Chapter 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept to Make Sense of the Spirit of Sport Pieter Bonte, Jan Tolleneer, Paul Schotsmans, and Sigrid Sterckx Should sport revolve around natural talent or should athletes be allowed to enhance their bodies with biotech? Throughout 2012, a series of events shook the world of sports, sparking heated but often sensationalist or simplistic debates on these issues. In fall, for instance, the US Anti-Doping Agency presented a formidable doping dossier against seven-fold Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. Before long, the International Cycling Union UCI had repealed all his seven victories, and the words of UCI president Pat McQuaid “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling” became the instant headline of every major global news outlet. In the public eye, arguably the world’s greatest athlete of his time took an unprecedented fall from grace to join the ranks of the ‘doping sinners’. A few months earlier, in an incomparably different moral climate, Oscar Pistorius – the South-African double amputee running on so-called Cheetah prostheses – could be seen sprinting in the 400m relay finals of the London Summer Olympics. As he ran – or did he ‘blade’? – as a man made of muscle and blood and fiberglass, and above all of will and skill, Pistorius rose to the ranks from where Armstrong was to fall: the hall of famers of heroic P. Bonte () Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Bioethics Institute Ghent (BIG), Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium J. Tolleneer Faculty of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Sciences, KU Leuven University, Leuven, Belgium P. Schotsmans Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law, KU Leuven University, Leuven, Belgium S. Sterckx Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium J. Tolleneer et al. (eds.), Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 52, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5101-9_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 1 2 P. Bonte et al. overcoming. In a sense, both athletes decided to draw biotechnologies inside their bodies, and to meddle with nature, in order to enhance their ability to perform. To many, however, the comparison stops right after it started, as each use of biotech signifies incomparably different things: the first causing mass desperation and gloom about the increasing intrusion of artifice in the human body, the second mass inspiration and hope about the coming marvels of biomedical technology. One of the many ethical conundrums this volume seeks to clarify concerns what might make Armstrong’s endeavor so appalling and that of Pistorius so appealing. As many commentators have noted, it seems that the contemporary doping debate is in urgent need of more in-depth investigations of such issues. Ultimately, the most vexing problems posed by enhancing ‘doping’ and enabling artifice nestling deep within the body do not seem to be about health or fair play, although doping clearly does pose momentous problems on those fronts too. But if some forms of doping would be made available in an adequately healthy and fair way, they would probably still cause much concern – concern about doping itself would persist, no matter how much its circumstances would be tidied up. These intrinsic concerns require us to look at doping through a different set of lenses than that of health, fairness and rights. Issues of authentic agency and personal accountability, of the appeal of natural grace in performance, of sports as a testing ground for the capacities of the human species with which all members of the species can identify, of sport as a display of the special natural gifts given to the talented, of sport as a display of ideal exemplars of man’s nature; or alternatively, of sport as a display of man’s protean nature (his capacity to adapt and transform himself), of sport as a showcase of his promethean nature (his tendency to transgress naturally given constraints on his existence) – all these foundational issues come to the fore when we start looking at doping through the lens of ‘human nature’. These foundational issues make up the ‘spirit of sport’: they constitute the more profound existential, ethical and aesthetic reasons why sports is perceived as a very meaningful practice to so many people. These foundational issues concerning human nature are not only of great philosophical relevance, they are equally of great practical relevance. Today, a categorical anti-doping position has been successfully established as the near-universal official consensus. Yet, as many authors have argued and as can be derived from the World Anti-Doping Code, the legitimation of this categorical denunciation of doping relies heavily on the so-called ‘spirit of sport’. However, surprisingly few attempts have been made to provide sustained and focused articulations of what this foundational spirit consists of and how it could warrant a categorical denunciation of doping. To the extent that attempts have been made to back up a categorical anti-doping stance on the basis of concerns unrelated to health or fairness, none have been without controversy. At the same time, behind the official and popular consensus that doping is intrinsically wrong, a number of increasingly vocal scholars have been developing elaborate arguments for the permissibility and even the promotion of drastic athletic enhancement technologies, in direct opposition to the global anti-doping stance. In recent years, anti-doping institutions have taken an impressive lift-off in terms of popular support, budget increase and regulative and policing powers. Nevertheless, 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 3 their fundamental rationale is frequently perceived by both pro and contra-doping authors as a “black box”. That is, the ‘spirit of sport’ is commonly acknowledged to contain the foundational justification that fuels the anti-doping project, but it seems difficult to find out just how to open the box and find out what the spirit is. Now that a number of contrary positions have been presented, the foundational anti-doping rationale must be restated if it wishes to trump those contestations. High time, therefore, for the anti-doping institutions to take a renewed interest in their raison d’être. In preparing this volume, we have endeavored to provide a platform for this urgent foundational discussion. In an effort to push things forward we have, in a sense, ‘cut to the chase’ of the doping debate. Instead of arriving at conclusions that issues of human nature matter, we invited authors to start from the assumption that normative conceptions of human nature and the related issues matter in this debate. In doing so, we hope this volume can do more than indicate what the foundational issues are, and begin the work of investigating them. Besides doing the relatively harmless work of clarifying what the deeper questions are that athletic enhancement technologies pose, we wanted to encourage attempts to do the more controversial but urgently needed work of trying to provide deeper answers to those questions. We have sought to unite a group of authors that is highly international, involving American, Belgian, British, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and Swiss authors. We have equally endeavored to make this volume widely interdisciplinary, bringing together philosophers, sport scientists, historians, medical professionals, legal scholars and sociologists. Also, considering how both sports culture and attitudes towards biotechnologies are rapidly changing, new insights from well-established experts are interspersed with the work of a younger generation of researchers. Together, they tackle a wide variety of issues, interconnected by the quest to come to a clearer understanding and appreciation of the roles that human nature and enhancement technologies play – and should or should not play – in sports. For any given contributor to this volume, several of his or her arguments and insights are instantly challenged or complemented by the writings of their colleagues. Therefore, we present the reader with more than a mere summary of the chapters here. Instead, we draw attention to what has struck us as the most intriguing points of controversy and consensus amongst the contributors. Also, for each author we foreground the way in which she fleshed out the concept of human nature. 