper may cause worry about our own faculties, but this is not one of my primary goals.
The recent election of Mark Sanford to the U.S. House of Representative following a massive scandal is interesting. However, Sanford’s political persona did not revolve around his relationship with his wife, and his claim that the woman with whom he had an affair as his “soulmate” impacts our response.
The existence of virulently anti-gay activists and politicians who are found to have engaged in homosexual relationships but eventually forgiven does not count against my view. In such cases, the primary narrative is frequently one about a commitment to Christian beliefs. Thus, while engaging in sexual activity and then lying about it might be in contrast to expressed views, the underlying commitment is maintained and the behavior may be interpreted as part of a narrative in which “backsliding” leads to redemption.
And, as many have noted, what counts as “performance enhancement” is deeply historical.
Canseco corroborates McGwire’s claim that he did not use during his rookie year
In the US, this seems especially true for baseball, which partly explains why we may hold football players to slightly different standards.
Figures like Joe Paterno might offer a helpful illustration of cases where something might be a part of a person’s narrative without being stated explicitly. Even though “not protecting child molesters” was not a central piece of Paterno’s narrative, it is not unreasonable to assume that this is a part of most people’s identities.
The body responsible for electing players to the Hall of Fame.
Whether we justified in holding people accountable for behaving in accordance with their narratives is something I’d like to explore in a future paper.
There are many in the cycling community who never believed Armstong’s claims in the first place. I do think it plausible that different persons may stand in different epistemic relationships to specific stories and for this reason may believe or disbelieve parts of the narrative that are put forward as truths. What this suggests is the extraordinary complexity of narrative and how we come to understand one another.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to participants at the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport Annual Meeting in September 2013, the Cal PolyPomona Philosophy Department, and the Claremont Works in Progress Group for their extremely helpful input. Daniel Ehrlich, Alexandra Plakias, and John Ramsey, offered commentary on early drafts, and Richard Doan helped me conceive of the project. Finally, I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for offering some valuable insights.
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I began this paper shortly after the Union Cycliste Internationale stripped Lance Armstrong of his Seven Tour de France titles, leading to his banishment from the sport and separation from the Lance Armstrong Foundation. In January 2013, he made a televised appearance in which he admitted to using a variety of performance enhancing drugs (hereafter, PEDs) including Human Growth Hormone and anabolic steroids. With this he joined the legions of athletes whose once inspiring careers have been tarnished by the stigma of doping. These include baseball record-breakers Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, and Barry Bonds, track star Marion Jones, and fellow Tour de France winner Alberto Contador.
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Gendreau, M.S. Who? Moral Condemnation, PEDs, and Violating the Constraints of Public Narrative. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 515–528 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9536-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9536-6