I think that performance enhancing drugs are compatible with the ideal conception of sports. Simon’s idea of sports being a, “mutual quest for excellence through challenge,” implies that if all athletes had some sort of relative class where they could compete, then PED’s would still fit within the ideal concept of sports (Simon 179). Evaluating people as bodies rather than as persons through depersonifying economic valuation of them may further enable more precise valuations in the overall context that includes an ideal valuation which must address the idea that environmental toxins create harmful effects that limit the ability to reasonably evaluate athletes from an ideal perspective because all bodies react differently to the amount of environmental toxins they are exposed to over their lives. This may inhibit the talents of some athletes and have no affect on other athletes.
There are many ways that Simon discusses as to why PED’s may be incompatible which include that there’s no ideal definition of PED’s, that PED’s may harm their users and may have coercive effects to other players, informed consent cannot be obtained in their administration, relative efficiency of bodies varies greatly in response to usage and that it’s disrespectful to other persons to use them and doesn’t truly test the ability of one sports team against another. Simon rejects the idea that using PED’s are coercive, and in general chose to argue that PED’s are not compatible with the ideal conception of sports due to their relative effects on bodies not being consistent, and that their usage is disrespectful to other players. I do agree that their usage is disrespectful under most circumstances, and that they generally don’t inflict a level of harm that’s morally reprehensible, but disagree with his argument that PED’s aren’t compatible with the ideal conception of sports due to inequality of efficiency regarding efficacy of using PED’s.
Simon didn’t attempt to suggest an ideal definition of what a PED is and in doing so left out discussion regarding the temporal proximity of administration of the drug to the moment in which a player competes. While it would be breaking a rule to see someone taking PED’s a few days before a game, it may be a totally different moral discussion if they took the same drug years ago so that they could compete. There is an acceptable window of time that is specific to individual circumstances in which it’s morally justifiable for a person to use a PED with respect to the time in which themselves as a future athlete would compete. What that time frame is is outside the scope of this discussion.
Simon’s discussion on efficiency and efficacy of PED’s from one body to another neglects substantial performance-impeding effects that are imposed on all athletes from their environment. These effects reduce them from some baseline. The economically-driven facilitation of an environment that’s inherently inhibitory to human talent and acts as a negative selection force is essentially reverse-doping and reduces the overall capability of a population to produce individual talent sufficient to meet the ever-escalating ideal criteria that one must pass in order to enter these major leagues. What I mean is that it’s possible to produce better players now is through economically incentivizing further reductions in the quality of all environments capable of producing athletes. I don’t think anybody affected by this wants this to happen and therefore, to me, it makes sense to reduce this selective force on the population as a whole by creating multiple economic niches of professional sports rather than facilitate the extreme pressure to produce more competitive athletes in a single professional division.
My issue here is that in the same way Simon argues that doping results in a competition of how ones body responds to doping rather than how people compete against each other, this reverse-doping produces identical, but inhibitory, effects as there are people that are affected differently by hormone disruptions. Implications for would-be athletes to having disruptions to their bodies that may impede their athletic ability is implied in a CNN article that discusses that there’s about 0.2 ounces of plastic in peoples heads assuming a brain is about 3 pounds and, “That’s the equivalent of an entire standard plastic spoon.” (LaMotte para. 4). I measured a fork, it’s 0.2 ounces and so I can only imagine what it would be like without one of these things in my own. LaMotte continues in discussing effects on health in saying that, “plastics are associated with harms to human health at every single stage of the plastic lifecycle.” (LaMotte para. 17). This all implies that there are people who may otherwise have been athletes who arguably have had their chances denied to them! Is this fair to them, whom we will, can and may never know whom they are and were? Are they justified in using PED’s? I think so under certain rules and I think they very much deserve their chance in a different professional category as a result of societal values; not due to some sort of inherent disability or personal pursuit of their own fault.
In conclusion, PED’s are compatible with the ideal conception of sports. This may be done through introducing new classes in professional leagues in which mutually informed consent can be obtained such that the “mutual quest for excellence through challenge” can be pursued by competing on an equal playing field (Simon 179). There are many reasons to believe that the ideal conception of sports isn’t compatible with PED’s, but few of these arguments are logically sound, and the argument about it being against the rules to do so doesn’t address whether or not using them is morally acceptable.
Works Cited
LaMotte, Sandee. “Human Brain Samples Contain an Entire Spoon’s Worth of Nanoplastics, Study Says.” CNN, Cable News Network, 3 Feb. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/02/03/health/plastics- inside-human-brain-wellness/index.html. Accessed 30Mar2025.
Simon, Robert L. “Good Competition and Drug-Enhanced Performance.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, vol. 11, no. 1, May 1984, pp. 6–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.1984.9714408. Accessed 30Mar2025.