1.1 Part I: Conceptual and Theoretical Framework Jan Tolleneer and Paul Schotsmans open the conceptual and theoretical part of this book with Chap. 2, Self, Other, Play, Display and Humanity. Development of a Five-Level Model for the Analysis of Ethical Arguments in the Athletic Enhancement Debate. They introduce a schematic framework to better grasp and relate the plethora of ethical issues athletic enhancement technologies raise. They draw up five axes, relating the (doping) athlete to (1) the self, (2) the other (the fellow athlete), (3) play 4 P. Bonte et al. (the game of sports), (4) display (spectator sports) and, as an underlying level which might be significantly affected by doping, (5) human nature. This model shows that the choice of an athlete to engage in doping inextricably has relational repercussions. The authors use the athlete’s moral perspective to study the respect that is shown or not shown on the five levels mentioned. On each level, Tolleneer and Schotsmans present clusters of arguments pro and contra. Contra, doping can be said to respectively incur health risks, lessen the opponent’s chances and freedom, undermine sports’ gaming spirit, create negative role models and desecrate human nature. Pro, doping can be said to respectively increase autonomy, equalize opportunity, align sport with other social spheres susceptible to enhancement interventions, stimulate awe-inspiring heroism, and realize human nature understood as a Promethean nature – an image that is analyzed at length in Trijsje Franssen’s contribution. Tolleneer and Schotsmans have amassed these arguments from the scholarly literature on the ethics of doping and human enhancement which they enrich with their own study on the spontaneous opinions on doping’s (im)permissibility with 18 year old students, where they note a trend towards increasing permissiveness. By contrasting conservative agents on the one hand and liberal agents on the other the five-level model helps in pinpointing the main ethical questions concerning athletic enhancement. Furthermore, a sociohistorical excursion focuses on the role of the Olympic movement in including more and more social groups: female athletes, worker athletes, professional athletes etc. The authors argue that the Mexico 1968 games were a kind of turning point in this broad development because, based on the new doping regulations, one suddenly started to exclude a certain group: the enhanced athletes. The arguments discussed and categorised on the two opposite sites of the five-levels research model explain why this doping ban can be seen as (il)legitimate. Yet, the enhancement-case provided by the 400 m runner Oscar Pistorius, which will be studied in depth in Tara Magdalinski’s chapter, entails a new interesting moment in history. This dis/superabled athlete is given access to the Olympic competitions and took part in the 2012 London Games. How will the Olympic family deal with this issue in the future? What if the prosthesis technologies and training methods improve and a new generations of blade runners put the non-disabled athletes at a disadvantage? Will ‘designer legs’ remain morally acceptable? The authors portray the history as a chain of negotiations between all those involved – recognizes the fact that policies are not, and should not, simply be developed and implemented top-down, but take shape trough continuous negotiations, an approach explicitly argued for in the contributions of Darian Meacham, Roger Brownsword and Pieter Bonte. Pro and contra arguments are constantly discussed and balanced against each other, and Tolleneer and Schotsmans advance genetic modification as the most troubling challenge for tomorrow. Given the tendency to increased inclusivity, might ‘designer genes’ ever become acceptable too? Or can anti-doping exclusions turn the tide? The five-level model and similar tools can help in managing both these technological developments as well as the negotiations between all social agents involved. In Chap. 3, Is Human Enhancement Unnatural and Would This Be an Ethical Problem?, Christian Lenk distinguishes three possible meanings of ‘naturalness’. First, he discusses ‘natural’ in the sense of something which comes or stems from nature. 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 5 Here he takes to task ‘moral naturalism’, an ethical position stating that what runs counter to a supposedly objective ethical standard of human nature – an example of which, some have argued argue, is homosexual intercourse – can then be seen as unnatural, perverse and immoral. Lenk counters such moral naturalism with what is perhaps the most formidable obstacle to deriving conclusions of ethical value out of considerations of natural facts – such as in the debate on athletic enhancements, deriving the conclusion that such enhancements are wrong because they run counter to (some aspects of) human nature. That obstacle is the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, i.e. the failure to take into account that the realm of values and the realm of facts are two distinct realms, and that one should not base a conclusion of value on premises of fact or vice versa. In Chap. 6, Trijsje Franssen exposes the ubiquity of such fallacious arguments in both the contra and pro enhancement literature. Mindful of this fallacy, Michael J. McNamee seeks to present a spirit of sport that retains a proper appreciation of our natural human constraints in his contribution, whereas Pieter Bonte argues for an existentialist spirit based on an appreciation of how the naturalistic fallacy leaves us with a nature-less human condition, in which we cannot find meaning in the way nature de facto constrains us. Second, Lenk discusses ‘natural’ in the sense of normal or usual. Here, he follows the lead of the biostatistical theory of C. Boorse, wherein a species’ nature is seen as ‘a functional design empirically shown typical of it.’ Lenk points out that enhancement interventions might – but need not – cause a harmful disequilibrium of one’s physical or mental constitution. To upset a given natural balance would not, however, be problematic as such. Third, Lenk analyses ‘natural’ in the sense of essential or essence. Discussing the ‘right to morphological freedom’ advocated by explicitly proenhancement transhumanist such as Nick Bostrom, Lenk again finds no fault with the alteration of biological essentials as such. Rather, he warns of such alterations being made without proper regard for autonomy. He does, however, tempers Bostrom’s vision of radical self-alteration as such practices of self-enhancement are likely to build on the kind of being one already is. Raising an issue that will be investigated at length by Darian Meacham as well as Roger Brownsword, Lenk warns for the possible intolerance towards those humans who would transform themselves into beings that stray too far from the normal human fold. Lenk concludes: “in my interpretation, the “natural” has no secret metaphysical meaning, but is rather a reasonable and pragmatic benchmark for our living and the evaluation of the acceptability of changes in the human body.” Anticipating the response that, as a result, he thereby gives no principled objection to enhancement, Lenk argues that further fairness concerns would provide adequate reason to continue the categorical ban. His conclusion that, ultimately, there are no deeper concerns than those of health and fairness, is something with which many other contributors would beg to differ. Pieter Bonte, for instance, explicitly suspends the issues of health and fairness in Chap. 4, Dignified Doping: Truly Unthinkable? An Existentialist Critique of ‘talentocracy’ in Sports in order to find out what the problems peculiar to doping itself may be. Bonte develops a three-leveled framework, contrasting natural talent to an enhanced body. Within this framework, a proper athletic accomplishment 6 P. Bonte et al. should: (a) originate in proper origins; (b) take place via proper processes; and (c) result in proper end states. Common pro-talent, anti-doping intuitions would respectively require that the accomplishment originates in natural talent, takes place via effortful agency, and results in a perfected but identifiably human end state. However, at all three levels Bonte reaches conclusions that upset those intuitions. According to Bonte, the belief that innate natural talent is superior to artificially enabled embodiments should be significantly tempered, as it may be riddled with a ‘talentocratic’ bias that is at best based on unfortunate misconceptions, probably rooted in psychological atavisms that should be denied ethical validity (an issue that returns in Andreas De Block’s contribution), and at worst related to latent social Darwinist or eugenicist adorations of genetic superiorities (also discussed in Eric Juengst’s chapter). Wedding a demanding conception of sports based on virtue ethics to an existentialist understanding of the human condition, Bonte arrives at a conception of ‘dignified doping’ that may help to better distinguish the many deplorable doping practices from the few dignified ones, without having to commit to a blanket anti-enhancement position. Such ‘dignified doping’ would have to consist in a person first courageously assessing her existential predicament as one that is ‘foundationlessly free and ruthlessly responsible’ and then proceeding to affirm that burdensome responsibility by making a deep, willful intervention in her absurdly obtained nature. With the humanist dignity of, for example, Pico della Mirandola, the doping athlete thus literally incarnates the belief that man is the creator and carrier of his own values. Such an explicit abandonment of the belief that one was given a meaningful natural mold by nature or God may well be detrimental to one’s comfort and superficial happiness, but from this perspective is to be understood as an obligation grounded in one’s human(ist) dignity. To engage in such an act of self-imposed body-modification in the field of sports seems very apt, as sports is one of the most natural habitats of the Homo ludens, whose dignity and grace lies in playing ‘useless’ games of one’s own devise, in ‘useless’ bodies of one’s own devise. Although apparently antagonistic to the position defended by Michael J. McNamee in Chap. 9 , both positions share a ‘thick’ virtue ethics approach as well as a staunch criticism of ‘thin’ libertarian and utilitarian pro-enhancement theories. Bonte, however, radically challenges the perfectionism and innatism implied in a spirit of sport understood as ‘the virtuous perfection of natural talent’, which results in an equally deep, but very different commitment to athletic play as ‘the virtuous exploration of bodily virtuosity’. 1.2 Part II: Transgressing the Limits of Human Nature In Chap. 5, Subhuman, Superhuman, and Inhuman: Human Nature and the Enhanced Athlete, Eric T. Juengst delves deeper into the concern that doping ‘dehumanizes’. According to Juengst, the concept of ‘human nature’ is often given a negative or contrast-definition, that is: a definition in terms of what human nature is not. “Human 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 7 nature is not, by definition, subhuman, superhuman, or inhuman. The subhuman is less than human, like a beast; the superhuman is more, like a god; and the inhuman something simply different, like a machine.” This negative approach has the benefit of not having to commit to a positive account, which would face the problems of gaining sufficient support and avoiding the naturalistic fallacy, all the while retaining the commitment to protect human nature in practical decisions about possible transgressions, such as doping. Juengst analyzes the fear, that athletic enhancement may lead to degradation into the subhuman, as a fear of a disruption of the ontological boundaries between species, between races or between sexes. Runners modified to obtain a cheetah-like running speed or female swimmers with a masculinized constitution would on these ground be dismissed as unnatural freaks – a point of concern that returns in the contributions of Darian Meacham, Marianne Raakilde Jespersen and Tara Magdalinski. To Juengst, such lines of reasoning run the risk of sliding into racism, sexism or social class bias. The second transgression, that into the superhuman, is analyzed as a concern for hubris or the defiance of higher (divine or natural) powers, and a concern for the maintenance of a proper appreciation of life’s ‘giftedness’, which in sport often takes the form of admiration and celebration of the talents of ‘gifted’ athletes. As do Trijsje Franssen and Pieter Bonte, Juengst quotes Michael Sandel’s The Case Against Perfection in this regard. The third transgression, that into the inhuman or artificial, is set apart from the first two. Here, the concern is about the dilution of human agency by artifice, and here Juengst engages with John Hoberman who finds that doping brings forth a crisis of identity, wherein athletes would increasingly be driven by artifice instead of performing on the basis of their own agency. Juengst attempts to rebut this by arguing that there is no fundamental distinction between engaging in a particular diet and engaging in a performance enhancing intervention – both can be conscious decisions made by athletes, and both can be accepted as legitimate elements of their ‘victory narrative’. Citing Ronald Cole-Turner, he adds that an enhancement would not do away with the need for struggle and effort, but rather relocate that struggle by heightening the baseline of what can be performed effortlessly. Moreover, if enhancement would serve to level out differences in natural endowments, it would increase the focus on effort. General human agency need perhaps not be undermined by doping, Juengst concludes, but perhaps a particular kind of athletic agency is. Juengst notes how, in the evaluation of athletic