Abstract
As the activity of sporting has become deeply ensnared in cultures of hyper-competition and industries of shallow spectacle, many are unable or unwilling to consider how in healed sports (sub) cultures, doping may be done in dignity. To investigate this, I suspend all circumstantial issues surrounding doping, to see whether doping, in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, would remain problematic. Analysing the required origins, processes and outcomes of a proper athletic accomplishment, I conclude that doping need not be debasing, mechanistic nor dehumanizing. The deep integration of artifice in one’s body may even signify a courageous acceptance of the human condition of being ‘foundationlessly free and ruthlessly responsible’. As such, doping would be deeply dignified. In this light, I critique the deep attachment to natural talent in the justifications of anti-doping as attempts to sustain the comfortable but deceptive self-image of man as a creature which should follow the cues of its nature – develop its talents – to find purpose and meaning in life. Ironically, where ‘talentocrats’ cultivate natural forms, transhumanists cultivate a natural formula: evolution, thus becoming strange bedfellows in trying to connect human existence to the comforts of a ‘naturally given purpose’. To be human, however, is to be denied such an existential cradle. Intriguingly, sport is claimed both as a deceitful dreamland of soothing purposefulness and as a testimony to our troubling but true purposelessness. A truly virtuous spirit of sport should insist it is the latter.
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Notes
- 1.
For a strict philosophical inquiry to be maximally revealing, thought experiments should be restricted by nothing more than logical possibility – a classic example of which, also relevant in the debates on human enhancement, would be Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (1984). If one demands realism, or even actual occurrence or feasibility in a foreseeable near future, one risks ‘ontological parochialism’, obscuring conceptual clarity. That said, the more realistic and contemporary we can construe a situation in which doping would not be intrinsically problematic, the more fruitful such findings will be for the eventual goal of the development of practicable policies, as it would allow us to identify, should they exist, (1) actual doping practices which are now receiving undue denunciation and persecution, and/or (2) feasible or foreseeable doping practices which are permissible and perhaps laudable to prepare and pursue.
- 2.
See the distinction made between individual surpassing doping and species surpassing doping.
- 3.
This dynamic of identification based on recognition + random elevation is, I believe, a major reason of the immense popularity of hero stories such as Spiderman, Popeye, Asterix & Obelix etc. The basic narrative is that of an Everyman, with which the reader of the story can readily identify, who has the luck of experiencing an extraordinary intervention (being bitten by a mutated spider, eating super-spinach, drinking a druid brew or being drenched in it as a child), after which he comes to obtain special, superior capacities and his life is elevated to that of a superhero. Should the same fortune ever befall the reader (and it is only random that it has not), she may start leading the life of a superhero, too. Similarly, should the natural lottery have given the audience member the genetic hand now dealt to the top athlete (and it is only random that things turned out otherwise), the now audience member who goes unnoticed would have been the glorified star in the arena. Oddly, we seem to adore ‘doping sinners’ in these cartoon stories.
- 4.
For an insightful critique of common mistakes in thinking through the ‘natural lottery’, applying among other things the non-identity problem to these issues, see Hurley (2002).
- 5.
As such it may have a secondary role in helping to determine what might improve human welfare (see for instance Bayertz 2003), but even then it can just as well be that all manner of ‘unnatural’ practices may make us feel even better.
- 6.
On the contemporary problem of responsibility explosion in general, see Schwartz (2004).
- 7.
In my rendition of the Homo ludens, I add the dimension of the self-made body to the existentialist understanding presented by Suits, who had already radicalized the existentialist dimension of the Homo ludens when compared to Huizinga.
- 8.
Indirectly and often via the process of sexual selection, the mere capacity to mimic the presence of a hereditary trait can sometimes suffice to become a fitness-increasing trait itself (De Block and Dewitte 2009).
- 9.
See the analysis of such lines of reasoning in Trijsje Franssen’s (Chap. 6) contribution to this volume.
- 10.
Although certainly, those susceptible to sloth (and this group may well be demographically very large) may indeed use such baseline-lifting doping as a way to lessen the need for their own active agency.
- 11.
Consider in this regard Denis Hauw’s (Chap. 12) analysis in this volume of how contemporary elite cyclists often revert to dope simply in order to cope with the excruciating demands put on their natural constitutions by organizers and audiences.
- 12.
As I believe these concerns are relatively less profound and as space does not permit further extensive argument, I will deal with this third set of intrinsic objections, those on defiguring ‘dehumanization’, in a more brief manner, and several intriguing twists and turns will therefore be left unpursued here.
- 13.
See, for instance, Tara Magdalinski’s (Chap. 13) contribution to this volume on the ‘natural romanticism’ that fueled the creation of modern sports as a wholesome activity. In addition, however, John Hoberman describes in his contribution the long history of the Leistungsprinzip or Performance Principle as a motor of modern sport. For more on the long history of human intervention in nature in the name of increased productivity and efficiency, see Claude Olivier Doron’s introduction to Missa and Nouvel (2011).
- 14.
For instance, in his contribution to this volume Andreas De Block (Chap. 8) examines the possibility to ground the categorical objection to doping on such widespread, evolutionary rooted distastes. The anti-doping project would then no longer have to argue for the increasingly contested position that doping is categorically unethical, but instead could take the more robust line of argument that doping is categorically un-aesthetical.
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Bonte, P. (2013). Dignified Doping: Truly Unthinkable? An Existentialist Critique of ‘Talentocracy’ in Sports. In: Tolleneer, J., Sterckx, S., Bonte, P. (eds) Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5101-9_4
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