Enhancement and Education: Lessons from the Kobayashi Maru (Part Two)

Tweet

(Part One, Series Index)

This post in the second in my two-parter on the lessons we can draw from the Kobayashi Maru (KM) for the enhancement-in-education debate. The KM test is, of course, a part of the Star Trek canon. It is supposedly an unpassable test but, according to Trek lore, Kirk managed to pass the test. The problem is that he did so by reprogramming it to make it passable. The question I’m considering now is whether this was legitimate.

In a change from my normal practice, I’m going to continue directly on from part one (this is reflected in the numbering of the sub-sections). So, in other words, you really need to read part one before attempting this.


3. Spock’s Argument Against Kirk
Should Kirk’s “pass” on the KM really be a “fail”? The obvious answer would appear to be “yes”, but let’s consider the reasoning behind the obvious answer in a little more depth.

According to the most recent film, Star Trek, Spock was the creator of the test, and he clearly thought that Kirk had defeated the true purpose of the test by cheating. As a result, his success was illusory and should be deemed illegitimate. Indeed, Spock directly challenged Kirk, through disciplinary proceedings, on this issue. This is revealed in the courtroom-like scene in the film where Kirk asks to confront his accuser, who turns out to be Spock. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the relevant clip on youtube, so you’ll have to look it up on your own time (assuming you have access to a copy of the film).

More important than the clip though is Spock’s reasoning. As creator of the test, Spock clearly had an intended learning outcome (ILO) that he wanted to achieve with the test. He states this pretty clearly at one point. He says the purpose of the test was to get the student to experience fear in the face of certain death and to see how they coped with it. This means that the KM-test was not intended to be a test of problem-solving skills, but, rather, a test of character. Consequently, its the no-win scenario was a core part of Spock’s ILO.

This leads to the following argument:

• (4) If you succeed in a test by avoiding the ILO of that test, your success is illegitimate and illusory.

• (5) The ILO of the KM-test is to see whether someone has the psychological resilience to cope with a no-win (certain death) scenario, not to develop their problem-solving skills.

• (6) By reprogramming the test, Kirk avoided having to cope with a no-win scenario.

• (7) Therefore, Kirk’s success on the KM-test was illegitimate and illusory.

This argument appears to be valid. So if its premises are true, Spock’s accusation against Kirk is vindicated (then again, we’d expect this since Spock is, supposedly, “logical”).

So are the premises true? I think premises (5) and (6) are relatively uncontroversial: (5) is what the (admittedly fictional) Spock claims for his test himself and (6) seems like a fair description of what Kirk did. Premise (4) is the tricky one. Its justification could be based on what I said in part one about constitutive regulations and ILOs, but I don’t want to spell out that argument just yet (for reasons that should become clear). Instead, I’ll offer a prima facie justification of it by way of analogy.

The analogy is as follows. Suppose I assess my philosophy 101 course with an essay. The essay asks the student to offer an argument for or against the following proposition: “Abortion is immoral”. The ILOs for the students taking this course would include: (i) acquire knowledge of relevant subject matter in ethical philosophy; (ii) develop the ability to think critically and reasonably about a controversial ethical topic; and (iii) develop the ability to present an argument about this issue in a readable manner. The essay is supposed to provide evidence as to whether those ILOs have been achieved.

Now suppose that instead of researching, thinking and writing about the topic in the required manner, a student simply buys an essay dealing with this topic from an online essay-mill and hands it in as if it is their own work. This essay might be quite good and might, if I can’t tell the difference between it and a genuine essay, garner a pass grade or higher. This means that the student would (officially) appear to have succeeded in the test. But then ask yourself: would that student’s success be legitimate? No, obviously not. It would be both illegitimate and illusory. And why is this? Because the success was gained by avoiding the ILOs. Thus, premise (4) would seem justifiable.

Is this enough for Spock’s argument to go through? Not quite, we have to consider Kirk’s potential rebuttal and counterargument.


4. Kirk’s Rebuttal and Counterargument
To be clear, nowhere in the Star Trek canon does Kirk actually present anything like a formal rebuttal and counterargument to Spock. He does, however, present his reason for reprogramming the test. In Wrath of Khan — during one of the scenes set in the cave on the Genesis moon, if you must know — Kirk says, with admirable brevity, that he cheated because he doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario. I think we can expand upon this single reason to present a more formal response to Spock’s argument.

I’ll focus first on a potential rebuttal of Spock’s argument. A rebuttal is an argument or premise that challenges a premise in the main argument. In this instance, the rebuttal will be aimed at premise (4). You see, despite the prima facie justification offered above, there is some reason to doubt its truth. This reason is linked to some of my previous comments on ILOs and their connection to the constitutive regulation argument (see part one for details).

Basically, my feeling is this: an ILO can only be part of a constitutive regulation argument if the ILO is itself morally legitimate, and the problem with ILOs is that they need not always be morally legitimate. Indeed, if one of the key properties of an ILO is that it is linked to what a teacher intends for their students to get out of a course, then there’s no reason why an ILO can’t be morally arbitrary. For example, I could make learning the names of all my relatives one the ILOs for the students on my philosophy course. I could even assess them on this by asking them to name my relatives at the end of their essay. However, this ILO would be morally arbitrary and the students would be right to challenge me on it (or to “cheat” on this part of the assessment if they so wished).

So premise (4) is rebutted by this:

• (8) You are within your moral rights to bypass or avoid an ILO if that ILO is morally illegitimate or morally arbitrary.

And so should be revised accordingly.

All of which leads us to the counterargument to Spock. A counterargument is an argument that stands in direct opposition to the conclusion of another argument. So in this case we want an argument that contradicts (7), from above. How can we construct such an argument? Well, we can start by picking up the trail left by the rebuttal that I just outlined. The rebuttal works because it assumes that some ILOs are legitimate and some are not. Furthermore, it assumes that a student can be within their moral rights to bypass an illegitimate ILO.

This raises an intriguing possibility. What if, in addition to having a ILOs that are legitimate/illegitimate, we could also have hierarchical relationships among legitimate ILOs? In other words, what if some ILOs were more legitimate than others? And what if, recognising that there was a “more” legitimate ILO in place, a student achieved it by avoiding a lesser ILO? Might that make the practice of avoiding a legitimate ILO acceptable?

Like I said, it’s an intriguing possibility. It’s also a possibility that could work in Kirk’s favour. After all, I don’t think we can say that Kirk’s success was legitimate because Spock’s ILO was morally illegitimate — cultivating the psychological resiliency to face death seems like a legitimate ILO for command-track cadets in Starfleet — but we might be able to say that his success was legitimate because he achieved a greater ILO at the expense of a lesser one.

This raises the obvious question: what might the greater ILO be in the case of the KM-test? Here’s a suggestion. Most educators would agree that one of the supreme goals of any type of education is to cultivate the capacity for critical thought among students. Critical thought is understood to include the ability to question taken-for-granted assumptions through the use of reason and logic. If students can demonstrate this ability, most educators would be pleased.

So perhaps this is what Kirk was doing when he “cheated” on the KM-test. Perhaps through reprogramming the test he demonstrated a capacity for critical thought that should be rewarded, not punished. As follows:

• (9) If a student succeeds on a test by avoiding one legitimate ILO for the sake of a more important ILO, then their success is not illegitimate or illusory (in fact, it’s the very opposite).

• (10) Demonstrating the capacity for critical thought (an ILO for nearly all educational projects) is more important than demonstrating the psychological resiliency to cope with a no-win scenario (Spock’s ILO for the KM-test).

• (11) The capacity for critical thought consists primarily in the ability to challenge taken-for-granted-assumptions.

• (12) The implicit taken-for-granted assumption of the KM-test is that there is such a thing as a no-win scenario.

• (13) By reprogramming the test, Kirk demonstrated an ability to challenge the assumption that there is a such a thing as a no-win scenario.

• (14) Therefore, Kirk demonstrated a capacity for critical thought (from 11, 12, and 13).

• (15) Therefore, Kirk’s success on the KM-test was not illegitimate or illusory (from 9, 10 and 14).

Again, I think this is valid and it might make us more sympathetic to Kirk’s solution. I’ve illustrated the relationship between this argument and Spock’s argument in the diagram below.

For all the sympathy that Kirk’s counterargument might engender, it has a number of weak links. For starters, premise (10) might be controversial. Someone might argue that the hierarchy is the other way round or, worse, that hierarchical relationships cannot be established between ILOs because they are fundamentally incommensurable. Additionally, someone might dispute premise (13) and say that mere act of reprogramming does not provide good evidence of critical thought.

These objections are certainly worthy of consideration, but I think there is a more interesting one. The argument above (premise 12) suggests that the KM-test comes with a taken-for-granted assumption about no-win scenarios. It further suggests (premise 13) that challenging that assumption would be the way to demonstrate critical thought. Consequently, since Spock’s ILO requires the assumption about the no-win scenario, demonstrating critical thought would have to come at the expense of Spock’s ILO.