performance, a particular emphasis is put on both the presence of natural talent and on decisive hierarchical ranking. Juengst sees a fourth interpretation of “natural” at work here, which gives a special standing to natural talents, “i.e., inherited characteristics over which athletes have no control and which are ultimately traceable to particular combinations of ancestors and their genes”. In his view, this seems to provide the fundamental legitimation of WADA’s categorical doping prohibition: “Performance enhancement is wrong for athletes to pursue and sports medicine to provide, we can say, because it compromises the ability of athletes to segregate themselves into genetically defined classes and the ability of sport to elevate genetically advantaged athletes from their disadvantaged competitors.” Juengst concludes that to the extent that principled concerns about how enhancement interventions transgress human nature would indeed rest on such hierarchical 8 P. Bonte et al. genetic essentialism, “sport may have more in common with these extreme human vices [of blood feuds, racism, and genocide] than we would like to think”. In Chap. 6, Prometheus on Dope. A Natural Aim for Improvement or a Hubristic Drive to Mastery?, Trijsje Franssen provides a revealing analysis of how enhancement enthusiasts can appeal to human nature as readily as enhancement critics. According to a pro-enhancement reading of the Prometheus myth, so often referenced in the enhancement debate, it is our fundamental human nature itself which calls on us to enhance and transform our bodily constitution. That is our Promethean nature: not to resign in our given predicament, but to “steal the fire of the gods” and to boldly explore and enhance our existence. Sports may provide an excellent showcase for this spirit. As Julian Savulescu and colleagues have argued: “Far from being against the spirit of sport, biological manipulation embodies the human spirit – the capacity to improve ourselves on the basis of reason and judgment.” Some, such as activist author Simon Young, even proceed to root the call to become ‘the New Prometheans’ in the obedience we supposedly have to pay to an “innate Will to Evolve – an instinctive drive of a conscious entity to expand its abilities in pursuit of ever-increasing survivability and well-being”. Such religious overtones are most commonly heard among categorical contra-enhancement authors, and they too commonly reference the Prometheus myth, although they tend to draw on Hesiod’s instead of Aeschylus’ account, stressing the Titan’s hubristic usurpation of powers that he should better leave be. Although in this volume Michael J. McNamee builds on the myth of Odysseus, in earlier writing he has called upon sport ethicists to ensure that “sports do not become the vanguard of Hesiod’s Promethean project”. Franssen connects McNamee’s Prometheus-inspired conceptions of hubris, humility and human nature to those of Michael Sandel and Leon Kass. She sets apart the many distinctions between all these commentators, and also notes how a nod is regularly given to the naturalistic fallacy. However, the frequent transgressions of the (supposedly) unbridgeable conceptual divide between factual descriptions of human nature and normative endorsements of that nature remain a sore point – not only for advocates of a principled ban on athletic enhancement, as is debated by Juengst, Lenk, De Block, Bonte and others in this volume, but also for certain pro enhancement lines of thought. In Chap. 7, Outliers, Freaks, and Cheats: Constituting Normality in the Age of Enhancement, Darian Meacham points out that a major reason for sports’ enormous and global popularity, is that “organised sport, and the Olympic movement in particular, function in part as a kind of testing ground for the physical limits of ‘man’”. Even though the world’s finest athletes are extreme outliers when compared to the performance levels of average persons, every human being can nevertheless identify with those top athletes, and cheer them on, as members of their own species who remain ‘normally abnormal’. Such universal showcasing was one of the explicit motives of the founders of the modern Olympics. However, this project of universal identification with the most excellent specimens of the species cannot be maintained in an era when athletes begin to use increasingly effective enhancement technologies, allowing them to go beyond the outer boundaries of what can be performed by natural, normal humans. For Meacham, this “violation of the ‘normal’” is key. Mindful of a legitimate suspicion of oppressive norms of normality, which also returns in the 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 9 contributions of Raakilde Jespersen and Magdalinski, from a phenomenological perspective, Meacham argues for the inevitability, and fundamental necessity, of a conception of normality acknowledged by all who inhabit a life-world together. Ultimately, for Meacham the challenge of human enhancement is this: “whether or not these differently natured groups could share a ‘world’ in a phenomenological sense: communicate and engage in common projects”, such as meaningful sporting competitions. The advent of athletic enhancement is a fork in the road of modern sports: the Olympics can become “something like a UNESCO heritage site” and continue approximating (and policing) the boundaries of the normal, natural human body; or it can adopt an ethos of open-ended pro- and transgression, and “break free from the Enlightenment idea of ‘man’”. This, a choice between approximation and transgression, as is also noted by Pieter Bonte, may be seen as a choice between two antagonistic projects. Meacham zooms in on two contemporary figures who appear to be ‘abnormally abnormal’: Oscar Pistorius, a runner without lower legs, and Castor Semenya, a woman with a partly masculine physique. Meacham finds himself “more able to empathise with Usain Bolt, who runs faster than Pistorius, because we share in a general style of the human body that is constitutive of a scope or horizon of normality.” According to Meacham, the advent of substantially different ‘general styles of the body’ such as that of Pistorius could be viewed as “a beginning of a fragmenting of the ‘species’” – and such fragmentations can begin to cause significant disruptions of the capacity of empathy even well before they reach the point of effectively creating fully distinctive biological populations. Castor Semenya, whose ‘abnormal’ bodily constitution was not brought about intentionally and technologically but is instead an outcome of natural processes, casts another revealing light on the norms of normality upheld in sports, in casu the normality of the male–female binary. Meacham notes that where Pistorius was put on billboards as a symbol of heroic overcoming, Semenya’s abnormality on the other hand has mainly met with negative reactions. To Meacham, however, her case demonstrates the extent to which our horizon of normality is a social construction, and one that can be restructured in the face of new experiences. In his view, the confrontation with Semenya’s embodiment should rather result in a reconfiguration of the conventional male–female binary than in a negative valuation of Semenya and others who do not fit that binary scheme of normality. Citing, as does Christian Lenk, anthropologist Ludgwig Siep’s article on normative aspects of the human body, Meacham concludes that besides a healthy suspicion towards possibly oppressive norms of normality, we should also recognize the pivotal role played by a shared ‘traditional shape’ of the human body in the constitution and maintenance of a sense of empathy and community that is mankindwide. Since the Olympic Games – and the modern Olympian spirit of sport in general – can be seen as a ceremonial glorification of this communal human nature, Meacham has located a profound, principled argument to resist athletic enhancement technologies in sports. This, however, invites a political and legal interrogation, which is readily provided in Roger Brownsword’s contribution, whether such a universal conservationist project might consist in one contra-enhancement value-community denying the rights of other, pro-enhancement communities to engage in their own particular athletic culture. 