gene doping
first off, sorry for the long delay! i've had finals and graduation, and i had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to beautiful southern california for a week, to see my sister graduate -- summa cum laude and phi beta kappa!
anyway, the bulk of this was taken from a paper i wrote for a biotech ethics class, so please excuse me if it sounds like i'm on quaaludes.
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Gene doping adds another layer of controversy to a world of sports already hounded by steroid scandals. What’s more, it only adds fuel to the controversial fire, since gene doping is not only nearly untraceable but safer than steroids. But is there really cause to be up in arms?
First, let me make it clear that cheating is not the issue. The real question is, “Should a sports league allow gene doping?” Before weighing the pros and cons of gene doping, there is the question of whether law should trump private ordering. This is especially relevant in the United States, where some sports leagues have been granted antitrust immunity. But the primary impetus for such legal intervention is a matter of antitrust and labor law, not of ethics. (A related question is whether leagues that choose to disallow gene doping should be audited to make sure they live up to their promises, and here there is a very strong case for some sort of third-party or regulatory oversight.)
Another preliminary question necessary to frame the debate is whether athletic competition is zero-sum, meaning that people are more interested in who wins than how good they are (from an absolute perspective). If this is the case, and if all athletes engage in gene doping, their overall athletic prowess would improve but their rewards would improve only slightly, or not at all. And the prisoner’s dilemma informs us that, without regulation, all athletes will be stuck engaging in this costly activity, which would be inefficient, on the whole. This is the position taken up by Chicago Law Professor Gary Becker, and his post on doping, along with its comments, can be dismantled to show why the argument does not hold.
There is good reason to question the underlying assumption of the zero-sum argument, which is that relative performance trumps absolute performance. As one commenter pointed out, in part, there are countless examples of two leagues with the same amount and distribution of wins and losses, yet one of them is more popular because its athleticism is greater. For example, male sports are more popular than their female counterparts, across the board. Another example is minor versus major leagues, or simply age groups.
The zero-sum argument also fails to explain why world records are more noteworthy than competitive wins. In fact, Becker’s own example of the four minute mile is contradictory. He claims that its notoriety exemplified a “crucial relative aspect,” which is that “no one had done that before.” But if relativism is comparing to everyone who came before, then what is not relative? It can’t be comparison to all athletes, past, present, and future!
The bottom line is that people do want to see athletes run faster, jump higher, etc. These are absolutes, and fans demand their achievement. Although this is a conjecture, it seems natural that there be some causative link between sports’ increasing popularity and the accelerating achievements of participants therein.
Becker also points to other costly enhancers that are regulated supposedly because they are costly but do not improve relative performance, such as equipment specifications or squad size limits. But these rules are in place not because they do nothing to change relative performance, but because they would make games impossible to play.
First, Becker points to equipment limitations, such as the size of golf clubs that can be used in competition, “corked” baseball bats, and the types of tennis rackets permitted. Note that these rules have a common denominator – they limit the distance that a ball can travel, or they limit its velocity, or the velocity of, say, a stock car. These rules are in place because, without them, there are environmental or human constraints that would skew the game and render it dull. If every hit were a home run, or if every volley had the speed of a serve, or if every stroke carried 300 yards, the games would be boring. Moreover, it would be inordinately expensive to correct for these changes. We would have to not only increase the size of every ballpark, golf green, and race track, we would have to make defensive players faster in order for them to cover these increased distances. (Ironically, doping could allow just such changes and, if you believe in the “absolute” argument, the value of sports.)
Other costly enhancers pointed out by Becker are number limits, for example, of players or of golf clubs. Here, allowing unlimited numbers would increase athletic achievements, but the changes would be slight in comparison to, first, their costs (salary and equipment purchases), and second, to other, more productive, enhancements. It may very well be that people would pay more to see sports change these rules, but fans may not be willing to pay enough to cover the huge expense of keeping things interesting. By contrast, gene doping could increase athletic performance by orders of magnitude at very low cost.
Even if we assume the relative position, there is still a strong argument that gene doping should be allowed. We can compare gene doping to other costly enhancers that are not regulated, despite the fact that they lead to the competitive stalemate outlined, above. Examples of these would be exercise, training, and nutrition. The common characteristic among these unregulated enhancers is that they are supposedly beneficial to the athlete. (For the sake of argument, we ignore the fact that these enhancers are just as subject to “pecuniary abuse” as steroids or other “harmful” enhancers. Athletes and their organizations spend millions of dollars on improving their training, technique, nutrition, and equipment.) And while gene doping could be subject to abuse, its proper administration would be no less beneficial than advantages garnered from exercise and nutrition. In fact, it is most likely more beneficial because it is a low-cost solution and increases the effectiveness of the athlete’s other enhancements. And any danger currently inherent in gene doping would be certain to decrease if it were allowed.
Another consideration in this debate is a fairness issue, which is closely tied to the definition of what is “natural.” Many people would think gene doping is “unfair” because it gives recipients an “unnatural” advantage over competitors. But we have good reason to question the contrapositive of this position and ask whether it is “fair” that some people should be prevented from participating in athletics because they do not have an athletic phenotype.
We would also be amiss if we did not discuss the potential scientific benefits. Many enhancements currently in development began as therapies, and there is no reason to think this is a one-way street. This being the case, athletes and organizations could potentially invest billions of dollars into research and development that could benefit society at large.