But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe the KM-test is itself designed to challenge a taken-for-granted assumption. Most students would enter a simulated test like the KM with the assumption that there is some kind of “solution” to the problem. They might then carry this assumption with them into the real world when they should really be open to questioning it. Thus, it may be that in programming the test so that there is no solution, Spock actually gets them to both (a) challenge their own assumptions about these kinds of scenarios and (b) test their psychological resiliency by getting them to confront death. In other words, achieving Spock’s ILO need not come at the expense of critical thought. Indeed, it might actively require a capacity for critical thought.

In the end then, whether we side with Kirk or Spock might just come down to which assumptions we think are worthy of challenge and whose challenge would hence be more indicative of critical thought. So whether Kirk’s success was legitimate or not is, as I said at the outset, a close run thing.


5. Lessons for the Enhancement Debate

At last we come to the topic that I started out with: the legitimacy of enhancement in the educational context. Can the analysis of the Kobayashi Maru tell us anything interesting about this issue? On one level, the analysis of the Kobayashi Maru is just a bit of fun; but on another I think it has some interesting lessons for the enhancement debate. Here are the two that occur to me:

The Normative Irrelevance of ILOs: The first lesson has to do with the normative salience of ILOs. As should be clear from what I said, ILOs are not necessarily normatively significant. Since they are linked to the intentions of the teacher, it is possible for them to be normatively arbitrary. This has important consequences for anyone who wishes to object to enhancement because they might cause students to bypass or avoid certain ILOs. They first have to make sure that the ILOs being avoided are normatively significant.

The Link Between Enhancement and ILOs: The second lesson has to do with how the use of enhancement might be linked to the avoidance of a normatively significant ILO (or, alternatively, how it might be linked to the achievement of an ILO). Kirk’s reprogramming of the KM-test was (depending on how you look at it) either directly indicative of a failure to achieve an ILO or directly indicative of success in achieving an ILO. It was directly indicative of a failure to confront death (Spock’s ILO), or directly indicative of an ability to think critically (a more general ILO). Thus, it is possible to make a fairly simple normative argument for or against Kirk’s actions. This is interesting because most enhancement technologies are unlikely to be directly linked to ILOs in this manner. The effect they actually have on achieving ILOs is likely to be indirect. Thus, making normative arguments for or against their use is likely to be more difficult.

And on that note, I shall conclude.

Enhancement and Education: Lessons from the Kobayashi Maru (Part One)

Tweet

(Series Index)

Okay, so this is going to be the last two-part entry in my series on the use of enhancement in sports and education, and since it’s the last I’ve decided to have a little fun with the topic. This post is going to be a, rather self-indulgent, philosophical analysis of a key component of the Star Trek canon: the Kobayashi Maru Test. (Don’t worry, I’ll be explaining for all the naifs.) I suppose I should apologise in advance to all those non-Star Trek fans, but I recommend persevering with these two entries anyway since I think they contains some interesting material. Then again, I would say that.

To set this up properly, I need to summarise the purpose of this series so far. The series was written to help me investigate whether the use of cognitive/performance enhancing technology is legitimate in the educational context. To make this investigation more interesting, and to draw upon an already rich philosophical literature, I’ve been considering the analogies between sports and education. I’ve done this over quite a number of posts. I don’t know if I have any particularly strong conclusions to draw so far. My basic feeling is that the use of some performance enhancers might be illegitimate in (some) sports because they either breach the constitutive regulations of that sport, or because they leads to inter-temporal unfairness. But as to whether that carries over to education, I’m really not too sure. There may be important disanalogies between the two fields that make this impossible.

The next two posts will focus on those potential disanalogies, but won’t directly touch upon the enhancement issue. At least, not until the end. The goal, instead, is to expand upon the notion that breaching the constitutive regulations of some activities is morally illegitimate by exploring the fictional example of James T Kirk’s alleged “success” on the infamous Kobayashi Maru test. Using what has been said about the test in two of the Trek films (Wrath of Khan and the more recent reboot film Star Trek), I’ll suggest that there are good arguments on both sides of the issue. So Kirk’s success might be legitimate or it might not; it’s a close run thing. And the fact that it’s a close run thing has some interesting implications for the enhancement debate.

The remainder of the series is structured as follows. In section one, I revisit the concept of a constitutive regulation and explain why it is normatively significant. In section two, I give a brief outline of the structure of the Kobayashi Maru test and explain the circumstances behind Kirk’s alleged “success” in it. In section three, I outline Spock’s argument (from Star Trek) as to why Kirk’s success was illegitimate. In section four, I outline Kirk’s counterargument as to why his success was legitimate. And finally, in section five, I draw out the lessons of all this for the enhancement debate.

I’ll cover sections one and two today; sections three, four and five the next day.


1. The Constitutive Rule Argument
Some time ago, John Searle set down a very simple taxonomy of rules. According to Searle, the kinds of rules we use to regulate and control our activities can be broken into two broad classes: (i) regulative rules; and (ii) constitutive rules. Regulative rules take a pre-existing activity or set of activities and set down some rules so as to signal to us the (normatively) best way to perform that activity or set of activities. Constitutive rules are different: they set down rules so as to constitute (i.e. create) a new type of activity, a type of activity that wouldn’t exist without the rules.

Compare the rules of driving and the rules of chess. Driving is an activity that does not need rules to exist: we all know what it is to drive a car without having someone tell us that we ought to drive a car in a particular manner or at a particular speed. The rules of driving simply tell us how best to perform that activity. So, for instance, it is possible to drive a car while intoxicated, but this is a normatively inferior way of driving a car, hence there is a rule telling us not to do this. Contrast that with chess. While it is true that moving carved wooden pieces around a board makes a certain amount of sense without the rules of chess; it is also true to say that without following those rules any such activity is not chess. The rules of chess don’t just tell us how we ought to move wooden pieces around a board, they also create a unique kind of activity which we call chess. In other words, the rules of chess constitute a particular activity, they don’t just regulate it.

There is something attractive about the constitutive rule concept when it comes to understanding sport (and perhaps education - we’ll get to that in a minute). For example, the rules of soccer (football to the Brits) don’t simply regulate the activity of kicking a ball around a pitch; they also constitute a particular kind of activity we call soccer. But there’s something slightly unsatisfactory about using the constitutive rule concept when making a normative argument about sport. The problem is this: because of their nature, constitutive rules seem to be descriptive not prescriptive in nature. Thus, any argument made by appealing to them will be factual, not normative. For example, if we play cricket with a baseball bat, we’re not playing a normatively inferior kind of cricket; we’re just not playing cricket at all.

Or so it seems. But David Lauer has made an interesting argument about this in a recent paper. Lauer suggests that constitutive rules can be used as the basis of a normative argument, provided we distinguish between two kinds of constitutive rule. They are:

Constitutive Standards: These are constitutive rules that tell us the conditions that one kind of activity (X) has to satisfy in order to count as another kind of activity (Y). For example, moving carved pieces of wood around a check-patterned board counts as chess, if the movements correspond to the rules of chess. In this form, the constitutive rules are purely descriptive, not normative.

Constitutive Regulations: These are constitutive rules that remind us how an already intelligible activity (X) ought to be done in order to count as a good instance of X (call this Y). For example, hitting someone with your fists is a kind of activity that makes sense without the need for rules, but when you add rules it might constitute a new phenomenon that we call “boxing”, whilst at the same time creating a normatively superior form of hitting someone with your fists. In this form, the constitutive rule is not purely descriptive, it is also partially normative too.

I’d recommend reading Lauer’s paper for more on this conceptual division and the kind of work it can do. For now, I’ll suggest that we could use the constitutive regulation concept as the basis for a normative argument. As follows:

• (1) It is wrong to perform an activity whilst breaching the constitutive regulations of that activity.

• (2) X breaches the constitutive regulations of an activity.

• (3) Therefore, X is wrong.

The interesting question is whether educational activities — specifically assessments — come with constitutive regulations. I think the answer is “maybe”. If we follow contemporary teaching theory, then each course we teach should come with a number of intended learning outcomes (ILOs). These are things you want your students to be able to do at the end of the course (usually they are abilities or capacities you want them to develop). In essence, they are the normative goals of the course. If the course is well-designed, then the assessment should essentially be like a “game” in which students are forced to demonstrate that they have achieved the outcomes. If they do not, they fail.

Assessments of this sort should, I think, bear some resemblance to an activity or set of activities governed by constitutive regulations. The assessment-regulations will take an independently intelligible set of capabilities (e.g. memorisation, analysis, critical thinking) and, through the constraints of rules, create a scenario in which there is a normatively superior way of demonstrating those capacities. These will be the test conditions and parameters. Consequently, if one breaches the constitutive regulations of the test, one should be deemed to have both: (a) subverted the purpose of the test; and (b) if the ILOs are normatively significant (a point to which I shall return), one should also be deemed to have done something normatively illegitimate.

For the remainder of this series, the key issue is to see whether Kirk’s actions in “passing” the Kobayashi Maru test did, in fact, breach the constitutive regulations of that test.


2. What is the Kobayashi Maru Test?
To address this issue, we first need to know what the Kobayashi Maru (KM) test actually is. The following description is based on the one from Memory Alpha (the Star Trek-wiki).