10 1.3 P. Bonte et al. Part III: The Normative Value of Human Nature In Chap. 8, Doping Use As an Artistic Crime: On Natural Performances and Authentic Art, Andreas De Block argues that doping is not so much an offense against ethical values than it is a violation of aesthetical values. Of crucial importance in the appreciation of both an artistic and an athletic performance, is the presence of original and undiluted authorship. For De Block, doping is problematic in this regard because it shifts (or splits) the attribution of the performance from the athlete to the doping agent. The performance thus becomes a forgery, which the doping athlete fraudulently tries to pass as her own – a critique that both Eric Juengst and Pieter Bonte try to deflect in their contributions. De Block is clearly aware of the naturalistic fallacy which makes it impossible to cash out the intuition that doping is somehow intolerably ‘unnatural’ in terms of the goodness of human nature. Therefore, he proposes that anti-doping advocates cease to argue on ethical grounds but instead appeal to aesthetic arguments. For instance, what is aesthetically impressive about an athletic performance is that it was hard to do considering the physical constraints of which the athlete has had to make the most – a theme that is highlighted in Michael J. McNamee’s contribution. In this light, using doping to enhance the physical restrictions of one’s embodiment becomes a meaningless, misguided project. For De Block, the persistent demand that athletic performances be based on one’s given human nature can also be made intelligible by referring to the psychology of disgust, which has an evolutionary rationale as a defense against the intake of toxic food. Later, the disgust response was coopted as a response to immorality – connecting the immoral to the ‘impure’ and ‘alienated’. This is one among several reasons pointed out by De Block why the resistance to doping is often thought to be ethical but may in fact be aesthetical. In doing so, he provides an evolutionary psychological account of the common disgust for doping that shows interesting analogies with Darian Meacham’s account, which is based on a radically different (phenomenological) theoretical framework. De Block concludes that although such reactions should be denied ethical validity, they can nevertheless remain legitimate as deeply held aesthetical preferences. As such, repugnance, aesthetically understood, can be a sufficient basis for a given community to demand that athletes who wish to partake in that community’s sporting events, comply to a categorical doping ban. In Chap. 9, Something from Nothing or Nothing from Something? Performance-Enhancing Drugs, Risk, and the Natures of Contest and of Humans, M. Andrew Holowchak looks at sports and doping from an ancient virtue ethics perspective, first treating the question of how doping may wrong the institution of sports, after which he investigates how doping may wrong the doping athlete herself. Mentioning his own use of doping agents in the past, Holowchak’s conclusion is nonetheless double negative: doping is inconsistent both with the Aristotelian conception of human nature and with the nature of sports. According to Holowchak, central to the nature of sports is the idea of investing effort and skill in order to accomplish improved performance. Certain ergogenic aids, 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 11 however, ranging from drag-minimizing swimming suits to performance enhancing drugs, deliver improved performance without added effort or skillful use: they offer a ‘something for nothing’. Other such aids, however, may increase the need for effort and skill. One might argue that the aids that deliver a something for nothing harmlessly are good nor bad and could be permitted, and those that harmlessly increase effort and skill should even be encouraged. Yet for Holowchak this would leave a deeper concern unresolved. According to the hallmark definition provided by Bernard Suits, a game is a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” This implies that in playing a game, one must not use the most efficient means to achieve the game’s goal. A competitive advantage must be achieved through improved skill or heightened expenditure of effort. Holowchak gives the example of novel golf clubs that would correct for a wide variety of swing errors. This would be of great benefit to golfers with a poor swinging technique yet provide little benefit to golfers who have mastered, through skill and effort, the art of golfing. According to Holowchak, all performance enhancing aids that would have such a diminishing effect on the role of effort or skill, can be legitimately banned. Performance enhancing drugs, however, need not have this handicapping effect on effort and skill. On the contrary, citing his own past use of steroids, Holowchak elucidates the way in which steroids operate on the body and on the internal practice of sports: by making training more rewarding and by reducing the need for recuperation between training sessions, it can actually jolt one’s eagerness to train more and train harder. Moreover, if all competitors would use such a drug, it would probably provide equal advantage to all, not handicapping elite athletes. In this sense, therefore, performance enhancing drugs need not run counter to the nature of sports. When investigating the issue of human nature, Holowchak does find an intrinsic argument against doping. First he notes how one cannot shirk the issue that many doping agents may be very dangerous, even if that is ‘only’ a probabilistic and not an intrinsic feature of doping in general. He also criticizes liberal arguments that one should not paternalistically deny individuals the right to choose their own manner of living, even if they would choose high-risk lifestyles such as using doping – an argument that is also prominent in Roger Brownsword’s contribution. He then goes on to present his own argument for the wrongness of doping. To Holowchak, athletic accomplishments are praiseworthy only when they promote virtue and social cohesion. Winning in itself does not count, it is the virtuous commitment to playing to win within the confines of the constituent rules that is key. If doping would be engaged in because of an obsession to gain an edge, the virtue-ethical foundation of sport would be lost, and the advantage gained would be morally vacuous. Also, if doping would be used to make one’s superior athleticism stand out to the detriment of the communal dimension of sports, for Holowchak this too would be a ‘nothing for something’. In Chap. 