"In recent years, a lively intellectual debate has sprung up around the question of how, exactly, doping is wrong—or whether it’s wrong at all. The debate is contentious: The more that scholars and fans have learned about the history and practice of doping, the more elusive that answer has become. There are plenty of popular reasons to argue that drugs and sports are fundamentally incompatible, but in almost every case—whether they’re based on tradition, fairness, or the ideals of health and good character—those arguments are contradicted by some widely accepted element of high-level sports. Some thinkers even raise an unsettling possibility: that our visceral opposition to doping is a defense mechanism that lets us lie to ourselves about what we really love about sports."

This article was a great read:

To the people in charge of regulating sports, doping has become a thorny enforcement problem: an arms race between increasingly sophisticated forms of cheating on the one hand, and better detection and punishment on the other. But beneath that, there’s an even thornier philosophical problem: Though pretty much everyone in sports agrees that doping is wrong, there’s little deeper agreement about why. Everyone acknowledges that, according to today’s rules, doping is wrong because it’s cheating. What’s not so obvious is whether doping is inherently wrong—whether there’s something fundamentally unsportsmanlike about using drugs to enhance your performance.

Thank you for sharing, Eric.