The KM is a test given to all command-track cadets in Starfleet. The test takes place in a simulated version of the USS Enterprise’s bridge. The test candidate assumes the role of captain for the duration of the simulation. The simulated scenario is as follows. The Enterprise is on patrol near the neutral zone between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. It receives a distress call from a civilian freighter named The Kobayashi Maru. The freighter, which is located within the neutral zone, has struck a gravitic mine and needs to be rescued, otherwise the crew and passengers will perish. While rescuing the ship is what every commander would like to do, the problem is that entering the neutral zone risks a confrontation with the Klingons. Sure enough, this is exactly what happens: when the Enterprise enters the neutral zone, three Klingon battle cruisers decloak and attack.

The video below, taken from the Wrath of Khan, shows what the test looks like.

The test is programmed in such a way that, once you enter the neutral zone, there is no way to “win”. In other words, there is no way to successfully rescue the Kobayashi Maru while at the same time avoiding death at the hands of the Klingons. This renders the test more a test of character than a test of problem-solving. Everyone is supposed to fail the test, at least superficially.

Now, while I’m willing to accept that the KM-test is a no-win situation, I must point out at least one potential flaw in the set-up so far. Donning a moral philosophers cap for a moment, I think the KM can be viewed as a kind of moral dilemma. In fact, I think a moral dilemma is the quintessential no-win scenario. A moral dilemma, strictly defined, is any decision-making context in which one’s choices are limited to two (or more) equally bad courses of action. As such, there is no morally correct solution: no way to “win” from a moral perspective and a genuine tragedy associated with any choice you make.

But if we adopt a consequentialist ethic, I think the KM-test is not a true moral dilemma, and hence not a true no-win scenario. Look at it like this: in the initial phase of the test you have two options: (i) enter the neutral zone and attempt a rescue or (ii) do not enter the neutral zone and do not attempt a rescue. If you go for option (i), you will be killed and so too will the crew and passengers of the KM. If you go for option (ii), you will not be killed, but the crew and passengers of the KM will be. Presumably. And while ideally no one should die, it’s surely preferable that the crew of only one ship die than the crew of two ships. The two options are not equally bad. One seems clearly better than the other.

Admittedly, this is a controversial solution. It’s much like the classic kill-one-to-save-five scenario depicted in the trolley problem. But as I said at the outset, this is only a “potential” flaw in the structure of the KM-test. It could easily be repaired. For one thing, the solution just outlined only works if we assume the captain knows what will happen when he/she enters the neutral zone (i.e. if we assume perfect information); if we assume the opposite — that the captain does not know what will happen — then the solution I pointed out above becomes much less obvious. For another thing, the test designers could easily reprogramme it so that the initial choice — that of entering the neutral zone or not — is eliminated. This way one is landed immediately into the no-win dynamic of the rescue.

Of course, one the key bits of Star Trek lore is that Captain Kirk managed to “pass” the KM-test despite its no-win dynamic. How did he manage this? Well, as is reported in Wrath of Khan and depicted on screen in Star Trek, he “cheated”. He reprogrammed the test so that it was possible to defeat the Klingons and rescue the KM.

The question we need to ask is whether his “success” on the test was commendable or not. To do this, we’ll need to delve a little deeper into the ILOs and constitutive regulations of the KM-test, and assess their normative significance. We’ll do this in part two.

Doping, Slippery Slopes and Moral Virtues

Tweet

(Series Index)

Well, I’m still stuck on the enhancement-in-sports-and-education-roundabout and probably will be til the end of January. So this post is, unfortunately, yet another addition to my ongoing series. This one is quite narrowly focused, looking at one argument from Chapter 10 of the following book:

Mike McNamee Sports, Vices and Virtues: Morality Plays (Routledge, 2008)

The book is actually pretty interesting. It makes the case for viewing elite sport as a kind of morality play: a forum in which the moral virtues are celebrated, and from which the general population can learn. It’s an idealistic view, but one with which those who complain about the grubby professionalism of modern sports are likely to agree.

I’m only going to zone in on a small part of the book’s overall thesis. The part in question comes from McNamee’s chapter on doping in elite sports. The chapter reviews some of the typical anti-doping arguments and dismisses them in relatively short order. I’m not too interested in this part of the chapter since I’ve covered such arguments elsewhere in this series. The chapter gets rather more interesting when it turns to consider one potentially novel — and McNamee thinks better — argument against doping: the slippery slope argument (SSA). It’s this argument that will be discussed here.

The remainder of this post is structured as follows: part one discusses SSAs in general; part two looks at McNamee’s SSA against doping; and part three looks at McNamee’s complaints about the vices of athletes who dope. Just note that although “doping” has a particular meaning in sport, one that may be thought distinct from “performance enhancement”, the terms are used interchangeably in what follows.


1. A Taxonomy of Slippery Slope Arguments
An SSA has a fairly standard form: it proposes that allowing something to be the case (in this instance, doping in sports) will lead to something else, usually undesirable, happening. And since this undesirable thing should not be allowed to happen, then it follows that the first thing should not happen either. In other words, it proposes that there exists a slippery slope between two things (call them X and Y), and since the second of these is undesirable the first shouldn’t be allowed. To put this more elegantly:

• (1) If X is allowed to happen, then Y will happen.

• (2) Y should not be allowed to happen.

• (3) Therefore, X should not be allowed to happen.

There’s one important thing to note about this version of the argument: there can be more than one “slide” on the slippery slope before we reach the bottom. In the version given here, Y is directly connected to X and Y also lies at the bottom of the slippery slope. As such, the argument is suggesting that there is only one slide down to the bottom of the slippery slope. This need not be the case. There could be multiple stopping off points along the slope before we get to the bottom. All that matters is that the first slide — the one from the current status quo to X — leads, inexorably, to the bottom.

Now, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss SSAs before on the blog. In my series on John Corvino’s article (“The PIB Argument”) I looked at the use of SSAs in the same-sex marriage debate. There, I followed Corvino’s basic taxonomy and identified two forms such arguments could take: (i) the causal and (ii) the logical.

A causal SSA is one that proposes a causal link between X and Y. As an example, consider the following SSA: if you smoke one cigarette, you will want to smoke more cigarettes; if you smoke more cigarettes you will become addicted to nicotine and continue smoking for an extended period of time; and if you continue smoking for an extended period of time you dramatically increase your risk of lung cancer. So, since you should not wish to dramatically increase your risk of lung cancer, you should not smoke one cigarette. In this argument, the link between the points on the slippery slope is causal: one outcome, it is claimed, will naturally lead to another.

Contrast this with a logical SSA. In a logical SSA, the link between the points on the slippery slope is logical, not causal, in nature. This is most common in ethical SSAs. In an ethical SSA, the claim is usually that if we deem some practice to be morally acceptable, then we lose the principled basis upon which we object to other (more undesirable) practices. In other words, the logical barricade that currently exists between our principles and some undesirable practice is eroded. In the same-sex marriage debate, for instance, there are those who argue that in legalising same-sex marriage, we lose the principled basis on which we object to polygamy, incest or bestiality. This was discussed in the earlier series on the PIB argument.

Although I like the simplicity of the logical/causal division, McNamee adopts a slightly more complex taxonomy of SSAs. Relying initially on the work of Bernard Williams, he distinguishes between horrible result SSAs and arbitrary result SSAs. The distinction here depends on the kind of event or outcome that is thought to lie at the bottom of the slippery result. Obviously enough, in a horrible result SSA, the outcome at the bottom of the slope is horrible, whereas in an arbitrary result SSA, the outcome is simply arbitrary. But that just raises the further question, what do we mean by “horrible” and what do we mean by “arbitrary”. Unfortunately, McNamee isn’t clear on this point, and since I haven’t read Williams’s earlier work, I’m not sure that I can clarify the matter all that much. My guess, however, is that a horrible result is one that is morally repugnant or objectionable, and that an arbitrary result is simply one that seems unconnected (either logically or causally) from the initial starting point.

In addition to dividing SSAs up into these two major kinds, McNamee (again borrowing from someone else) looks at three different ways in which the slide down the slope can be conceptualised. This leads to the following three sub-types of SSA:

1. Precedential SSAs: In a precedential SSA, the initial slide from the status quo to X, is thought to set a precedent for further slides down the slope. Imagine you are arguing with your teenage son. He wants to go to some nightclub, but you disapprove. He is persistent and eventually you relent, allowing him to go but only “just this once”. Unfortunately for you, this relenting sets a precedent to which your son can appeal in future cases. Before you know it, you are allowing him to go out whenever he asks, which is exactly what you didn’t want. This kind of SSA could also be referred to as a “thin end of the wedge”-SSA.

2. Sorites SSAs: In a Sorites SSA, the slide to the bottom of the slope is hastened by the conceptual ambiguity of some key term(s). Obviously, the allusion here is to the infamous Sorites paradox: if you remove grains of sand from a heap, one-by-one, at what point does the heap become a non-heap? Here, the problem is caused by the conceptual ambiguity of “heap”. As McNamee points out, conceptual ambiguity of this sort is often exploited by proponents of doping and performance enhancement. For example, proponents of enhancement often point to the fuzzy boundary that lies between “treatment” and “enhancement”. They then use most people’s acceptance of “treatment” to make the case for certain forms of “enhancement”.

