Anti-Doping Absolutism – A Darwinian Demasqué

Throwing some light on the (eugenic) dark side of anti-doping 

By Pieter Bonte, doctoral researcher, Bioethics Institute Ghent, Ghent University

It makes deep evolutionary sense to be outraged by doping: nothing should impress a good beast more than signals of hereditary fitness – such as natural talent – and nothing is more infuriating (or at least off-putting) than being cuckolded into thinking that others are innately fit when actually they aren’t. This may be why doping, like hair implants, meets with such ire and scorn. Doping is duping. Duping about innateness and heredity. It flouts our most primal, bestial ‘spirit of sport’. But evolutionary sense makes little moral sense and I will argue that at heart, the moral panic about doping may not be moral at all. To the contrary: Anti-doping absolutism (by which I mean: zero tolerance, come what may) is a-moral at best and profoundly immoral at worst.

From his Social Darwinist leanings, Modern Olympics-founder baron Pierre de Coubertin declared that “[t]he first essential characteristic of the Modern Olympics is that […] they constitute a religion. […] The second characteristic of Modern Olympism is that it constitutes an aristocracy, an elite  […] determined purely by the physical superiority and muscular potentialities of the individual, enhanced to some degree by his will power and his training” (Coubertin 1935: 52-53). In today’s WADA-Olympic Spirit of Sport, sport should be “a humanistic endeavour to see how far you can go on your own talent” (Pound in Foddy and Savulescu 2007, see also Sandel 2007). Overt appeals to religiosity and aristocracy, once its two first and essential characteristics, are no longer part of the official Olympics PR. At the same time however, celebrating the 150^th birthday of Coubertin in 2013, then-IOC-president baron Jacques Rogge sung Coubertin’s praise with not a single note of reserve (Rogge 2013). This of a man who wrote (pre-WWII, it must be stressed) to his successor Sigfrid Edström how he “intensely admires Hitler” and who openly argued after the Nazi-organized games of 1936 how “the grand success of the Berlin Games has splendidly served the Olympian ideal” and that “this glorification of the Nazi regime has been the emotional shock which has allowed for the immense development the Games have known” (Coubertin in Bermond 2008 : 370-372, my translations from the original in French). Moreover, appeals to natural order and an infatuation with natural talent (that is: brute birth luck) as a mark of meaning and merit still make up the core of Olympian morality.

A growing number of leading ethicists is deeply disconcerted by these appeals to innateness and natural order in anti-doping circles. Eric Juengst, for instance, argues that there is nothing ethical about “glorify[ing] genetic disparities to the extent of prohibiting their abatement when biomedicine provides the ability to do so”. To the contrary, he judges that to be “anachronistic and slightly ominous” (Juengst 2012: 100-101). Maxwell Mehlman openly decries the immorality of anti-doping absolutism “as an attempt by the gifted and lucky to preserve their unearned hegemony” (Mehlman 2009: 87). Torbjörn Tännsjö does the same from the spectator-side, arguing that his own enthusiasm for contests which celebrate who has the most superior talentis “upon closer examination[,] not respectable. On the contrary, it is of a fascistoid nature” (Tännsjö 2000: 9). Recently, bestselling essayist Malcolm Gladwell spread this message to the global audience, openly defending mindful doping practices as “the means by which pudgy underdogs could compete with natural wonders” (Gladwell 2013).In his discussion of EPO, Gladwell puts the rhetorical question: “shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?”

These criticisms rock anti-doping (im)morality to its core. They expose a dark side of anti-doping absolutism as an attempt to consolidate the biological status-quo by policing people in the intimacy of their very bodies, enforcing the orthodoxy of ‘naturalness’. I believe these iconoclasts are on to something. However, beyond calling out the immoral consequences of anti-doping absolutism, there is still much work to be done in the further, more empathic endeavor of trying to elucidate where anti-doping absolutism springs from. Let’s try to really answer Gladwell’s rhetorical question. Hopefully, such empathic exploration might help to advance the doping debate beyond for-and-against polemics.

There is a complex cluster of (mostly faulty) existential and religious motives for imagining that one’s (lack of) talents tells us “what we are made for” (Putallaz 2013, my translation from French), and these motives play an important role in the deep existential, and indeed often religious fervor with which many modern people sport their lives away: they sport to ‘discover themselves’; to ‘do what they were made for’; to enlist in a microcosm where right and wrong are clearly defined, where one can commit and sacrifice to a manifest purpose, and where judgment of achievement and failure is instant and absolute. I address that cluster elsewhere (e.g. Bonte 2012). In the space of this commentary I must confine myself to another cauldron, that of the animalistic atavisms which continue to riddle our minds.

Sport itself taps deeply into our animal psyche. “Human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men”, Johan Huizinga famously argued, for just like in human sports, animals too engage in “regular contests and beautiful performances before an admiring public” (Huizinga 1949 [1938]: 1). A basic evolutionary point to games is that they can help to get a clearer view unto the participants’ hereditary potential. In evolutionary parlance, athletic demonstrations signal hereditary fitness. Andreas De Block and Siegfried Dewitte have recently provided a nuanced primer of sorts for the evolutionary understanding of sports (De Block and Dewitte 2009), arguing that

sports (like many other games and cultural practices) establish a reliable prestige hierarchy loosely based on (Darwinian) fitness, and that this function is the ultimate cause of the cultural invention of sports (De Block and Dewitte 2009: 4).

