Doping, Debunking, and Drawing the Line

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current ban on certain performance enhancing substances in sport such as erythropoietin (EPO) faces a line-drawing problem: what is the moral difference between taking an EPO injection to increase one’s hematocrit and using an hypoxic chamber to the same end (supposing that they involve similar health risks)? The standard approach to this issue is to evaluate various arguments for banning certain substances and methods – arguments based on considerations of fairness, coercion, harm, naturalness, etc. I take a different approach which considers prospects for attempts to use evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) to address the line-drawing problem and resolve the tension between different normative judgments that we may be disposed to have about the use of EPO and hypoxic chambers. I consider three different considerations on which an anti-doping evolutionary argument (ADA) might be based, and I argue that, due to certain facts about the nature of psychological dispositions and the vagueness of judgments to which they give rise, no such argument can be used to address the line-drawing problem. I also discuss how the difficulties for these debunking arguments bear on WADA’s ``spirit of sport‘’ criterion as it might be called upon to help settle the matter of which substances are to be banned. Finally, I briefly consider what our inability to explain away condemnation of doping via ADAs might tell us about the origin of anti-doping intuitions and what it suggests about the proper approach to anti-doping policy.