3. Domino Effect SSAs: In a domino effect SSA, the slide to the bottom of the slope is causal in nature. One event leads to another, which leads to another and so on. This corresponds pretty much exactly with my earlier description of a causal SSA so I won’t given an example here.

I’m not sure that McNamee’s more complex taxonomy brings with it any great advantages. Although the horrible/arbitrary distinction might be useful, the three sub-types listed above really only elaborate on the logical/causal division discussed earlier. Specifically, they just distinguish between two kinds of logical SSA: the precedential — in which endorsing one moral claim sets a precent for endorsing further moral claims; and the Sorites — in which conceptual ambiguity means we lose faith in our more restrictive moral beliefs. The domino effect SSA is simply a redescription of the causal SSA.

Even though I’m somewhat sceptical about its utility, I’m still going to make use of McNamee’s taxonomy in what follows. This is for the obvious reason that he makes use of it in describing his argument, and since I want to explain his argument here, it’s easier if I follow suit.


2. The Arbitrary Result SSA against Doping in Sport
The section heading gives the game away but, just to state the obvious, having taxonomised SSAs, Mcnamee goes on to present his own, arbitrary result-SSA against the use of doping in sport. He does so in a slightly unusual way. He starts by developing a kind of Sorites SSA that used by proponents of doping, and then he inverts it to support the anti-doping position.

Let’s look at the pro-doping SSA first. Of course, since the argument is being used to support something rather than object to it, it’s not really right to call it an SSA. The moniker “slippery slope” should probably only be applied in the negative case, not the positive. Nevertheless, with that concession to linguistic purity in mind, I’ll persevere in calling it the pro-doping SSA.

The pro-doping SSA discussed by McNamee relates to the ambiguity of the treatment/enhancement distinction. He uses a nice example to make his point:

Skeletal Reinforcement: Apparently (I’m not familiar with the sport) American Footballers can suffer from pretty serious injuries (broken bones etc.). Oftentimes these injuries affect their quality of life in their retirement. Suppose someone, pointing to the prevalence of such injuries, suggested a remedy. Instead of relying on the fragile construction of the human body, all players would have their key skeletal structures reinforced by new materials such as Kevlar. This would prevent serious long-term health effects from accruing to the players.

McNamee seems to accept that most people would look favourably on this kind of intervention. Furthermore, its advocates could probably sneak it in under the guise of its being a “treatment” not an enhancement. After all, reinforcing the key skeletal structures is being done to prevent injuries. And preventing injuries is surely a respectable form of treatment. This is the essence of pro-doping SSA:

• (4) If you accept the moral legitimacy of treating sports injuries, then you ought to accept the moral legitimacy of preventing sports injuries.

• (5) If you accept the legitimacy of preventing sports injuries, then you ought to accept the legitimacy of skeletal reinforcement in American football.

• (6) You do accept the legitimacy of treating sports injuries.

• (7) Therefore, you ought to accept the legitimacy of skeletal reinforcement in American football.

I’ve compressed the logic here, but you get the drift. The top of the slope is represented by the proposition “the treatment of sports injuries is legitimate” and the slide is brought about by the conceptual ambiguity of “treatment”. Why shouldn’t preventative interventions be viewed as a type of treatment?

The problem — at least from the perspective of the anti-doper — is that if you accept the moral legitimacy of skeletal reinforcement in this instance, you begin the inexorable slide to a pro-enhancement position. This leads to the inversion of the above reasoning. If you accept skeletal reinforcement for football players, what would you say about artificial toe extensions and arch reinforcement for sprinters? Surely, you’d have accept them too, particularly if it was pointed out that this could reduce the effects of friction on the sprinters’ limbs. But these interventions are likely to have enhancing effects too. Before you know it, you are landed in the landscape of enhancement.

Two points here. First, this Sorites-style SSA might not be valid. Just because there’s no difference between preventative interventions and treatment, does not mean that there is no difference between enhancing interventions and treatment. Indeed, that’s the whole point of the Sorites paradox in the first place: a single grain of sand is very definitely distinct from a heap of sand, even if the dividing line between being a heap and a non-heap is fuzzy.

Second, and more importantly, the pro-doping faction can easily ask the anti-dopers to point to the horrible result that lies at the bottom of the slope — the one that means we shouldn’t start the slide. In other words, they can issue the following challenge: If skeletal reinforcements for American football players aren’t troubling, then maybe we’re wrong to think that toe-extensions are troubling? And if we’re wrong about that, maybe we’re wrong about most forms of enhancement too?

Live to this kind of pro-enhancement argument, McNamee suggests the opponent takes a different tack. Instead of assuming that there must be a horrible result at the bottom of the slope, they can appeal to the possibility of arbitrary results: ones that seem to lose all connection to moral principle. In other words, they can say that by accepting the first slide down the slope, we will create conditions in which moral arbitrariness can thrive, i.e. conditions in which our decisions about which kinds of practices are permissible and which are impermissible seem to lack any firm grounding in reason.

To spell out the argument formally:

• (8) If we accept X (some type of enhancement or quasi-treatment like skeletal reinforcement), then we will create conditions in which moral arbitrariness can thrive.

• (9) We should not wish to create the conditions in which moral arbitrariness can thrive.

• (10) Therefore, we should not accept X.

This is straightforward enough, but we need some reason for accepting (9). Why is it that moral arbitrariness is so problematic? McNamme has the following to say:

Let us take one brief example. There are aspects of our lives where, as a widely shared intuition, we might think that in the absence of good reasons we ought not to discriminate among people arbitrarily. Healthcare might be considered precisely one such case. Given the ever-increasing demand for public healthcare services and products it could be argued that access to them ought typically to be governed by publicly disputable criteria such as clinical need, or potential benefit, as opposed to choices of an arbitrary or subjective nature. (Sports, Virtues and Vices, pg. 186-187)

This is interesting. I think it appeals somewhat to the Rawlsian notion of public reason, i.e. the notion that practices need to be accepted for reasons that are accessible to all members of the public, not because of chance or whim. I probably agree with this, but then I’m forced to question premise (8): why would endorsing enhancement lead to moral arbitrariness? Why would we lose the ability to assess different forms of enhancement with publicly accessible reasons simply by accepting one particular form?

McNamee says the following:

Nothing in the pro-doping, or more broadly the pro-enhancement, position seems to allow for such objective dispute let alone prioritisation…In the absence of a defensible telos, over and above the mindless mantra of more medals, more glory (the narrowly conceived citius, altius, fortius), of clearly and substantively specified ends (beyond the banner of unrestrained “enhancement”), elite athletes, their coaches and their sports emdical back-up teams alike ought to resist the potentially open-ended transformations of human nature and potentialities.

I don’t quite know what to make of this. On the one hand, McNamee demands that decisions about the permissibility of enhancement be open to public scrutiny but says that they can’t do this until proponents of enhancement have some clear, morally defensible telos. At the same time, he acknowledges that there is kind of telos in sight (more medals, more glory, unrestrained enhancement), but dismisses this on, I hate to say it, arbitrary grounds. That is to say, he just seems to assume, without clear argument, that the very idea of enhancing and transforming human potentialities is not “morally defensible”.

Surely he must have a better reason to object to it than that?



3. The Vices of the Doper
Perhaps he does, but it is one that is somewhat distant from the slippery slope argument we have been discussing up til now. As I said at the outset, McNamee’s book defends the idea that sporting contests are a kind of morality play: a forum in which the moral virtues are celebrated, and the vices condemned. Thus it’s no real surprise to find out that one of the main reasons he objects to doping (and enhancement) is that dopers exhibit certain moral vices. McNamee points to two vices in particular: pleonexia (injustice) and shamelessness. Let’s discuss these briefly.

The Vice of Pleonexia: To be virtuous, a person must be just. And to be just they must be willing to give others their due and accept what is due to them. The problem with the doper is that they are not willing to accept what is due to them: they demand more and more, and they shut out others in the process, denying them their due as well. So goes MacNamee’s argument. The problem with this argument argument though is that it is forced to make certain questionable assumptions about the desert relation, i.e. the relation that determines whether somebody deserves a particular kind of punishment or reward. McNamee assumes that commitment, talent and dedication form the basis of the desert relation in sport and that those who engage in doping lack these traits. I think this is arguable on two grounds. First, on the ground that dopers may well display some kind of talent, commitment and dedication (is doping not evidence of dedication?); and second, on the grounds that there may be some trait possessed by the doper that ought to be included in the desert relation.


