Enhancement: What, if anything, is wrong with “doping" in competitive sports?

In this WiPhi video, we’re going to ask: what’s wrong with using performance-enhancing drugs? Some of the biggest scandals in the world of sport have to do with the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles after he was found to have used performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career. Russia faced a four-year ban on participation in the Olympics and other major international sporting events in response to findings of extensive organized doping schemes. Countless individual athletes have been stripped of their trophies and titles as a result of doping allegations. But what’s wrong with doping? In many of the most famous cases, the answer is simple: it’s against the rules. If you break the rules, your victory doesn’t count. Doping is cheating. Case closed. But that’s not really what we’re asking. Why is the use of performance-enhancing drugs generally banned? Why is doping against the rules? One answer has to do with safety. Many of the drugs athletes use to enhance performance are dangerous. Hence doping might be prohibited for the same reason hockey players are required to wear protective gear: as a measure intended to protect athletes from harm. Still, safety concerns don’t get to the heart of things. For one thing, athletes routinely engage in behaviors during their training that, considered in themselves, are extremely dangerous. Indeed, their sport may itself be extremely dangerous. And anyway, it doesn’t seem like the root of our criticism of doping is that those who do it are being unduly reckless. For a lot of people, if you win with the help of performance-enhancing drugs, that means your victory doesn’t count. You don’t deserve to win. Why not? There’s a saying that winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. But that’s not really true. What about victories where: your opponent was secretly paid to lose, you unwittingly broke the rules, the win was due to an officiating error. These wins don't really count. Or, at the very least, they come with an asterisk. That’s because a genuine victory is one you achieved because you were better than everybody else. You deserve to win only when you win because of your mastery of the sport. Cheating on a test is wrong, in part, because it undermines the purpose of the test, which is to establish how much you know. When you cheat you are, in effect, lying: you’re deliberately representing yourself as knowing things that, in fact, you don’t. If we think about it this way, cheating in an athletic competition is wrong point of the competition is to establish who’s the best whose mastery reigns supreme. Here too, cheating can be seen as a kind of lying: you’re deliberately representing yourself as deserving to win in virtue of your mastery but you’re not. So maybe the problem with doping is that it opens the door to undeserved victories. But that just leads to another question: why does doping mean you don’t deserve to win? Most great athletes have some natural advantages over most other people they’re faster, taller, stronger, more nimble, and so on. But while these natural gifts may be necessary for athletic greatness, they’re not sufficient for victory. The winner of the Tour de France isn’t determined by picking the competitor with the most impressive natural advantages for cycling. the winner is the competitor whose mastery of their natural strengths enabled them to surpass the rest of the field. So real greatness results from perfecting your natural strengths through sustained, disciplined effort. When you use performance-enhancing drugs, though, you improve your level of mastery purely passively, without any effort on your part. That diminishes the value of your achievement. If you then go on to defeat a competitor whose achievement is actually more impressive, and who would have won had you not had the help of the drugs, then you’ve claimed a victory you don’t deserve and cheated them of one they do deserve. However, this argument assumes that only some competitors are doping. What if all competitors used performance-enhancing drugs, the same way all cyclists wear aerodynamic helmets? Wouldn’t this mean that the victory once again went to the most deserving competitor? One argument made in Lance Armstrong’s defense is that doping was so commonplace in competitive cycling, that no one could claim it gave him an unfair advantage indeed, not to dope would be to accept an unfair disadvantage. But even if performance-enhancing drugs were safe, legal, and widely available, many people would still think that they diminish the value of a victory. Setting aside concerns about safety and fairness, there is a widespread conviction that meaningful victories in sport reflect what the athlete can achieve without help from biomedical enhancements. What do you think?