Geoffrey Miller has argued that athletic feats may be costly signals of the ‘amplifier’ type:

Each sport could be viewed as a system for amplifying minor differences in physical fitness into easily perceivable status differences, to make sexual choice easier and more accurate. In this sense, sports are culturally invented indicators of physical fitness. (Miller 1999: 253)

This makes Miller cast the ‘fair play’ ethic in a telling new light, claiming that “[s]ports rules are considered ‘fair’ insofar as they produce the highest correlation between a competitor’s fitness and his or her likelihood of winning” (Miller 1999: 254). The evolutionary point is to reveal those who enjoy greater (wholly unfair and meritless) genetic privilege. From this disenchanting evolutionary perspective, the Olympian anti-doping spirit of sport may tacitly be conducive to" a ‘eugenic screening’ of sorts. The recipe goes as follows:

First you try to secure, however imperfectly, conditions of ‘universal inclusivity’ and ‘fair play’. Universal inclusivity is necessary to make the claims to superiority of the winners robustly incontestable: only if there is a competition of everyone against everyone can the victors claim supremacy on the species-level. A half-baked notion of fair play is necessary to reduce the importance of social privilege/deprivation and other forms of ‘circumstantial (bad) luck’ (Nagel 1979) on the competition’s outcome. By the same token, however, they increase the importance of noble birth or ‘constitutive(bad) luck’: one’s (lack of) natural ‘gifts’ and talents.

Secondly, you match universal access to the Games with universal spectating of the Games. You try to broadcast the talent-assessment games as broadly as possible, for instance by surrounding the sports pitch with mass stadia and by televising the event. The fitness-based hierarchy which the Games produce will thus receive instant universal acknowledgement by society at large.

Thirdly, you disallow manifest attempts to compensate for a lack of birth-luck. This means that you ban doping. Similarly, you also disallow handicap or forfeit compensation techniques, such as head starts, time or point forfeits (techniques that people spontaneously apply in all kinds of games and competitive environments from the moral interest to ‘level the natural playing field’ and increase the importance of effort). In Olympic, ‘talentocratic’ games, however, it is understood that the natural playing field must be conserved in its original, manifestly unlevel form. The games thus rigged in favour of the talented, the contenders are to jostle for rank so that the “natural aristocracy” (to use Thomas Jefferson’s expression) gradually rise up to their rightful thrones, cups and medals. “The aristoi are separated from the pseudo-aristoi” (Jefferson again, 1988 [1813]: 387). Akin to that other talentocratic practice of universal schooling, objective testing, and performance-based appreciation, Olympic sport thus pursues Jefferson’s proto-eugenicist ideal of a ‘true’,scientifically rationalized aristocracy – ‘true’ because it factors in the actual dynamics of biological inheritance.

Fourthly and finally, as the Games draw to a close, an incontestable ‘natural order’ will have been approximated, in which a relatively meritless but genetically privileged ‘talentocracy’ will have cropped up in the higher ranks. This “lucky sperm club” (Young 1958, 2008) can then be staged, medalled and wreathed as the ‘meritocracy’.

So this is how anti-doping absolutists may need to answer Gladwell’s question, which in a generic form goes: shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have bio-capital and another man is not? The ban on emancipation from natural incapacitation may be justified from this atavistic, animalistic interest in discovering and glorifying those who have more talent, i.e. better genes. In itself this evolutionary psychological relic is a-moral and meaningless, but those who nevertheless enjoy to get these primal kicks can go ahead. To think such love of talent and hatred of doping is moral, however, makes no sense. To force this talentocratic a-morality on others, moreover, would be immoral.

References

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Bonte, Pieter. 2012. “Dignified Doping: Truly Unthinkeable? An existentialist critique of ‘talentocracy’ in sports”. In Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics (eds. J. Tolleneer et al.). Springer: Dordrecht.

Coubertin, baron Pierre de. 1935. “The Fundamentals of the Philosophy of the Modern Olympics.”

De Block, Andreas and Siegfried Dewitte. 2009. “Darwinism and the cultural evolution of sports.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 52(1): 1–16.

Foddy, Bennett and Julian Savulescu. 2007. “Ethics of Performance Enhancement in Sport: Drugs and Gene Doping.” In Principles of Health Care Ethics, Second Edition (eds. R. E. Ashcroft et al.)

Gladwell, Malcolm. 9 September 2013. “Man and Superman. In athletic competitions, what qualifies as a sporting chance?” The New Yorker.

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Jefferson, T. 1988 [1813]. The Adams-Jefferson letters: The complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. (Ed. Lester Cappon). Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press.

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Mehlman, M. 2009. The price of perfection. Individualism and society in the era of biomedical enhancement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Miller, G. 1999. The mating mind. NewYork: Doubleday.

Nagel, Thomas. 1979. “Moral Luck.” In Mortal Questions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Putallaz, François-Xavier. 19 October 2013. Faut pas croire (television debate of Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS)). http://www.rts.ch/emissions/religion/faut-pas-croire/5200316-la-medecine-au-service-de-la-performance.html

Rogge, baron Jacques. 2013. “World still benefiting from vision of modern Olympic Games’ founder.” http://www.olympic.org/news/jacques-rogge-world-still-benefiting-from-vision-of-modern-olympic-games-founder/186617

Sandel, Michael. 2007. The Case Against Perfection. Harvard University Press.

Tännsjö, T. 2000. “Is it fascistoid to admire sports heroes?” In Values in sport: Elitism, nationalism, gender equality, and the scientific manufacturing of winners (eds. T. Tännsjö and C. Tamburinni). London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Young, Michael Dunlop. 1958. The Rise of the Meritocracy. London: Thames and Hudson.