The Vice of Shamelessness: Shame is tied to feelings of guilt or personal failure. The person who experiences shame will feel both that they have let themselves down and that they have left others down too. As a result, they will seek to hide themselves away. McNamee doesn’t think that we should encourage athletes to feel shame, rather he thinks we should encourage them to have the capacity to feel shame. The problem with dopers is that they may lack this capacity. McNamee uses the example of Charlie Francis to illustrate what he means. Francis said that if Ben Johnson had simply stuck to schedule — knowing when to come off certain drugs and doses — he would not have been caught. This, as McNamee notes, is to treat doping as “a mere problem of timing, not one of ethics”. In contrast to this, McNamee thinks dopers should feel ashamed of any successes they gain by doping. They have let themselves and others down. There are many problems with this argument. The main one is that the belief that the doper should feel shame is usually driven by the belief that their successes are fraudulent or unfair to others. But this is exactly what the pro-doper would argue against. They would say that doped-up performances are neither necessarily fraudulent nor necessarily unfair.

This brings us to the end of McNamee’s arguments against doping. While there is some interesting material in there, I think McNamee has a long way to go before what he says is at all persuasive. His anti-doping SSA needs further work before the connection between enhancement and moral arbitrariness is shown; his claim that the doper exhibits the vice of injustice needs to clarify the nature of the desert relation that is being invoked; and his belief that dopers should feel shame is driven by assumptions that the pro-doper has no reason to accept.

Enhancement in Sports and Education (Index)

Tweet

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Unfortunately, the first couple of weeks in January are (possibly from now on) going to be dedicated to marking student assignments. Hopefully, I'll be able to get back to posting more regularly soon.

Anyway, to fill the gap, I thought I'd just do an index for all my recent posts on the use of performance enhancers in sports and education. I've listed them in chronological order, since that is probably the best way to read them. As you'll see, they deal more with sports than with education. I'm trying to work on a paper (possibly papers) dealing with the analogy between sports and education at the moment that will cover the educational context in more detail. I mention this several times in the posts that follow.

I think there's some interesting material in here, if you have the time to read it. Enjoy.


Series Index


1. Partridge on Performance Enhancement in Swimming

2. Schermer on Enhancement and Cheating (Part One)

3. Schermer on Enhancement and Cheating (Part Two)

4. Tannjso on Enhancement and the Ethos of Elite Sport

5. Overview of the Arguments Against Doping in Sport (Part One)

6. Overview of the Arguments Against Doping in Sport (Part Two)

7. Doping, Slippery Slopes and Moral Virtues

8. Enhancement and Education: Lessons from the Kobayashi Maru (Part One)

9. Enhancement and Education: Lessons from the Kobayashi Maru (Part Two)

Overview of the Arguments Against Doping in Sport (Part Two)

Tweet

(Part One)

This post is the second (and final) part in my overview of the moral arguments against doping in sport. As mentioned in part one, I’m using the following article as my guide to this topic:

Angela Schneider and Robert Butcher “A Philosophical Overview of the Arguments on Banning Doping in Sport” in Tannjso and Tamburrini (eds) Values in Sport: Elitism, Nationalism, Gender Equality and the Scientific Manufacture of Winners (Taylor and Francis, 2000).

In their article, Schneider and Butcher identify three main families of anti-doping argument. They are: (i) fairness arguments; (ii) harm arguments; and (iii) integrity arguments. I dealt with fairness and cheating arguments in part one; in this part I will deal with the integrity arguments.

As it happens, Schneider and Butcher are much briefer in their treatment of the integrity arguments than they were in their treatment of the harm arguments. As a result, this post will be much briefer than the previous one. I must say though, Schneider and Butcher’s brevity is somewhat surprising given the fact that they ultimately think that an integrity-style argument holds out the best hope for proponents of the anti-doping stance. Indeed, they themselves ultimately endorse one of these arguments and we’ll spend most of our time discussing that argument in this post.

Before we do that, however, we need to quickly discuss the idea of sporting integrity and dismiss some of the less successful forms of integrity argument. The idea of sporting integrity can be summed up by appealing to notion of authentic athletic performance. (This being something that Nike famously use as their corporate motto.) An authentic performance is one that respects the internal goods of sporting activity; and inauthentic performance is one that does not. The internal goods of sporting activity are the human excellences that are constituted by the rules of sporting activity. I discussed at some length previously.

All integrity arguments against doping will claim that doping leads to inauthentic as opposed to authentic performances. The less successful forms of integrity argument — the one’s dismissed fairly quickly in Schneider and Butcher’s discussion — appeal to the concepts of “unnaturalness” and “dehumanising”. As Schneider and Butcher note, these concepts are either ill-defined or not morally compelling. Consequently, they do not make for the most persuasive arguments. I tend to agree so I see no need to address them at further length here.

Instead, I turn to consider what Schneider and Butcher see as being the most persuasive integrity argument: the irrelevancy argument.


1. The Irrelevancy Argument
The irrelevancy argument makes a very simple, and in some ways modest, claim. It claims that drug-enhanced performances are not necessarily immoral or wicked, but, rather, that they are just irrelevant to the kinds of good or end that sporting activity is trying to promote. Consequently, true athletes — i.e. those who engage in sport in order to pursue the internal goods of sporting activity — should simply have no desire to engage in doping.

In contrast to their discussion of the harm arguments against doping, Schneider and Butcher provide no formal summary of this irrelevancy argument. I always get slightly suspicious when authors fail to do this, particularly when it comes to arguments that they themselves are trying to endorse. Thus, I’ve decided to try to formalise their reasoning as follows:

• (1) The main reason for athletes to participate in a sport, is to develop a set of skills that overcome the obstacles created by the constitutive rules of the sport.

• (2) Doping (taking substance X) does not help an athlete to develop the skills needed to overcome the obstacles created by the constitutive rules of the sport; it only helps an athlete to gain a competitive advantage.

• (3) If something does not help one to satisfy the main reason for participating in a sport, then it should be viewed as being irrelevant by those who wish to participate in a sport.

• (4) Therefore, doping should be viewed irrelevant by those who wish to participate in a sport.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this formalisation is inelegant. Nevertheless, I think it does capture Schneider and Butcher’s argument in a reasonably faithful manner. And there are three interesting features of this argument that I want to comment on here.

First, the argument is really dialectic in nature, not conceptual or categorical. In other words, it appeals to the internal reasons for action of someone who wishes to engage in a particular activity, not to categorical or conceptual propositions. It then tries to demonstrate for this person how certain other activities are contrary to (or irrelevant to) their own reasons for action. I covered dialectic arguments of this type once before when looking at Gibbard’s argument for the principle of generic consistency. Schneider and Butcher seem very clear about the dialectic intent of their argument in the article under consideration. They repeatedly emphasise the point that a successful case against doping will have to appeal to what the athletes themselves desire, not what the authorities or wider public desire.

Second, because the argument appeals to the internal reasons for action of particular actors, it skates on thin ice. Although the presumption will be that most athletes are motivated by a desire to develop skills and overcome obstacles, one can easily imagine a cynical cohort of athletes who are motivated more by the fame and riches that come with sporting success. They are likely to remain unpersuaded by the argument. Should we care about this exclusion? I’m not sure.

Third, although I like the general idea of the argument, I’m pretty sure it is false. In particular, I’m pretty sure that premise (2) is false. I think many doping substances and practices (e.g. blood doping in cycling) actually do help people to develop the skills and overcome the obstacles set down by the constitutive rules of sport. For instance, cyclists who engage in blood doping really do improve their stamina and pedaling efficiency. Are we really going to say that those skills are irrelevant to the internal good of cycling?

I think the problem here is that Schneider and Butcher try to separate skills development from competitive success. But when you think about it, if the rules of any sporting competition have been carefully formulated, these two things should go together, i.e. those who have the best-developed skills should be the most competitively successful. Of course, it could be the case that the rules of the competition have not been carefully formulated and that competitive success is a very poor measure of skills development. And this may be what Schneider and Butcher are getting at in their argument. In other words, they may be saying: “Look at how out of sync our measures of sporting success are with the internal goods of sporting activity. This is shown by the fact that drug-enhanced performances lead to competitive success.” The problem I have with this is that it’s very difficult to say why drug-enhanced performances should not be competitively successful without arbitrarily assuming that they are contrary to the internal goods of sporting activity.


2. The Unnecessary Risk Argument
Despite the failings of the irrelevancy argument (at least in the form given above), I’m going to entertain the possibility that it is successful in order to examine two follow-up arguments offered by Schneider and Butcher. In some ways, I feel comfortable doing this since these arguments might (if reinterpreted) actually provide additional reasons for supporting the irrelevancy argument, reasons that help to overcome the objection that I offered above. I won’t push this reinterpretation here, but it might be worth exploring at a future date.

Both of the follow-up arguments try to add to the reasons why athletes should wish to avoid doping. Both of the arguments also attempt to re-introduce some of the harm arguments that were discussed in part one. Although Schneider and Butcher were dismissive of all these harm arguments, they feel it is appropriate to make use of them here. Why so? Well, because the main problem they had with the various harm arguments was that they each needed an independent reason for thinking doping was wrong before they could get off the ground. Since the irrelevancy argument has, in Schneider and Butcher’s minds anyway, provided this independent reason, there is hope for the harm arguments once again.