10, Transhuman Athletes and Pathological Perfectionism: Recognising Limits in Sports and Human Nature, Michael J. McNamee also starts from the theoretical background of Aristotelian virtue ethics to conceive of sports as a perfectionist practice – not just in the superficial sense that a sports discipline often centers on 12 P. Bonte et al. the undistorted execution of certain movements, dynamic strategies etc., but also in a more fundamental sense: as a virtue-driven endeavor to realize, perfect and honor one’s human nature. To McNamee, our given human nature, properly understood, can continue to serve as a moral compass even if the naturalistic fallacy is to be acknowledged. McNamee contrasts his virtue-ethical view of a life well lived with the dominant modern notion that subjective wellbeing ought to be the standard for judging accomplishment. In McNamee’s view, however, “the idea that in seeking a life of perfection, what is being perfected (what excellences are being sought) is to be understood against an understanding of what it is to be human, or what nature is to be found in human being.” Against this backdrop, he identifies as thoroughly misguided transhumanist notions of athletic and human perfection according to which the limits of human nature are imperfections that should be superseded. First, McNamee argues that transhumanism has a lopsided focus on ‘technical’ athletic perfection, fetishizing the error-free, perfect execution, such as the perfect swing that produces a hole-in-one. The transhumanist vision of perfection is also based on an overly restricted negative definition thereof: perfection as the mere lack of blemishing imperfections. However, such a perfect performance might still be very flawed, for instance if it was brought about by doping. Echoing Andreas De Block, McNamee identifies an essential aesthetic dimension to sports that consists in refraining from using the most efficient means to realize a goal: it is precisely performance within constraints that makes it meaningful and truly valuable. Second, the transhumanist vision of human perfection as the absence of all imperfections is said to lack a telos – a positively defined aim for perfectionist activity, given in an entity’s nature. Here, Pieter Bonte’s contribution could be read as a challenge to both McNamee’s and transhumanist perfectionism: on an existentialist theory, there is no guiding human essence that preceeds human existence. Third, McNamee notes that transhumanism also seems to hold a misguided ‘absolute’ conception of human perfection, as the realization of all of one’s potential together. An impossibility, as one cannot be all things at once, and because one’s potentials do not have a fixed value that is independent of the specifics of one’s developmental trajectory. To develop his positive, human nature-based account of perfection, McNamee builds on the myth of Odysseus, who declined a ‘perfect’ life of immortality and endless joy and instead willfully returned to his finite and fragile human life. For McNamee, taking up another form of embodiment, no matter how ‘perfected’ that might be, should be resisted on account of it being too alien and inauthentic for human beings. 1.4 Part IV: Socio-Cultural and Empirical Approaches In Chap. 11, “Definitely Not for Women”: An Online Community’s Reflections on Woman’s Use of Performance Enhancing Drugs in Recreational Sports, Marianne Raakilde Jespersen draws attention to the use of performance enhancing drugs by women. She takes a look inside the doping community itself, analyzing in detail how such female doping practices are received on the online bodybuilder community 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 13 forum Bodyhouse.dk – a forum where people in doping subcultures discuss their doping behavior with little inhibition. On an anthropological rendering of human nature, the use of drugs of some form or other can be seen as an integral part of universal human behavior. Raakilde Jespersen cites Donald Brown’s list of human universals, which includes “mood- and consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances”. Wedded to an “imperative to perform” which Raakilde Jespersen, following John Hoberman, finds pervasive in twenty-first century western culture, a culture of performance enhancing drugs has taken firm root in large networks of both elite and amateur athletes. Interestingly, within these contemporary athletic drug cultures, the male use of them is regularly legitimized as a naturally manly act. The female use, however, will regularly be seen as an unnatural desecration of feminine nature. A machismo philosophy runs through the Bodyhouse forum, contrasting male will power and rational self-control – the required traits to dope like one should – to female whimpering and irrationality. Female use of performance enhancing drugs is regularly scorned for the possible masculinization it brings about, and for the risks it poses to women’s reproductive function. These findings of Raakilde Jespersen’s study of the Bodyhouse rhetoric thus seem to confirm Tara Magdalinski’s analysis in Sport, Technology and the Body: “the use of technologies to take women beyond feminity is rejected.” In an interesting addition to Darian Meacham’s conclusion that human enhancement technologies negate vital conceptions of normal, natural embodiment, within certain doping practices such as those in bodybuilding milieus, conceptions of a normal, natural division between male and female body types can paradoxically be affirmed with a vengeance. In Chap. 12, Toward a Situated and Dynamic Understanding of Doping Behaviors, Denis Hauw conceives of human nature as being profoundly social and dynamic. He leaves the analysis of the normative worth of our biological constitution and of athletic enhancement to others. Instead, in turning from ‘human nature’ to ‘the nature of human activity’, Hauw takes the wrongness of doping as a given and proceeds with an analysis of how circumstances can conspire to create the scene of an athlete taking dope. Similar to Bengt Kayser and Barbara Broers, Hauw concludes that current anti-doping programs are too narrowly focused on a principled denunciation of the ‘doping sinner’, to the neglect of practical policies that might remedy the failure to effectively bring down the number of doping athletes. Where Kayser and Broers present a pragmatic containment strategy, Hauw presents a pragmatic avoidance strategy, making use of six strands of psychosocial studies combined with specific empirical studies on doping behavior. For instance, several studies have analyzed how doping cultures can take root and proliferate in certain athletic environments, sometimes to the point of becoming subcultures complete with a (deviant) sense of pride and belonging – for example, in Marianne Raakilde Jespersen’s contribution we can catch a glimpse of the inner life at the Bodyhouse online community. Other studies discussed by Hauw shed a light on the individual trajectories of doping use, from first experimentation to entrenched habit. Such methods help to identify what factors may trigger doping use, which in turns yields cues for effective prevention or rehabilitation. The myriad contextual issues identified by Hauw dispel the naive belief that doping use is essentially a rational 14 P. Bonte et al. choice made by an immoral athlete, a choice to ‘sin’ for which the athlete carries all responsibility as an isolated individual. Indeed, Hauw