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. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present and critically discuss a game-theory-based argument in favour of the view that sports organizations ought to ban the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. After presenting the argument in detail, I try to show that the argument is not convincing. First, the argument cannot be used to argue in favour of WADA’s (World Anti-Doping Agency) current ban on doping, at least if it rests on the assumption, that doping use is always harmful. (...) However, that in itself may not be a problem for adherents of the argument, and they can and should modify the harm assumption to cover only harmful use of doping. Second, even with this modification, it is argued that the harm assumption is flawed, for example, because it is not obvious why we should accept certain harms in sport but not harm to athletes caused by doping. Third, the argument is also flawed because it entails the non-competitive assumption: if all athletes dope, then no competitive advantages are gained by any athletes assumptions. The non-competitive assumption is challenged in view of the observations that doping can have some non-competitive advantages and is, so to speak, not only a positional good and because doping, due to unequal responsiveness, can give some highly responsive athletes a competitive advantage over less responsive athletes. (shrink)

One of the claims sometimes advanced in favour of anti-doping is that allowing doping would lead to a uniform increase in performance in comparison to no doping. The idea is that if all athletes wo...