Lifetime ban for dopers?
It comes down to what kind of society we want to live in
A friend of mine, who had been discussing doping in an ethics class he is taking, asked me what I thought about lifetime bans for dopers.
I think that dopers should be given lifetime bans for four reasons:
1. we are talking about sports, which I think it is a privilege and a natural gift to be part of, so contravening anti-doping rules should not be taken lightly;
2. one person doping means that others are not able to decide that they want to compete naturally, the one person creates a cascading effect;
3. doping is a sort of theft, stealing both opportunity and monetarily from those that want to compete cleanly, and from the sport as a whole as it slowly gets dragged down in scandal after scandal;
4. we can’t support unethical behaviour in society, again the cascade effect. If we feel it is OK to dope in sport why not cheat in other aspects of society such as finance and business.
One caveat though. There does need to be some kind of distinction between someone who dopes by accident, due to taking an over the counter medication for instance, and the kind of systematic doping that Lance and others have engaged in. For those that engaged in systematic doping there should be no returning to the sport.
Sportsmen/women are heroes to society at large, perhaps in particular to youngsters. They are something of the gold standard, mythologized in our culture and should be held to a higher standard.
Ultimately it comes back to the question of what kind of society we want to live in. I would like to live in a society in which we can all aspire and dream to something great, and not have to discover once we get there that the dream is nothing more than a mirage that hides unpleasant choices.
