Chuck Klosterman - There Are No Sound Moral Arguments Against Performance-Enhancing Drugs

In the New York Times recently, in the Ethicist column, Chuck Klosterman responded to a reader's question on the hypocrisy of making PEDs illegal while other forms of performance enhancement are not illegal. Klosterman argues that there is no sound moral argument against PED use, but he does offer an ethical argument.

He believes that morality is a personal choice, but that ethics are a contextual and socially constructed set of rules. Therefore, a sport (like a religion or a board game) can have a set of rules upon which most people have agreed. However, he also acknowledges that the lines drawn in sports are  capricious - why is a shot of Toradol okay for an injured player but not a shot of testosterone, when both offer healing benefits?

I reject the ethical argument as well - and below this article I offer a brief outline of my own views on PEDS. For another excellent argument relative to the hypocrisy of making these substances illegal, see this column by Miami Herald reporter Dan La Batard.

There Are No Sound Moral Arguments Against Performance-Enhancing Drugs

By CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Published: August 30, 2013

Q: The argument against performance-enhancing drugs in sports is that the drugs give players an unfair advantage. But how do P.E.D.’s differ from Tommy John surgery? Or pre-emptive Tommy John surgery? What about rich kids? Is their access to superior coaching, facilities and equipment a similarly unfair advantage? In a society that embraces plastic surgery, Botox injections, Viagra and all kinds of enhancements, what moral line do P.E.D.’s cross? 
~ LYNN MOFFAT, SLEEPY HOLLOW, N.Y.

The hypocrisy you recognize is undeniable. Virtually all moral arguments against P.E.D.’s involve contradictions. The presumption of competitive unfairness could be applied to any two human experiences that aren’t identical. The notion that P.E.D.’s are “unnatural” isn’t that distant from making the same argument against elbow surgery or insulin or eyeglasses. Any impulse to criminalize steroids in the name of player safety is absurd (collision sports are more dangerous than the illegal drugs used within them). Some will insist that athletes have a unique responsibility as role models, but that claim evaporates the moment you question the assumptions therein. (Why are people who happen to run fast and jump high the best models for behavior? Can someone be forced to be a role model against his or her will?) There are no sound moral arguments against P.E.D.’s.

There is, however, an ethical argument.

Morality is about personal behavior. Ethics are more contextual. They create the framework for how a culture operates. Sports, unlike life, need inflexibly defined rules. Any game (whether it’s the World Cup or Clue) is a type of unreality in which we create and accept whatever the rules happen to be. Even the Super Bowl is fundamentally an exhibition. So how do we make an unreal exhibition meaningful? By standardizing and enforcing its laws, including the ones that don’t necessarily make sense. Three strikes constitute an out; four balls constitute a walk. In order for baseball to have structural integrity, we all have to agree that this is the system we’re using. Success or failure at baseball is measured against a player’s ability to perform within the framework that defines what baseball is; the logic behind that framework is almost a secondary concern.

For a variety of reasons — statistical tradition, illegality, fear — there’s a social consensus that P.E.D.’s are bad for sports. The lines have been drawn capriciously, but the lines exist. Though it’s difficult to explain why, we’ve collectively agreed it’s O.K. for an injured football player to take a shot of Toradol to help ignore an injury, but not a shot of testosterone to help that injury heal faster. Now, you can certainly argue there’s no moral justification for that dissonance. But morality is not the motive here. The motive is to create a world — or at least the illusion of a world — where everyone is playing the same game in the same way. P.E.D.’s are forbidden because that’s what our fabricated rules currently dictate. In real life, that’s a terrible, tautological argument. But in sports, arbitrary rules are necessary. The rules are absolutely everything, so the rules are enough.

E-mail queries to ethicist@nytimes.com, or send them to the Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, and include a daytime phone number. 

Okay, here are my views on PEDs, which I have posted in various forms over the years (this is a slight revision of the comments I left at Debate.com on the PED in sports topic).