cites studies on doping athletes’ own perception of doping, one of which revealed, for example, that the main thing on the interviewed doping cyclists’ minds was not so much some excessive drive towards superhuman performance, but rather a concern to better cope with the daily stresses of elite athlete training, such as exhaustion. In Chap. 13, Restoring or Enhancing Athletic Bodies: Oscar Pistorius and the Threat to Pure Performance, Tara Magdalinski recalls how modern sports was in part founded as a romantic project for the liberation of natural man from the alienating industrial world which suppresses his spontaneous self-expression. This project was conjoined with the cult of the natural world as a wild and pure realm unblemished by industrial civilisation. Engaging in sports was thus seen as an invigorating antidote to the ills of technological culture. This romanticism often resisted all manner of scientific and technological intervention in the natural sporting activity, such as advances in clothing, equipment or training facilities. Much of this resistance has crumbled, as contemporary sports are positively saturated with practices of scientific surveillance and technological assistance. It seems, however, that despite its many battles lost, the romantic insistence that sports honour ‘the natural man’ has focused its attention to defending the natural human body against the encroachment of invasive, human nature-altering biotechnologies. As such, sports can still be believed to display pure participants striving to establish the limits of the natural human’s physical capacity – a project which other contributors connect – complementary or contradictory? – to the Enlightenment (Darian Meacham), Vitruvian perfectionism (Pieter Bonte) and a Vatican spirit of sport (John Hoberman). Magdalinski interrogates this contemporary insistence on natural sport via the controversial presence of Oscar Pistorius, a runner who competes in the Olympics despite having prostheses instead of natural lower legs. When Pistorius and analogous persons start demanding access to the ‘able-bodied’ leagues, they appeal to the inclusive universalism that is a central part of the Olympic spirit. At the same time, however, they deeply disrupt another central point of those competitions: the collective search for the natural contours of mankind. The conflict is confounded by the fact that the R&D of cutting-edge prostheses has advanced beyond the mere mimicry of the ‘original model’ of human physiology. If alternative (bio-)mechanisms yield better enabling results, such pathways will be pursued, even if they deviate from the ontology of Homo sapiens nature. As such, they reveal how impure and open human nature can be, how deeply natural artifice can come to be, and how many legitimate options for deviance from the natural norm this can open up. Here, Magdalinski sees suspect norms of ‘natural normalcy’ surface in an unwillingness to see deviant bodily constitutions as anything other than ‘disabled’ when compared to normal human nature – norms that are paternalistic, oppressive, and not only ethically but also factually mistaken. Magdalinski concludes with applying these insights to the struggles Oscar Pistorius has had to go through to be granted access to the ‘able-bodied’ competitions. For instance, IAAF’s Elio Locatelli has protested that Pistorius’ participation would disrupt the ‘purity’ of those competitions. Magdalinski strongly rejects such arguments: “efforts to label Pistorius’ running blades as ‘unfair’ or ‘advantaged’ and to 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 15 scientifically render his performance not ‘proper’ running, overlook the fact that regardless how efficient his prosthetics may be, Pistorius is still missing his two lower legs, and his technological aids can perhaps not be accurately classed as an ‘unfair advantage’ until athletes are willing to forgo their legs in favour of these running blades.” Arguments presented by Meacham, Brownsword and Bonte may, however, share with Magdalinski the full recognition of Pistorius’ athleticism but equally recognize the requirement that a competition, in order to remain meaningful, requires adequately similar bodily constitutions of all competitors. 1.5 Part V: Practices and Policies In Chap. 14, Sports Physicians, Human Nature, and the Limits of Medical Enhancement, John Hoberman hones in on the role sport physicians play in enhancing athletes’ performance levels. A traditional conception of medicine holds that the aim of the physician should be “the restoration of a physiologically deficient organism to its former, ‘normal’ state.” The Vatican anthropology provides a good example of what this traditional conception amounts to. Here, the pivotal value of the restoration and conservation of one’s given nature is grounded in the theological doctrine that considers each individual human being to be a unique creation of a Creator: this given form is inviolable, its boundaries are divinely sanctioned. On these grounds, Pope Pius XII denounced doping as early as 1955 as “the error of claiming the right to dispose unconditionally of his body”. In a later critique, he chided the manipulation of human biology in general as a way of treating humans no different than animals – what Eric Juengst discusses as the concern for dehumanization as ‘stooping to the subhuman’. At the same time, in the twentieth century the Vatican also lauded sport as a potentially pious practice of self-control, self-abnegation and purposeful suffering. Hoberman, however, is sceptical of this analogical rapprochement considering the transgressive dictum of the modern Olympic Games of Citius, Altius, Fortius (which, as Tara Magdalinski, Darian Meacham and Pieter Bonte note, may also be given an approximating reading). To Hoberman, the more convincing reading is that of a “perfect opposition” between the Athleta Christi and the modern Olympian, as they present “the sharpest possible contrast between competing conceptual models of ‘human nature’.” The anthropological model to contrast with that of the Vatican is that of the Leistungsprinzip or ‘performance principle’, according to which the human organism must adapt itself to requirements of efficiency and productivity. Projects of human enhancement would then be perfectly in line with this principle. Where Bengt Kayser and Barbara Broers provide a historical account of how the anti-doping culture and policy was created, Hoberman provides a historical account of how pro-doping subcultures were formed in medical milieus. Medico-scientific thinking on the limits to human athletic performance – and the possible transgression of them – is traced to the final decades of the nineteenth century, and Hoberman provides a remarkable overview of the changing perceptions of these issues throughout the twentieth century. Starting in the late 16 P. Bonte et al. 1970s, an increasing number of scientists argue that the Olympic project of Faster, Higher, Stronger was drawing to a close – that is, only medicine and biotechnology could procure (quite likely perilous) ways to breach the upper performance limits of the human body. According to Hoberman, medical professionals began such searches in earnest during the 1960s. The phenomenon of ‘celebrity sports physicians’ began to occur. These would at times be charismatic figures with ambiguous aims: on the one hand they were seeking ways to protect the athletes against increasingly