The first of the arguments is the unnecessary risk argument and it works like this:

• (5) If taking substance X is irrelevant to developing sporting skills, and if X has some minimal risk of harm associated with it, then it would be prudent for athletes to avoid taking X.

• (6) X is irrelevant to developing sporting skills (from previous argument), and X has some minimal risk of harm associated with it (from harm to self argument).

• (7) Therefore, it would be prudent for athletes to avoid taking substance X.

I don’t think there’s a whole lot to be said here. In general, I find the basic principle (set down in premise 5) to be persuasive. To use an analogy, if I don’t have cancer, I don’t see any reason to undergo a course of chemotherapy since chemotherapy is harmful and would only improve my health if I actually had cancer. This would be true even if the risks associated with gratuitously undergoing chemotherapy were quite small. Still, the obvious point must be made: the argument is only really successful if doping is, in fact, irrelevant to developing sporting skills.

The second follow-up argument is the self-defeating argument. It works like this:

• (8) The only reason to take substance X is to gain a competitive advantage.

• (9) If one athlete takes substance X and thereby gains a competitive advantage, then all athletes will be coerced into taking that substance.

• (10) If all athletes are coerced into taking substance X, then there will no longer be a competitive advantage associated with substance X.

• (11) Therefore, there is no reason to take substance X.

A few words about this argument are in order.

First, this argument assumes that a prisoners’ dilemma (or arms race) logic prevails in competitive sports. I mentioned this when discussing the harm-to-other-athletes argument in part one. I think it’s probably true that such a logic prevails in competitive sports, but I have no good evidence to back this up.

Second, since the argument assumes a prisoners’ dilemma logic, it should really take into account all the features of the prisoners’ dilemma game. Thus, for example, the reasoning will only be persuasive if other competitors are aware that substance X is responsible for the first athlete’s success. If this information can be concealed from the other competitors, the coercion may not take place. Also, although the reasoning is persuasive, the whole point of a prisoners’ dilemma is that one individual cannot change the strategic dynamic of the game by unilaterally choosing to not engage in doping. The players will need to cooperate in order overcome the problem. This might be one reason why general bans and enforcement policies need to be introduced: if left to their own devices, athletes won’t be able to prevent doping.

Third, and once again somewhat obviously, the argument is only successful if premise (8) is true. If it turns out that substance X also helps athletes to achieve the internal goods of sporting activity, then there would be good reason to continue to take substance X, even after the competitive advantage it bestows is eroded.


4. Conclusion
That brings us to the end of this overview of the arguments against doping in sport. As we have seen in this part, Schneider and Butcher think that an integrity-based argument holds out the best hope for proponents of the anti-doping stance. They are particularly enthusiastic about the irrelevancy argument outlined above. They think that this argument, in conjunction with the two follow-up arguments, provides good reasons for athletes to disavow the use of doping substances. That said, I have presented some reasons for thinking that the irrelevancy argument is unpersuasive.

Overview of the Arguments Against Doping in Sport (Part One)

Tweet

I’m sorry to say that my obsession with the ethics of enhancement in sport is set to continue for a few more days at least. For some background as to why I’m interested in this topic see here and here. I appreciate some readers may be getting slightly bored with this topic, but today’s post should be pretty useful since it is the first in a two-part series that attempts to provide a broad overview of all the anti-enhancement arguments in sport (but in this case the term “doping” is standing in for “enhancement”).

I’ll be using the following article as my guide:

Angela Schneider and Robert Butcher “A Philosophical Overview of the Arguments on Banning Doping in Sport” in Tannjso and Tamburrini (eds) Values in Sport: Elitism, Nationalism, Gender Equality and the Scientific Manufacture of Winners (Taylor and Francis, 2000).

In this article, Schneider and Butcher identify three main families of arguments against doping. They are: (i) fairness arguments; (ii) harm arguments; and (iii) integrity arguments. The first group of arguments suggest that a permissive attitude toward doping leads to unfairness; the second group of arguments suggest that a permissive attitude toward doping creates different varieties of harm; and the third group of arguments suggest that a permissive attitude toward doping somehow perverts or undermines the integrity of the sport.

Within each of these groups there are a number of different arguments to be considered. I have presented these in the diagram below. Over the course of the next two posts I will try to examine most of these arguments, using Schneider and Butcher’s analysis as my guide. I will, however, be excluding the fairness arguments from my discussion. I do so since I have already considered these kinds of arguments at length elsewhere.

In the remainder of this post, I will look at the various harm-based arguments against doping. Three quick points at the outset. First, “harm” is generally agreed to be a morally relevant consideration, particularly in liberal political theories. Second, “harm” is obviously an ambiguous concept. This needs to be borne in mind when reading the remainder of this post: the arguments that we are about to discuss may all appeal to different forms of harm. And third, because of the (ambiguous) nature of harm, there can really be no general harm-based argument against doping. What matters is whether a particular form of doping is harmful in a particular sport. This needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Schneider and Butcher overcome this problem by using some case studies in their analysis. I’ll mention these as I go along.


1. Harm to Self
The first, and in some ways the most obvious, harm-based argument against doping comes from the notion that doping is harmful to the athletes who partake in it. Schneider and Butcher formalise these “harm-to-self” arguments in the following manner:

• (1) Substance or practice X harms its user.

• (2) The user needs to be protected from this harm.

• (3) The user can be protected by banning the substance or practice.

• (4) Therefore, the substance or practice should be banned.

They then imagine this argument being used to justify a ban on the use of anabolic steroids in sport. Would the argument be successful?

As regards premise (1), Schneider and Butcher note that the evidence is mixed. One reason for the evidence being mixed is that the substance is controversial and so difficult to study in a controlled scientific manner (mainly because ethics committees tend to reject proper studies). Controlled trials using low doses seem to reveal that there is little harm, but anecdotal evidence amongst athletes using high doses suggest some potentially harmful side-effects.

• (5) The evidence on harm is mixed: better quality studies are needed before we can say anything definitive.

So people who wish to use the harm argument will — somewhat paradoxically — need to encourage further studies if they are to justify premise (1). Whatever the reality may be, Schneider and Butcher are willing to concede the truth of premise (1) since they think the main problem with the argument lies in premise (2).

And what might this problem be? The answer, in a word, is paternalism. It is generally accepted — following the lead of J.S. Mill — that paternalism is unacceptable in a liberal society. Competent adults have a right to autonomy and the right to autonomy encompasses the right to make decisions that go against one’s interests. Since professional athletes are usually competent adults, it follows that we shouldn’t intervene to prevent them from taking a potentially harmful substance. To be sure, this argument isn’t completely compelling: paternalism can be acceptable in some instances. For instance, Schneider and Butcher suggest that a paternalistic attitude toward child athletes might be acceptable. They just don’t think such an exception from general rule applies to competent adult athletes.

There are other problems with premise (2). The chief one being that many sporting activities and training practices are harmful as well and yet we don’t ban people from participating in them. Take boxing as an example: to be a boxer means that one takes on certain risks associated with the sport. Since we don’t step in to prevent people from voluntarily competing in this potentially harmful activity, how could we justify stepping in to prevent people from taking a potentially harmful drug?

• (6) Individuals have a right to autonomy, and this right includes the freedom to make decisions that are harmful to themselves.

• (7) Other aspects of the sporting life are harmful too, we need some additional reason to justify singling out the harm caused by doping.

Premise (3) is also in trouble. Schneider and Butcher argue that there is very little evidence to suggest that banning the use of a substance actually protects athletes. Indeed, despite the fact that anabolic steroids are banned in many sports, athletes continue to take them in “clandestine, unsanitary and uncontrolled ways”. Other steps are probably more effective in weening athletes away from steroids, steps which Schneider and Butcher return to later in the article.

• (8) In practice, doping continues even when bans are in place; arguably, bringing doping out into the open might make it safer.

The argument map below summarises the reasoning to this point. The overall conclusion is that the harm to self argument seems like a non-starter.

2. Harm to Other Athletes
On the face of it, a harm-to-others arguments is far more likely to succeed than a harm-to-self argument. The reason goes back to the core of Millian liberalism: the harm principle. Although it is wrong to stop someone from harming themselves, it is right to intervene and stop them from harming others. Thus, as we switch to consider the harm-to-other athletes argument, things are looking up from proponents of the doping ban.

To see whether things will remain on the upside, we need to dress the argument up in its formal garb:

• (1) An athlete’s use of substance X causes harm to other “clean” athletes.

• (2) Those other athletes need protection from this harm.

• (3) Banning substance X will protect those other athletes.

• (4) Therefore, substance X ought to be banned.

What are we to say about this? Well, first things first, we need to some clear grasp on the nature of the “harm” that is thought to arise here. Schneider and Butcher suggest the harm of coercion is the main one, with coercion then bringing further harmful effects if the substance itself turns out to be harmful in some way. In other words, the following two premises support premise (1).

• (5) If one athlete uses substance X, and substance X is performance-enhancing, then other athletes will be coerced into taking that substance.

• (6) Coercion is a form of harm (that may bring further harms with it).

