Cheating in Sport

When the NCAA adopted new rules allowing athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness (NIL), few people took more interest than Reggie Bush who famously relinquished the Heisman trophy after being ruled retroactively ineligible for receiving "impermissible benefits." Bush has argued for his reinstatement and the "return" of his Heisman. In this paper, I argue that, while the NCAA never should have required players to be amateurs in the first place, Bush should not be reinstated or have the (...) Heisman "returned." Properly understood, Reggie Bush never won the Heisman Trophy in the first place, so "returning" it would be to rewrite history — almost literally, to move the goalposts. -/- Forthcoming in "College Sports and Ethics" by Lexington Books. (shrink)

Aaron Harper defends a new theory of sport—sport realism—focusing on sport operations and the decisions made by sports officials like umpires and referees. Sport realism offers an explanation of sport as it is played, along with normative assessment of ethical issues in sport like cheating and rules disputes.

ABSTRACT Sometimes, teams or players violate the rules of their leagues or associations. And sometimes, their leagues or associations respond by striking their wins from the official record. Especially in American college sports governed by the NCAA, this practice of vacating results is unpopular and widely decried. It should not be. Vacating wins can be an appropriate response to rules violations in higher-order competitions in the same way that it can be appropriate to call back a scoring play due to (...) a penalty. We outline the conceptual framework that makes sense of when, why, and how it is appropriate to vacate wins. (shrink)

It has become a mantra, that doping is immorally and therefore should be punished with exclusion, fines and stigmatization. In most parts of the world, the doping debate is characterised by an extreme tunnel vision since all athletes, politicians and sports managers who have public airtime express that doping is bad or the invention of the devil. -/- The purpose of 'Doping in Sport: A Defence' is to identify, clarify and challenge some of the central arguments that are used in (...) the often extremely emotional debate that primarily focuses on rejecting the use of doping. I hope that my effort to clarify and challenge the arguments will help cultivate a productive dialogue where all arguments are given a fair trial instead of the prevailing one-sided condemnation of doping. An open dialogue about doping is important since the question of where the line should be drawn when it comes to doping in sports is highly relevant in terms of the scope within which athletes, sports physicians, sports managers, coaches and pharmaceutical companies can operate in the world of sports. (shrink)

The contradictions and ambiguities in, admiration for, and potential benefits derived from cheating in modern athletics have numerous parallels in ancient Greek culture. Because both ancient and mo...

Controversy over the use of performance–enhancing drugs in athletics has involved sometimes rather complex technological advances (e.g. ‘designer steroids’ in track, and anabolic steroids in...

There is a widely held view that the rules forbidding the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are justified on grounds that utilizing these drugs constitutes cheating . In this chapter we engage with this assumption. Relying on an interpretative approach borrowed from Ronald Dworkin, we offer a novel analysis of cheating, one that makes it out to be a matter of inhibiting the attainment of certain sorts of achievements. These achievements are the important goods at the centre of sport, (...) the telos of sport. We then argue that a given enhancement should be regarded as cheating only when it inhibits or prevents competitors from realizing these important goods. (shrink)

This paper refines a number of theoretical distinctions relevant to deceptive play, in particular the difference between merely misleading actions and types of simulation commonly considered beyond the pale, such as diving. To do so, I rely on work in the philosophy of language about conversational convention and implicature, the distinction between lying and misleading, and their relation to concepts of seduction and bullshit. The paper works through a number of possible solutions to the question of what is wrong with (...) simulation and its difference from strategic fouling, including the argument that games and their rules operate like contracts. I conclude that the wrongness lies in the injustice of unfair advantage gained through actions that silence opposition by resort to unanswerable play. (shrink)

This study examined associations between level of sport participation, goal and sportspersonship orientations, and moral reasoning in sport and nonsport situations and orientation by sport participation interactions. Participants were individuals with elite, high school, and youth sport participation. When judging sport situations, individuals who participated in elite sports demonstrated poorer moral reasoning than those who participated in high school and youth sports. At low levels of sportspersonship, individuals who participated in youth sports demonstrated higher moral reasoning than those who participated (...) in high school and elite sports. When judging nonsport situations, moral reasoning was positively related to positive sportspersonship and negatively related to ego orientation but did not differ by sport participation. Within sport, sport participation and goal and sportspersonship orientations play a critical role in moral reasoning. However, these orientations may be more important than sport participation in moral reasoning beyond the sport context. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ethics of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball from the perspective of ethical theories: Kantianism, libertarianism, and utilitarianism. It argues that none of these theories can explain why performance-enhancing drugs should be prohibited. The paper argues that virtue ethics is the best moral framework for understanding the ethical problem of performance-enhancing drugs and why their use should be prohibited.

I review six bad arguments for banning performance-enhancing drugs from sports--and a seventh good one.

Brent Kious has objected to our previous criticism of his views on doping, maintaining that we, by and large, misrepresented his position. In this response, we strengthen our original misgivings, arguing that (1) his views on risk of harm in sport are either uncontroversially true (not inconsistent with the views of many doping opponents) or demonstrably false (attribute to doping opponents an overly simplistic view), (2) his use of analogies (still) indicates an oversimplification of many issues surrounding the question of (...) doping in sports, and (3) his doping analogies are insufficiently precise to support his conclusions. (shrink)

Brent Kious has recently attacked several arguments generally adduced to support anti-doping in sports, which are widely supported by the sports medicine fraternity, international sports federations, and international governments. We show that his attack does not succeed for a variety of reasons. First, it uses an overly inclusive definition of doping at odds with the WADA definition, which has global, if somewhat contentious, currency. Second, it seriously misconstrues the position it attacks, rendering the attack without force against a more balanced (...) construal of an anti-doping position. Third, it makes unwarranted appeals to matters Kious considers morally ‘clear’, while simultaneously attacking a position many others take to be equally morally ‘clear’, namely that of anti-doping. Such an inconsistency, attacking and appealing to the moral status quo as befits one’s argument, is not acceptable without further qualification. Fourth, his position suffers from a general methodological flaw of over-reliance upon argumentation by analogy. Moreover, it is argued that the analogies, being poorly selected and developed, fail to justify his conclusion that the anti-doping lobby lacks philosophical and moral authority for its stance. These issues are symptomatic of a more fundamental problem: any attempt at providing a blanket solution to the question of whether doping is morally acceptable or not is bound to run up against problems when applied to highly specific contexts. Thus, rather than reaching any particular conclusion for or against doping products or processes in this article, we conclude that an increased context-sensitivity will result in a more evenhanded appraisal of arguments on the matter. (shrink)