All performance enhancing drugs should be legalized for use under a doctor's supervision - for athletes, for you, for me. Athletes whose income (in the tens of millions of dollars) depends on producing statistics and being able to play as many games as possible (performance incentives) are going to do whatever it takes to stay on the field or in the game/race. The real benefit of HGH and testosterone (and all of their derivatives, as well as other drugs), are that they speed recovery from injury or simply from the wear and tear of the game (soccer, rugby, football).

The bottom line with PEDs is that they are simply another form of technology - like top of the line basketball shoes, the insanely lightweight bikes used at the Tour de France, the knee braces worn by NFL linemen, or the high-tension tennis racquets used on the pro tours. The list could go on and on.

In the 1940s and 1950s, just as an example, NFL players only had food as a "sports supplement," or maybe some dessicated liver pills (which you can still get, incidentally). Now all athletes have access to whey protein (quicker recovery and better immune health), creatine (strength and muscular endurance), a variety of amino acid supplements (l-tyrosine for alertness, l-leucine for muscle building, BCAAs for recovery), nutrient repartitioning supplements (ursolic acid, CLA), and even basic post-workout supplements specifically designed to aid recovery (containing a 2:1 carb to protein ratio with hydrolyzed whey, extra l-leucine, and other insulin potentiating substances). PEDs are in this same category, only more effective when used correctly.

Which is why they should require a doctor's supervision. With testosterone one needs to avoid the conversion into estrogen (so we also need an aromatase inhibitor), the increase in LDL cholesterol (so we need fish oil and other healthy lipids), or, with oral steroids, liver damage (so we need alpha lipoic acid, curcumin, and/or milk thistle extract).

PEDs can be used safely and effectively, but that will not happen as long as they are banned and/or illegal.

The Association for Psychological Science posted this video from the APS 24th Annual Convention (2012) featuring Barry Schwartz speaking about his book, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing.

Below the video is the first entry from the Practical Wisdom blog at Psychology Today, which offers a good overview of the book. For a shorter video, you can view the TED Talk, Using Our Practical Wisdom.

Barry Schwartz – Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

Why neither rules nor incentives are enough to solve the problems we face.

Published on December 13, 2010 by Barry Schwartz in Practical Wisdom

We Americans are growing increasingly disenchanted with the institutions on which we depend. We can't trust them. They disappoint us. They fail to give us what we need. This is true of schools that are not serving our kids as well as we think they should. It is true of doctors who seem too busy to give us the attention and unhurried care we crave. It's true of banks that mismanage our assets, and of bond-rating agencies that fail to provide an accurate assessment of the risk of possible investments. It's true of a legal system that seems more interested in expedience than in justice. It's true of a workplace in which we fulfill quotas and hit targets and manage systems but wind up feeling disconnected from the animating forces that drew us to our careers in the first place.

And the disenchantment we experience as recipients of services is often matched by the dissatisfaction of those who provide them. Most doctors want to practice medicine as it should be practiced. But they feel helpless faced with the challenge of balancing the needs and desires of patients with the practical demands of hassling with insurance companies, earning enough to pay malpractice premiums, and squeezing patients into seven-minute visits--all the while keeping up with the latest developments in their fields. Most teachers want to teach kids the basics and at the same time excite them with the prospects of educating themselves. But teachers feel helpless faced with the challenge of reconciling these goals with mandates to meet targets on standardized tests, to adopt specific teaching techniques, and to keep up with the ever-increasing paperwork. No one is satisfied--not the professionals and not their clients.

When we try to make things better, we generally reach for one of two tools. The first tool is a set of rules and administrative oversight mechanisms that tell people what to do and monitor their performance to make sure they are doing it. The second tool is a set of incentives that encourage good performance by rewarding people for it. The assumption behind carefully constructed rules and procedures, with close oversight, is that even if people do want to do the right thing, they need to be told what that is. And the assumption underlying incentives is that people will not be motivated to do the right thing unless they have an incentive to do so. Rules and incentives. Sticks and carrots. What else is there?