The problem Schneider and Butcher then see with the argument is that the harm of coercion is commonplace in sport. For example, if one athlete takes up a new (potentially harmful) training regime, and this training regime proves highly successful, then other athletes will be forced to follow suit. In some ways, that’s just the nature of the beast in competitive sports. There is an arms race logic that prevails. In order to stay competitive, athletes will need to up the ante, and once they do this others will have to up the ante too. This process can cycle on indefinitely.

So the question for Schneider and Butcher then becomes: why is upping the ante by adopting some new training regime less objectionable than upping the ante by taking steroids (or other drugs)? To answer that question we must move beyond harm-related concerns to concerns about the nature of doping and the nature of sporting excellence. In other words, premise (2) of the argument is hopelessly incomplete.

• (7) Coercion is commonplace in sport. So to say that other athletes need to be protected from being coerced into taking substance X, we first need to have some clear reason for distinguishing coercion into doping from other forms of coercion.

Schneider and Butcher try to find some independent reasons for thinking that coercion into doping is different later in their article, and once they have done this they think a coercion-based objection to doping could become successful. We’ll see how this might work in part two. For now, let’s move on to the next harm-based argument. Argument diagram is below.

3. Harm to Society
The next argument is predicated on the notion that doping harms society as a whole. Following the template that has been set down above, we can formalise this argument like so:

• (1) An athlete’s use of substance X causes harm to society.

• (2) Society needs to be protected from this harm.

• (3) Banning substance X will protect society.

• (4) Therefore, substance X ought to be banned.

The key to evaluating this argument is, once again, to clarify the kinds of harm to which it appeals. Schneider and Butcher identify two possible ways in which the use of certain drugs in sport might harm society (particularly children, who are the future of society). First, it might harm society by providing role models who encourage an attitude of disrespect toward rules and authority in general. Second, it might harm society by providing role models who encourage other forms of substance-abuse. Let’s take these in turn.

• (5) The use of substance X provides role models who encourage an attitude of disrespect toward rules and authority.

• (6) The use of substance X provides role models who encourage other forms of substance abuse.

As regards the first kind of harm — that of encouraging disrespect for rules and authority — there are two things that need to be said. The first is that not all forms of disrespect for rules and authority are to be discouraged; the second is that whether taking steroids or other substances does in fact model an attitude of disrespect depends on whether the substances in question are actually banned. If they are not, then taking them cannot model an attitude of disrespect. But this argument is being used to support the introduction of the ban in the first place. Consequently, in its current form, the argument simply begs the question.

• (7) An attitude of disrespect toward rules and authority is not always a bad thing.

• (8) The use of substance X can only encourage an attitude of disrespect toward rules and authority if the use of substance X is banned in the first place.

As regards the second kind of harm — that of encouraging other forms of substance-abuse — Schneider and Butcher say the following. There are many substances (cigarettes and alcohol spring to mind) that are deemed appropriate for adults to take and inappropriate for children. And yet we do not ban adults from taking those substances. Why couldn’t doping substances be among those? The only way a ban could be justified on this kind of ground is if there is something particularly problematic about the doping substances (e.g. if they carried the same addictive effect as heroin), and that doesn’t seem to be the case. Also, the causal link here is probably dubious.

• (9) There are many substances that are off-limits to children, but not to adults. Why couldn’t substance X be one of those?

• (10) The causal link between taking substance X and encouraging other forms of substance-abuse is dubious.

Although this is probably enough, there are few more problems with this argument. We’ll briefly catalogue a few of these here.

One particularly significant problem is the assumption it makes about sport and role models. There are other public figures — e.g. rock stars and actors — who we don’t necessarily expect to provide good role models for others. So why should we expect this of sportspeople?

• (11) Why should sportspeople be role models when other public figures are not held to this high standard?

Some philosophers have (apparently) argued that sports do play a particularly important role in shaping a young person’s worldview. But even if we accept that “sport is different” in this regard, we are then forced to confront another dubious assumption. You see, for the role model argument to really work, we’d need to explain why drug-enhanced performances are something that should not be encouraged, i.e. are things toward which young people should not aspire. Not all drug-enhanced performances are negatively perceived. For instance, drug-induced poetry and music is sometimes commended, or viewed as no better or worse than non-drug induced versions. Why should drug-induced sporting performances be different? The answer to that comes from looking at the integrity of sport, not at the harm it can cause.

• (12) We can only say that taking substance X is harmful to society if we have a justifiably negative attitude toward drug-enhanced performances. We have no such justification yet.

Finally, and more briefly, even if all these criticisms don’t apply, premise (3) would still be questionable. Will introducing a ban really protect society from harm?

• (13) It is doubtful whether a ban on doping would actually protect society from harm.

The argument diagram below summarises all of this.

4. Harm to Spectators
One final group of people who might be able to rustle up a harm-based objection to doping would be the spectators. Schneider and Butcher think that the possibility of there being a sound argument of this type is pretty slim. The main kind of harm caused to spectators is that their aesthetic enjoyment of the sport is somehow reduced or undermined by watching drug-enhanced performances. For example, those who watched Ben Johnson’s infamous 100m victory back in 1988 no doubt felt cheated and disappointed when they subsequently learned that he failed a drugs test.

There are two problems here however. First, its not clear that there is any great harm being caused here. Certainly, sporting authorities might be worried if spectators start to turn their backs on a sport due to doping (as may have happened in cycling) but its not clear whether that is a sufficient moral reason to ban doping. Second, the harm to spectators could, arguably, be solved by adopting a pro-doping stance rather than an anti-doping stance. If we allow all competitors to use doping substances this would remove spectator’s concerns about unfair victories and might even make the sport more exciting.

Thus, it seems unlikely that the harm to spectators argument will ever be compelling. We won’t bother with a diagram here since this is relatively uninteresting.


5. Harm Caused by Bans
To this point we have been looking at harm-based arguments that support the ban on doping. But harm-based arguments are implicitly consequentialist in nature. And since consequentialism aims at the best overall outcome, there is a flipside that needs to considered here, namely: would a ban on doping cause significant harms that could be avoided by adopting a permissive attitude toward doping?

Schneider and Butcher think that there is one major harm that is caused by bans on doping. This is the harm that it does to a person’s right to privacy. It is widely-known that the only effective way in which to police a ban on doping is to have random, year-round drug tests. Such tests are needed since banned substances can be taken in the off season and still benefit the athlete. But such tests mean that the athlete constantly faces the prospect of a random drug test. This is a massive intrusion into the athlete’s private life.

We could formalise this suggestion into a privacy-based argument against bans, as follows:

• (1) Athletes have a right to enjoy private lives.

• (2) A ban on doping would have to be enforced with a regime of year-round, randomised drug tests.

• (3) A regime of year-round, randomised drug tests would violate an athlete’s right to privacy.

• (4) Therefore, a ban on doping would violate an athlete’s right to privacy.

Schneider and Butcher see one major objection to their argument being made by proponents of the bans. This is that athlete’s somehow lose their right to privacy by becoming professional athletes. This would presumably be because they don’t have a right to compete in professional sports in the first place, and so when they enter the domain of professional sports they enter a domain that is excluded from the general class of rights.

• (5) The domain of professional sports is excluded from the general requirements of rights-based societies. Professional sportspeople lose their right to privacy when they enter that domain, and they have no “right” to enter that domain in the first place.

Schneider and Butcher see two problems with this objection. First, if taken seriously, this kind of objection would seem to imply that sporting authorities are entitled to introduce all sorts of rights-violating rules. That is surely absurd. Second, if the objection is to avoid absurd implications, it must show why violating the right to privacy in this particular manner is permissible, but other forms of rights violation are not. In other words, it must show why doping is so morally objectionable that it justifies the violation. This justification is something we are still looking for.

• (6) It is absurd to exclude the domain of professional sports from all the requirements of rights-based societies.

• (7) In order to prevent the absurd implications of this principle, we’d need some additional reason for thinking that violating the right to privacy was justified in the case of doping, but that other forms of rights-violation could not be justified on similar grounds.

The relevant diagram for this is below.

6. Conclusion
We have now run through all the major harm-based arguments in favour of (and against!) doping bans. As we have seen, none of these arguments is particularly persuasive. The harm to self argument is both in need of some hard evidence and in danger of being overly paternalistic. And the various harm to others arguments all fail to explain why doping is so harmful. In fact, they all tend to beg the question, in the technical sense of that term. Furthermore, there is a least one harm-based argument against doping bans.

In light of this, we must deem harm-based arguments against doping to be a failure. Perhaps the integrity-based arguments will fair better. We’ll find out in part two.

Tannjso on Enhancement and the Ethos of Elite Sport

Tweet

As part of my ongoing struggle to understand the arguments for and against the use of enhancement technologies in sporting contests, I want to take a look at the following paper by Torbjorn Tannjso (that’s his name without the appropriate accents by the way):

“Medical Enhancement and the Ethos of Elite Sport” in Bostrom and Savulescu (eds) Human Enhancement (Oxford: OUP, 2009).

