Who? Moral Condemnation, PEDs, and Violating the Constraints of Public Narrative

Abstract

Despite the numerous instances of PED use in professional sports, there continues to be a strong negative moral response to those athletes who dope. My goal is to offer a diagnosis of this response. I will argue that we do not experience such disdain because these athletes have broken some constitutive rule of sport, but because they have lied about who they are. In violating the constraints of their own public narratives, they make both themselves and their choices unintelligible. This worry becomes especially profound as we care greatly about who our athletes are. Using cases from both athletics and US politics, I argue that certain kinds of lies so violate our understanding of who a person is that we can no longer recognize them as the person we took them to be. Fundamentally, I believe that PED users have lied about something central to their public narratives. I develop this view through an examination of narrative identity, primarily focusing on J. David Velleman's work on agency and self-constitution. I do not claim that the athlete using steroids is nonidentical to who she would be in the absence of steroid use, but that through use of PEDs, she has misled us about an important component of her pubic narrative and this is difficult for us to reconcile. Ultimately, this has implications for sport as well as other other aspects of human social life.

The Confession Dilemma: Doping, Lying, and Narrative Identity

“…In the following section, I argue that the core of the confession dilemma lies in the dichotomy between lying and veracity, and I develop an approach to the ethics of lying indebted to the work of Bok (1999). Lying comes in many forms, and in the subsequent section I depart from a recent argument framing elite athletes' lies about doping as lies about who they really are in the eyes of the public (Gendreau 2015).…”

“…From a virtue ethical standpoint, McNamee (2008) highlighted the role systematic deception plays in the moral evaluation of "doping cheats" as constitutive of the vices, pleonexia and aidos. Similarly, Gendreau (2015) identified lying as the central moral concept feeding into the public condemnation typically facing elite athletes who dope. The quotations in the introduction illustrate how lying is a central aspect of elite athletes' experience of doping or, as in these particular cases, former elite athletes' experiences of having doped.…”

“…Engelberg et al 2012;Solberg et al 2010). Correspondingly, elite athletes often share with the public an active stance against doping and, by doing so, put the label 'clean athlete' on their public narratives (Gendreau 2015). Athletes who dope break with this narrative.…”