Fair is Fair, Or Is It?: A Moral Consideration of the Doping Wars in American Sport

Abstract

I argue that the recent major shift in anti-doping strategy by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which cracks down on athletes who dope by, among other things, trying to build criminal cases against them and by lowering the standard of evidence required to convict dopers from ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ to ‘comfortable satisfaction’, is morally problematic because it treats athletes unfairly. That is not to say that the efforts of USADA to curb doping in sport is itself unjustified, for athletes who dope do indeed violate the principle of fair play – a principle vital to the integrity of all sport. Rather, my argument is that the new anti-doping measures pursued by these athletic agencies go too far and are themselves unfair in the classical sense that they treat similar cases in a dissimilar way.