Although I’ve read quite a bit about this topic recently, I felt it would be worthwhile providing an exposition and analysis of Tannjso’s paper for two reasons. First, he has written quite a bit about the ethics of sport in the past, so he should be a good guide to the kinds of ethical issues that are raised in this field. Second, and rather more importantly, his paper takes an unusual approach to the topic, at least in light of the other papers I have been reading.

What is this unusual approach? Well, in the two previous papers that I’ve covered on this topic, there has been a tendency on the part of the authors to start off with some general ethical principles (e.g. fairness) and work from those principles to specific conclusions about the use of enhancement in sport. Tannjso’s paper is interesting because it takes the opposite approach: it works from several case studies in sport and tries to figure out which principles guide our intuitive responses to those cases. Although this methodology is common in ethics, I had yet to encounter it in my readings on this topic.

As a result of his methodology, Tannjso’s article reads like a mystery novel (of sorts): he presents us with a case study, raises some questions about this case study, tries to find a principle that will answer those questions and then repeats the process in an effort to further refine his conclusions. The article as a whole is structured around an attempt to find the ethos of elite sport, i.e. that principle or set of principles that explains why the rules of sport are as they are, and why we react differently to different kinds of enhancement in sport.

I’ll try to cover each major step of Tannjso’s analysis in what follows. I start by looking at his proposed distinction between negative and positive medical interventions, and enhancement proper. I follow this by presenting some of his various case studies and the kinds of reaction they provoke. And I conclude by sharing with you what Tannjso thinks really is the ethos of elite sport.


1. Some Conceptual Clarifications
Tannjso proposes that we distinguish between the following kinds of medical intervention:

Negative Interventions: These are medical interventions that are designed to cure, eliminate or alleviate a handicap or disadvantage that someone has relative to the population as a whole.

Positive Interventions: These are medical interventions that are designed to improve the functioning of some trait, organ or system within the natural variation.

Enhancement Interventions: These are medical interventions that designed to improve the functioning of some trait, organ or system beyond natural variation (or, alternatively, to add new non-natural traits).

We can illustrate this by reference to the following (hypothetical) graph. Imagine that the graph depicts the variation in foot sizes across the human population (assume it’s of one sex for the time being, just to avoid some possible complications). As you can see, the distribution follows what it called the “normal" form. Although this graph is hypothetical, I assume that this is basically true of the actual distribution of foot sizes across the human population. Using this graph as our guide, we can then define a negative intervention as one that takes someone from the lower end of the distribution into the middle; we can define a positive intervention as one that takes someone from either the lower or middle of the distribution to the higher end; and we can define an enhancement as something that takes someone beyond the higher end of the distribution.

Tannjso acknowledges that the conceptual boundaries between these three types of intervention are fuzzy. For example, where exactly is the cut-off point for a negative intervention? Is it one standard deviation from the mean? How about two? These questions don’t seem to have an obvious or agreed upon answer; any boundary that we draw is liable to seem arbitrary.

Still, for all their fuzziness, distinctions of this sort do play some part in how we think about the ethics of medical intervention, particularly when it comes to deciding which interventions to prioritise and which interventions to fund from the public purse. You can probably imagine how this might go. When it comes to prioritisation, the obvious sequence would seem to be: negative interventions come first, positive interventions come second, and enhancements come third. (Of course, this is only “obvious” if we make certain moral assumptions.) When it comes to funding, most people think that negative interventions should (in general, but not in every instance) be publicly funded; that positive interventions probably should not be publicly funded; and that enhancement should really be privately funded.

These presumptions are not above reproach, but they are plausible. Anyway, they need not detain us here since we have other issues relating specifically to medical interventions in the sporting contest.


2. Some Case Studies on the Ethos of Elite Sport
As I said at the outset, Tannjso explores the ethics of enhancement through a set of case studies. They range from the hypothetical to the actual. With each case study, Tannjso tries to first identify the reactive judgments they provoke, and then consider what these reactions say about the ethos of elite sport. I’ll try to set out each of his major case studies here (there are more mentioned in the article, but the following relate specifically to sport).

The first case study is hypothetical and is, in fact, the main case study. Tannjso uses this as his main proving ground for his subsequent conclusions about enhancement and sport. The case concerns a fictional highjumper who undergoes a medical enhancement to lengthen his legs:

The High Jumper: A skilled surgeon manages give a man three metre long legs. The man subsequently tries to compete in the high jump. The problem is: with his leg length, he can easily hop (or step!) over the bar in the high jump competition. This allows him to clear heights that are all but unobtainable to other competitors.

Tannjso thinks that this hypothetical case provides a clear enough example of an objectionable enhancement, one the sports authorities would be keen to ban. He’s just not sure why it is so objectionable. There are several features of the case — as described above — that are potentially objectionable. But which one is the most significant? Which one really justifies our negative reaction?

To answer this question, Tannjso proposes that we look at some historical enhancement-related rule changes in the pole vault and javelin competitions. One of these changes seemed to embrace enhancement, while the other seemed to reject it:

The Pole Vault: At one time in its history, pole-vaulting was carried out using a pole made of bamboo and steel. This was replaced by a fibreglass pole. The fibreglass pole was pre-bent and allowed the vaulters to clear significantly greater heights than did the old bamboo and steel ones. This pole-enhancement was largely embraced by both pole-vaulters, authorities and fans of the sport.

The Javelin: In 1986, the centre of gravity in the javelin was moved forward 10cm. This accomplished two things: it made the javelin safer to track and spot by the umpires, and it also reduced the distance that the javelin could travel.

Why were the reactions different in these two cases? A few things seem relevant. First, in relation to the pole-vault, the new poles were available to all competitors, so they didn’t raise any fairness issues. Second, and again in relation to the pole-vault, the new poles made the sport more exciting for both competitors and spectators. Third, in relation to the javelin, the reduction in the distance helped to accommodate javelin throws in the infield. So the decision was at least partly motivated by a practical constraint. Fourth, and finally, in both cases, the changes do not appear to be objectionable. But why was that? To answer this we must examine the ethos of elite sport.



3. What is the Ethos of Elite Sport?
Tannjso's initial attempt to analyse the ethos of elite sport comes up with three key ideals of sporting contests. These are: (i) aesthetic quality, i.e. the contest should provide aesthetic enjoyment for the spectator; (ii) competitiveness, i.e. the contest is a matter of winning and losing (a zero-sum game); and (iii) fairness, i.e. each competitor should have a fair chance of winning the contest. Individual contests may frequently fall short of these ideals, but they are, nonetheless, ideals that should be aimed at.

What we now wish to know is whether these ideals can explain our different reactions to enhancement in the high-jump, pole-vault and javelin case studies. Tannjso thinks not. Having one competitor with extra long legs might reduce the aesthetic quality and fairness of the high jump in the short term, but if we wish to restore these two things, then we could adopt a pro- or anti-enhancement stance. In other words, we could simply encourage all competitors to go for the leg-extension surgery, or we could ban it. Fairness and aesthetic quality could be preserved either way.

We can see how this balance might affect the reasoning in the pole-vault and javelin case studies. In the pole-vault case, giving the new fibre-glass pole to all competitors seemed not to damage the ethos of the sport and yet was clearly a pro-enhancement decision. This is possible because clearing greater heights made the sport more exciting. What then of the javelin case? Why did the authorities adopt an anti-enhancement stance there? The answer would appear to be that non-moral (or non-ethos-related) safety and practicality concerns tipped the balance toward the anti-enhancement stance in that particular case. Those non-moral concerns did not seem to apply to the pole-vault case.

All of this suggests that the three sporting ideals identified above do not help to explain our negative reaction the high-jump case. Those ideals are basically neutral when it comes to the issue of enhancement. We are forced then to explore other potential sporting ideals. Tannjso does this at some length in his article, introducing new case studies along the way to further address the complexities of our intuitive judgments. I won’t repeat every step in his analysis here. Instead, I’ll skip straight to the punchline.

Tannjso thinks that when you explore all the possibilities, there really only one aspect of the ethos of elite sport that can explain our reaction to the high-jump case. It is this: that the winners of elite sporting competitions should be those who won the genetic lottery. As he puts it himself:

The explanation here must refer to a further aspect of the ethos of elite sport, a very special notion of justice typical of it. This is a notion of justice insisting that we all must accept the ticket we have actually drawn in the genetic lottery. Genetic differences are not irrelevant to the outcome of the competition. Indeed, genetic differences are what should be decisive, once we have eliminated other differences

The idea is that most regulations and changes in sport are motivated by an attempt to level the playing field between competitors as much as possible, so that genetic differences are all that can really decide the outcome.

Now, to be clear, Tannjso does not think that this aspect of the ethos of elite sport is at all commendable. He describes it as being a “Nietzschean view” of sporting justice, something that sporting authorities should be keen to get rid of. He just thinks it is ultimately what explains the negative reactions to some kinds of enhancement. He also thinks that if we do get rid of the Nietzschean view of sporting justice, we will not be able support a rigidly anti-enhancement view. We will be left instead in the predicament described above in the pole-vault and javelin examples: a scale that could in either the anti- or pro-enhancement direction, depending on the effect this would have on aesthetic quality, competitiveness, fairness and other non-ethos-related considerations.