Defensive Doping

What Is Cheating?

It is worth beginning with a brief recap of the conditions that define cheating before carrying on with the idea of countercheating. Green (2004) notes that while cheating involves rule breaking, not all rule breaking is cheating. He offers us four formal elements that must exist in order for us to judge whether cheating has occurred. They are as follows:

In the first condition, a rule must be binding on all, and enforced with that intent by recognized authorities, and the action of the agent cannot fall within a recognized exception to the rule. Green uses the example of speeding in excess of the explicit traffic rules in order to deliver a woman in labor to a hospital. Exceptions like these are often coded within the rules, and to be classified by them does not make one a rule breaker.

For the second condition, the moral weight of breaking the rule comes from the fact that one has voluntarily entered into a cooperative activity with at least one other person and that there has been a mutual understanding of the implicit and explicit rules and expectations of the activity. Sport, for our purposes, has been described by numerous authors as precisely within this genus (Loland, 2005; Suits, 1973; Wertz, 1981).

The last two conditions involve the intentions of the actor who breaks the rules. As a condition of classifying such behavior as cheating, we must assure that the agent intended to break the rule and gain an advantage. It should be noted that Green (2004) and Gert (1973) both deny the possibility of accidental cheating—wherein the agent breaks rules and gains an advantage unwittingly—but I would further add that intent does not entail success. If one intends to break rules to one’s own advantage, we can refer to that action as cheating without looking toward the outcome of such behavior.

Out of this final condition—the notion of intentionally seeking an advantage—comes the idea that if one becomes aware that participants within the rule-governed, cooperative activity are cheating with the goal of seeking an advantage, that one could also cheat as a way to mitigate any advantage sought by the instigator. Wertz (1981) speaks of this as a question of the effectiveness of a lex talonis (retributive) approach to rule enforcement and suggests that such an approach in the pursuit of fairness has the effect of normalizing unethical behavior and eroding the valuable features of sports participation. As an example, one can think of many contact sports that possess an ethos of deterrence through retribution. In the case of gridiron football, a player on a team who injures the opposing quarterback with excessive roughness can expect that his quarterback will experience the same thing as not just retribution but as a deterrent to all for engaging in such behavior. It is conceivable that such an ethos could lead to escalation, and ultimately, have the social effects that Wertz warns us of.

Green (2004) goes against Wertz by suggesting that a “level-playing field” is not advantageous to any one agent, and therefore, insufficient for the label cheating. He does not endorse such behavior, and indeed, such reciprocal rule-breaking behavior could be judged harshly on ethical terms but just not as cheating.

Kavka (1983) claims that there are subvarieties of rule violations that have different moral claims attached to them: offensive and defensive. Offensive rule violations are a component of cheating as described earlier—ones in which an agent seeks and advantage, with the hopes of gaining some “good” (e.g., money, prizes, victory) from their cheating. Defensive rule violations are not an element of cheating because the intention behind them is to mitigate the advantage sought by the offensive rule-breaker. By example, one might think of one player breaking the constitutive rules of rugby by throwing the ball forward. If one player or team does it to seek an advantage, this is cheating. If both teams begin to do it, it becomes the case that the teams are not playing rugby in the formalist sense, but some other game. No advantage given means no cheating has occurred.

Morgan is sharply critical of Kavka in stating that there it is “not a moral argument at all” (p. 186). What is happening in Kavka’s work is to protect individual interests and a promotion of self-interest in response to self-interested action by another. Morgan cites Rawls’ (1971) statement that “a person whose moral judgments always coincided with his interests could be suspected of having no morality at all” (cited in Morgan, 2006. p. 186). Morgan makes two non sequiter assumptions here; first, there is nothing to suggest that the motivation behind defensive rule violations is entirely self-interested. ¹ Jose Canseco (2005) noted that a powerful motivation for the use of steroids by baseball players is the recognition of the relationship between physical performance and money, which prospects from impoverished Caribbean nations see as an opportunity to lift their families, and often whole villages, out of poverty. Second, Rawls’ states that arguments are not moral when and if they “always” favor one’s self-interest. There is no indication in defensive rule breaking that such a state of affairs exists. Morgan may be thinking in terms of an eroded state of sport, which he describes as a possible social consequence later on in his article, but he may be envisioning a speculative consequence and mistaking it for an essential element of the act itself, which it clearly isn’t.

