Drugs in Sports

Any moral disagreement among cultures, or other kinds of groups, should not deter us from engaging in moral inquiry designed to subject moral claims in sports or elsewhere to rational criticism and evaluation. Moreover, such a view does not commit us to being dogmatic or intolerant of the views of others. Indeed, tolerance and openmindedness are themselves values, which many think have objective support. If moral scepticism were true, there would be no rational basis for tolerance itself if cultures disagreed about its value. Accordingly, commitment to rational inquiry in ethics does not commit us to being arrogant dogmatists who forcibly impose our views on others. If anything, it commits us to be open to new insights of others who may be different from us, so long as we are willing to subject their views as well as our own to the test of reasoned inquiry in ethics. Thus, commitment to moral inquiry can help free us from insular prejudices and allow us to test our views by seeing if they can stand up to the reasoned criticism of others.

As Aristotle suggested, we should "look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs." This does not mean that ethical reasoning must be imprecise or sloppy, but rather that it may be more like the making of a sound case by a skilled judicial scholar than a strict mathematical proof.

Although it is unlikely that an exhaustive or totally uncontroversial account of good moral reasoning can be provided, the following three criteria of good moral reasoning will prove especially helpful in what follows. First, moral reasoning must be impartial. In evaluating a moral issue, we are not asking "what's in it for me?" Rather, our goal is to see what position is supported by the best reasons , impartially considered. Moral deliberation is deliberation from a broader perspective than that of self-interest. Thus, we cannot justify the claim that "the use of steroids by Olympic athletes to enhance their performance is morally legitimate" simply by claiming "the use of steroids will help me gain a gold medal in the Olympics." The latter claim may show that the use of steroids is in the speaker's interest. It does nothing to show that personal interest is the only relevant moral factor.

R. M. Hare, distinguished professor of philosophy at Oxford University, has suggested that impartial moral reasoning requires that we imagine ourselves in the place of all those affected by the action or policy being evaluated, giving no special weight to any one perspective. John Rawls of Harvard, author of the important book A Theory of Justice , has suggested that in thinking of social justice we must reason as if we were behind a veil of ignorance that hides from us knowledge of our individual characteristics or social circumstances. Regardless of the similarities and differences between these two accounts of impartiality, each prohibits us from arbitrarily assigning special weight to our own position or interests. For example, it prohibits us from arbitrarily assigning special privileges to our own race or ethnic group because it would be irrational to do so if we had to consider such a policy impartially from the perspective of all affected, as Hare requires, or in ignorance of our own group membership, as Rawls suggests.

Second, the positions we take on various positions must be systematically consistent. That is, we cannot take a position on one issue that contradicts a position we have taken on another without making a change somewhere in our moral perspective so as to bring the two positions into harmony. For example, if one holds both that it is wrong to assault another person but that it is permissible for a professional hockey player to assault another player during a game, one's position appears inconsistent. Unless one can show that the two cases are relevantly dissimilar, one or the other position must be given up for both cannot be correct. If the two cases are similar in the relevant moral respects, assault in one case cannot be permissible and assault in the other impermissible, for there would be no difference between the cases to justify the difference in judgment made about them.