high-risk levels of stress, while at the same time applying enhancement interventions to athletes to aid them in realizing epic performances. What is more, Hoberman shows how some physicians even went so far as to actively advocate the enhancement of human performance levels as a valuable and legitimate aim of their profession. Hoberman concludes that elite sport physicians risk picking up a troublesome sense of entitlement, which has lead and will continue to lead to attempts to transgress the traditional boundaries of both human nature and of the medical profession. While Roger Brownsword challenges the prohibitionist approach by accepting the existence of a doping community as a legitimate political fact, in Chap. 15, Anti-doping Policies: Choosing Between Imperfections, Bengt Kayser and Barbara Broers challenge this approach by accepting the existence of a doping community as a sociological fact. Where for Brownsword a paternalistically imposed categorical prohibition is objectionable, for Kayser and Broers it is impracticable. Kayser and Broers conceptualize ‘human nature’ as the persistent, universal traits of humans. As Raakilde Jespersen also argues, drug use may be one of those universals of human nature. Thus, Kayser and Broers consider it utopian and ill-conceived to aim for a full prohibition and eradication of drug use. Their contribution is based on a comparison of WADA’s ‘war against doping’ with the attempted and failed ‘war against (psychotropic) drugs’. According to Kayser and Broers, the two campaigns have much in common as regards their intent, their organization, and their effects: policies based on repression and surveillance, large claims on public budgets, black markets controlled by organized crime, attempts to shape internationally harmonized legal frameworks, ideology and political convenience anchored in media-fuelled moral outrages, the stigmatization and marginalization of drug users, continued infractions on a large scale, and unsupervised, high-risk practices of drug intake. Kayser and Broers criticize various aspects of WADA’s current anti-doping policy: the troublesome official definition of doping, its overly broad scope, the excessive severity of the ‘whereabouts’ and urine control surveillance regime, the dubious methodology of the ‘biological passport’ system, disproportionate punitive measures, the inability to realize significant behavioral change among athletes and their entourages – the list goes on. Their final verdict is damning. The proliferation of WADA-style zero-tolerance policy is said to have “worrying characteristics of a dystopia of Orwellian kind.” As an alternative, Kayser and Broers propose a utilitarian, permissive harm reduction policy. Marshaling empirical studies that show the effectiveness of such policies in other domains, such an approach may in their view also result in a better control and containment of problematic doping practices in sports. This proposal differs significantly from the (cluster of) approach(es) proposed by Denis Hauw, 1 Introduction: Human Nature as a Promising Concept 17 who does not challenge the categorical anti-doping rule. It also differs significantly from a libertarian laissez faire approach. On the contrary, general testing would still take place, although based on a stricter health-related agenda. Kayser and Broers readily admit that their harm reduction approach would be messy and imperfect. Yet they emphasize the need for ‘realism’, which means understanding drug use as an irremediable part of human nature and doping use as a irremediable part of perfectionist sports. In Chap. 16, A Simple Regulatory Principle for Performance-Enhancing Technologies: Too Good to Be True?, Roger Brownsword examines whether the following basic regulatory principle can be upheld: it is permissible for competent agents (such as Olympic competitors) to use enhancers unless either (i) use causes harm to others (who have not consented to this risk) or (ii) the user has freely agreed to act on a no-enhancement basis. Applying a paternalistic policy in sports to safeguard athletes’ best interests (most noticeably their health), as WADA and its affiliates arguably do today, would fly in the face of the prevailing ethical doctrine applied in medical settings today, where paternalism has largely been abandoned in favor of a doctrine based on free and informed consent. This tension is also noted by John Hoberman in his contribution, although Hoberman draws the largely opposite conclusion that it is the modern ‘consumerist’ view of medicine, penetrating the sports world and fueling a permissive stance towards doping, that needs revising, and not the categorical prohibition of doping. Brownsword considers how an application of the principle of informed consent would indeed “revolutionise the rulebook for sports” by permitting enhancement to those who properly consent to it. However, at the same time, this principle would also allow for athletic associations in which the categorical enhancement prohibition remains in place. Brownsword proceeds to stress-test these hitherto highly abstracted notions of harm and consent. Echoing the relational issues mapped by Jan Tolleneer and Paul Schotsmans, competing interpretations of harm to competitors, to spectators and other parties – for example utilitarian versus communitarian interpretations – will yield very different conclusions about when an unacceptable risk of significant harms to relevant others is reached. In unpacking the concept of free and informed consent, Brownsword also highlights how much devil is in the detail. For instance, how is one to ensure that there has been no undue inducement to enhance – by one’s sponsors, one’s coach, one’s physician, one’s fan base, one’s competitors? On the opposite side of the question, the possibility of undue inducement to abstain from enhancement, Brownsword intuits that this seems to raise less concern. However, both Pieter Bonte and Eric Juengst argue that upon closer inspection, this may pose a truly foundational problem: less talented athletes may be induced (and indeed, given the current regime of near-universal prohibition: forced) to forego enhancement in order to conserve the hegemony of the genetically superior ‘talentocracy’. In sum, Brownsword is open to the possibility that the minefields of harm and consent may provide strong objections to athletic enhancement. But an altogether different objection concerns the categorical prohibitionism. Often rooting their argument in the hotly debated notion of human dignity, prohibitionists think it necessary to impose their prohibition universally. To Brownsword, such a “imperialist version of communitarianism” is unjustified, and he goes on to present a proposal for the regulation of 18 P. Bonte et al. enhancement via ongoing public deliberation within a community of rights. Within such a community of rights, it remains possible that substantially communitarian policies, such as a categorical doping ban, would be decided upon – with the caveat that such communitarian prescripts should not impinge upon basic generic rights of individual community members. Following Darian Meacham’s argument, however, such a liberal position might indeed become too good to be true should enhancement practices begin to fracture the sense of membership in a single ‘species’ community. Such alienation may undercut the willingness to grant the all-too-alienated others equal moral standing and equal rights.