Holley critiques Kavka with a number of points, with a particularly interesting mention about the scope of reciprocity. Kavka’s “copper rule” states “treat others the way they treat you” (cited in Holley, 1997. p. 166), but is it possible to restrain the potential harms of defensive rule breaking to the instigator? Holley utilizes an example of shoplifting wherein a person shoplifts an equal amount as he calculates his shop to have lost by the same activity. The idea here is that the defensive shoplifting is indiscriminate and can harm other shop owners who didn’t instigate the offensive shoplifting so long as the harm caused is outweighed by the interests the defensive shoplifter is trying to protect. Holley’s point is a considerable one, when the scope of who can be harmed in some direct way through a defensive rule break is so broad. In sport, the scope of defensive rule breaking is limited by the number of people who can be involved in the activity. The defensive rule break is limited in scope by the fact that the number of people involved in the cooperative rule-bound activity is limited. There is a possibility of accidental harm to others in the process of exacting a defensive rule break, which is morally problematic, but is not a necessary part of defensive rule breaking, and unless it could be demonstrated to be a necessary or common part of that behavior, doesn’t bear much moral consideration.

To this point, existing objections to defensive rule violations are not conclusive, if at all sufficient. Green’s (2004) comment still stands with the speculative caveat offered by Wertz (1981). My aim is to examine defensive rule breaking in the specific context of antidoping rules, ² to answer the question, “Is defensive doping permissible?”

Doping is, for the purposes of this article, the intentional breaking of antidoping rules that are fairly constituted and enforced within the cooperative rule-bound venture known as sport. The scenario of defensive doping is quite ubiquitous in media narratives of drug users in sport and physical activities: The athlete didn’t really consider doping until it became inevitable because everyone else did it. In this narrative, the scene is set for defensive doping to occur to Green’s specifications—others are intentionally seeking an advantage over another athlete, so it behooves her to dope as well to level the playing field. One major problem with this notion is the idea—omnipresent in philosophical literature on sport—that two or more people doping constitute a cetibus peribus condition. Doping is used as a blanket term for wide variety of behaviors and substances, but in philosophical writings, the action is made to seem like a set variable in our ethical considerations. Truth is that, while a substance can be the exact same, the ergogenic or androgenic effect in two different bodies will be significantly different. Assume, for example, that two mixed martial artists of comparable size and abilities each decide to consume 60 mgs of oxandrolone (trade-named “Anavar”) daily for 8 weeks to bolster their performances. While the substance is a fixed variable, the pharmacodynamics of the drug varies widely with the physiological systems of the host athlete. Less technically, the same drug does vastly different things in different bodies, and while there are some general parameters of predictability of physiological response to the introduction of Anavar into these athletes, the parameters are very wide and unpredictable. What this means ethically is that defensive doping has two likely outcomes: that the response will be insufficient to level the playing field or that the response will be greater than the advantage gained by the instigator. In the first instance, the athlete has not eliminated the advantage and can never actually be certain that she would ever be able to perfectly meet the challenge of the instigator. The concept of lex talonis seems quite precise and simple to understand, but when trying to recreate that in the case of cheating using drugs, the balance is almost impossible to strike. Which leads us to the second outcome, wherein the defensive doper actually exceeds the advantage gained by the instigator. Now who is the defensive doper? Does the instigator become aware of this pharmacodynamic inequality and begin experimenting with a more potent combination of drugs to rebalance the advantage, or possibly, to reclaim his initial advantage? Where does this drug race end? Even if we could control for variables between rule breakers so that they were only breaking rules in proportion to the other, the potential escalation creates questions of justice and equity for the participants. For example, at what point does one accept his or her own disadvantage by virtue of his or her financial inability to keep pace in the perpetual escalation of drug use? What if one participant has a preexisting health condition that doesn’t allow him or her to engage in this equalization of competitive conditions through innovative deployments of drugs? While the instigator is still a cheater—by definition—defensive doping has been a failure to level the playing field. It would seem that the same motivation that could lead to defensive doping—the effort to minimize the advantage gained by a cheater—would also contribute to a cycle of perpetual antagonism in which drugs would play an essential role. ³

Conclusion

The concept of the justifiable rule breaking in order to negate the advantage gained by another has great intuitive appeal. Critics of such a notion have offered objections with more and less success. In abstraction, reciprocal cheating to reestablish equilibrium in fairness seems like a potentially functional proposal. In the case of doping, the line between offensive and defensive doping is hard to manage, and if motivations remain as a constant, the escalation of drug use, and any harms that entail from that, are very real possibilities.