Thinking about sports
The ethics of enhancement
Another angle on sports comes from Hank Greely, the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law, whose principal concern (other than the historic injustice of the infamous 1982 Big Game) is the ethical ramifications of physical and cognitive enhancement, both in sports and beyond.
"If we could find the fastest ‘natural’ runner in the world in some
village in Nebraska or Africa, he’d lose to a mediocre sprinter at
a good NCAA school who has training, good shoes, a sports psychologist
and access to video," said Hank Greely, who is particularly interested
in the ethical ramifications of sports.
Photo: L.A. Cicero
"The arguments against steroids are all poorly thought through," he said. "They boil down to: They're drugs, it means athletes work less—i.e., it's not fair, and it's not natural."
But some drugs (and devices) are legal while others aren't. To make it fair, following Noll's suggestion, give everyone the same access. Besides, what's natural?
"If we could find the fastest 'natural' runner in the world in some village in Nebraska or Africa, he'd lose to a mediocre sprinter at a good NCAA school who has training, good shoes, a sports psychologist and access to video," Greely said.
Why, for example, should medications that make you go faster be off limits while space-age swimsuits are the darlings of the Olympics? How is it that sports like tennis and golf reach new levels thanks to high-tech equipment while players can't indulge in high-tech pharmacology? Nobody cared that Sartre wrote his late works while loaded on speed, or that a college professor drinks four cups of coffee before lecturing; why does it matter what an athlete does? Is neuro-enhancement cheating? What if there were a pill that helped students pass the bar exam?
"I think the enhancement debate in sports is a deceptive preamble to the debate on cognitive and genetic enhancement in general," Greely said. Couching the doping dilemma in terms of health and fairness does not get to the essential issues. Gene therapy is on the horizon, and we are not prepared for the far-reaching neuro-ethical debates it will trigger, he said.
Greely also has written about sports in relation to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). One such article focused on the case of Casey Martin, the disabled Stanford golfer who petitioned the PGA Tour to be allowed to use a golf cart. Legal arguments revolved around the definition of unfair advantage. The Supreme Court's eventual ruling made it clear that almost all organized sports are subject to the ADA, though it has become evident that cases like Martin's will be rare.
In a similar vein, one of Greely's students, Patti Zettler, a former Stanford lacrosse star who worked in medical ethics before returning to law school here, recently wrote a paper about Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee sprinter who, as Greely put it, "came damn close to appearing in the Olympics." The international Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled he did not have an unfair advantage (there were those who said his prosthetic blades gave him an edge). But in the end, he missed qualifying by a half-second. Zettler's study asked if, under the ADA, the NCAA or USA Track & Field would be obliged to let Pistorius compete. She concluded that they would because his participation would not violate an essential aspect of the sport (a legal requirement), nor would his blades give him an unfair advantage. As she said, "No able-bodied athletes are considering amputation and prostheses to gain Pistorius' 'advantage.'"