This blog is an attempt to answer this question. In our new book, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, we acknowledge the need for both rules and incentives. But rules and incentives are not enough. They leave out something essential. It is what classical philosopher Aristotle called practical wisdom (his word was phronesis). Without this missing ingredient, neither rules (no matter how detailed and well monitored) nor incentives (no matter how clever) will be enough to solve the problems we face.

The term practical wisdom sounds like an oxymoron to modern ears. We tend to think of "wisdom" as the opposite of "practical." Wisdom is about abstract, ethereal matters like "the way" or "the good" or "the truth" or "the path," and it is the province of special sages. Aristotle's teacher, Plato, shared this view that wisdom was theoretical and abstract, and the gift of only a few. But Aristotle disagreed. He thought that our fundamental social practices constantly demanded choices--like when to be loyal to a friend, or how to be fair, or how to confront risk, or when and how to be angry--and that making the right choices demanded wisdom. Aristotle distilled the idea of practical wisdom in his classic book, Nicomachean Ethics. Ethics, said Aristotle, was not mainly about establishing moral rules and following them. It was about performing a particular social practice well-being a good friend or parent or doctor or soldier or citizen or statesmen--and that meant figuring out the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person, at a particular time.

This is what took practical wisdom. Aristotle's Ethics was about what we needed to learn to succeed at our practices and to flourish as human beings. We needed to learn certain character traits like loyalty, self-control, courage, fairness, generosity, gentleness, friendliness, and truthfulness--a list that today would also include perseverance, integrity, open-mindedness, thoroughness, and kindness. Aristotle called these traits "excellences" (arete)-often translated as "virtues." But the master excellence--the virtue at the heart of his Ethics--was practical wisdom. None of these other traits could be exercised well without it.

Why "wisdom"? Why "practical"? Why not just a good set of rules to follow? Most experienced practitioners know that rules only take them so far. Consider the doctor. How should the doctor balance respect for the autonomy of her patients when it comes to making decisions with the knowledge that sometimes the patient is not the best judge of what is needed? How should the doctor balance the desire to spend enough time with each patient to be thorough, compassionate, and understanding with the need to see enough patients in a day to keep the office solvent? How should the doctor balance the desire to tell patients the truth, no matter how difficult, with the desire to be kind?

Doctors--and teachers attempting to teach and inspire, or lawyers attempting to provide proper counsel and serve justice--are not puzzling over a choice between the "right" thing and the "wrong" thing. The common quandaries they face are choices among right things that clash. A good doctor needs to be honest with her patients, and kind to her patients, and to give them the hope they need to endure difficult treatments. But in diagnosing or treating a patient, these aims can be at odds, and the doctor must decide whether to be honest or kind, or more likely how to balance honesty and kindness in a way that is appropriate for the patient in front of her.

Aristotle recognized that balancing acts like these beg for wisdom, and that abstract or ethereal wisdom would not do. Wisdom has to be practical because the issues we face are embedded in our everyday work. They are not hypotheticals being raised in college ethics courses. They are quandaries that any practitioner must resolve to do her work well. Practical wisdom combines the will to do the right thing with the skill to figure out what the right thing is.

In this blog, we will describe the essential characteristics of practical wisdom, and show why it's needed to inform the everyday activities of doctors, lawyers, and teachers--parents, lovers, and friends. We will discuss some impressive examples of wisdom--and its absence-in practice. We will show that rules and incentives--the tools we reach for to improve our schools or our clinics, or even our banks--are no substitute for wisdom. Worse, they are the enemies of wise practice. And finally we will suggest that when wisdom is cultivated it is not only good for society but is, as Aristotle thought, a key to our own happiness. Wisdom isn't just something we "ought" to have. It's something we want to have to flourish. Our book makes all of these points in detail. In the blog, we will try to give you a taste of the arguments in the book.

We've been working together on practical wisdom, and teaching courses in it, for a decade. During that time, we have seen the failure of the institutions we rely on grow more acute, and the need for wisdom grow more urgent. We hope this blog will help people appreciate the central importance of practical wisdom, and induce them to ask how they can nurture it in their own lives and in the lives of the people with whom they live and work.