“Natural” Talents and Dedication—Meanings and Values in Sport

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The American Journal of Bioethics
ISSN: 1526-5161 (Print) 1536-0075 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uajb20
“Natural” Talents and Dedication—Meanings and
Values in Sport
Thomas H. Murray (President Emeritus)
To cite this article: Thomas H. Murray (President Emeritus) (2018) “Natural” Talents and
Dedication—Meanings and Values in Sport, The American Journal of Bioethics, 18:6, 1-3, DOI:
10.1080/15265161.2018.1474014
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2018.1474014
Published online: 31 May 2018.
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Guest Editorial
“Natural”Talents and Dedication—
Meanings and Values in Sport
Thomas H. Murray, The Hastings Center
“Good ethics begins with good facts” is a mantra I learned
in my early years at The Hastings Center. The relevant
facts include, of course, scientific and medical ones. But
just as important are the forces that shape perceptions,
motivations, and outcomes. The importance of under-
standing those factors—call them grounded realities—
soon became clear in my first major research assignment:
the ethics of performance enhancing drug use in sport.
The bioethics literature circa 1980 led me to expect to
find athletes struggling against the unjustified paternalistic
restraints of anti-doping zealots. Listening to elite athletes,
their coaches and others in that world, I heard a very dif-
ferent story. Where drugs made a palpable difference—
and they had no doubt that anabolic steroids and amphet-
amines did—athletes faced three unhappy choices:
compete without doping and face nearly certain disap-
pointment; give up competing at the level their talent and
dedication warrant; or dope like their competitors hoping
thereby to “level the playing field.” The relentless competi-
tive dynamic of sport coupled with the reality that perfor-
mance enhancing drugs can overwhelm differences in
talents and dedication has profound consequences for
health, values, and meanings.
It takes no special insight to see that excellent perfor-
mance in sport requires both raw talent and the virtuous
perfection of that talent. Our sense of marvel at extraordi-
nary athletic feats is a combination of wonder at the talents
embodied in that particular athlete, and admiration for the
effort, dedication, discernment and other morally praise-
worthy attributes that shaped their performance.
The idea that “natural” talents should be valued at all
can seem strange. Natural talents are not earned or
deserved in any way; why should they be celebrated, hon-
ored, rewarded? Loland’s argument in this issue is particu-
larly helpful. Descriptively, it provides a scientific
rationale for distinguishing between “natural” methods of
enhancing a person’s athletic capacities and other meth-
ods, such as drugs, that directly modify one’s physiology.
Normatively, it demonstrates the connection between the
morally unearned natural talents, and the hard, dedicated
and morally admirable work of training, which is essential
to the development of that talent and, ultimately, to
performance.
At its heart, the debate over PEDs in sport is an argu-
ment over what sport is about. One possible answer to that
question was supplied in the famous Seinfeld episode “The
Pitch,” in which George suggests to Jerry that they propose
to network executives a show about their everyday lives
and conversations—in other words, about nothing. Or, if
not nothing, perhaps sport is merely entertainment, or as
some have suggested of modern athletes, “Their ideal is
superhuman performance, at any cost.” (Savulescu et al.
2004) (The reference here is to the original marathoner, who
droppeddeadattheendofhisrun).
Loland defends an alternative: Sport as a testing
ground for “the admirable development of natural talents
towards excellence”—a reformulation of the World Anti-
Doping Agency’s description of the “spirit of sport.”
(World Anti-Doping Agency 2015) The quarrel isn’t over
“admirable development” or “excellence”; rather, it’s over
the moral significance of “natural talents.” Why should
natural talents make a difference in the outcome of sport
competitions? And why should we celebrate them rather
than do all we can to neutralize their impact in favor of
morally praiseworthy attributes of persons?
The first hurdle to clear is conceptual: Given that the
idea of “natural” is ineliminably contestable, can it bear
any moral weight at all? Loland cites Kaebnick on behalf
of the value of “serviceable” moral concepts such as kind-
ness, cruelty, generosity and integrity. It’s worth following
Kaebnick further: “In deciding whether the concept of
nature is coherent, then, the question is not whether there
is some one clear definition of it that lets us sort out every
case, but whether it is serviceable, in roughly the way that
many other morally significant terms are. How the term is
applied to the world must be more than mere smoke, but
need not be black and white” (Kaebnick 2013, 10).
Loland and Hoppeler (2012) propose a distinction
grounded in the science of human performance, specifi-
cally in how individuals respond and adapt to the physio-
logical stresses involved in training. The problem with
performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) such as endurance-
Address correspondence to Thomas H. Murray. E-mail: murrayt@thehastingscenter.org
ajob 1
The American Journal of Bioethics, 18(6): 1–3, 2018
Copyright ©Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1526-5161 print / 1536-0075 online
DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2018.1474014

boosting biosynthetic erythropoietin (EPO), then, is that
they are biochemical shortcuts—they modify bodies
directly rather than relying on the normal, natural pro-
cesses of adaptation to training. Training comes about
through dedication, perseverance, the willingness to suffer
in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal—things we find mor-
ally admirable.
There are many ways to run or swim faster, jump higher
or throw farther. Take swimming: you can train assiduously,
eat healthy food, and attend carefully to your coach’s
instructions. You can wear super-slippery full-body swim-
suits made of impermeable fabric that increases your buoy-
ancy by trapping air against your body. Or you can take
performance enhancing drugs. FINA, the international orga-
nization that governs Olympic swimming, applauds dedi-
cated, smart training, but, after years of record-shattering
times enabled by the special swimsuits, banned them from
competition. The suits, it seemed, had changed the nature of
the sport in the judgment of people most familiar with it,
making outcomes more a function of technology than of the
talent and dedication of the swimmer. PEDs, like special
swimsuits, are technologies that enable swimmers to go
faster. But how much of the credit goes to the athlete and
how much to the people who created and supplied the
drugs? East Germany dominated women’s Olympic swim-
ming for years. We now know that dominance was rooted
in a state-run program of systematic doping that blighted
the lives and the health of many young women.
Every sport competition faces this question: Of the
myriad of factors that could influence performance and
outcomes, which are the ones we hope are decisive? We
then do what we can to reduce the impact of everything
else. That is why teams switch sides of the field or court
during the contest; why we place limits on equipment, so
that superior technology cannot dictate the outcome.
The International Paralympics Committee (IPC) uses
four “fundamental principles” in evaluating equipment:
Safety, Fairness, Universality, and Physical Prowess. They
explain what they mean by fairness: “...the athlete does
not receive an unfair advantage that is not within the
‘spirit’ of the event they are contesting.” Universality dic-
tates that the technology must be “reasonably commer-
cially available to all.” Physical Prowess describes what
should be decisive: “human performance is the critical
endeavor not the impact of technology and equipment,”
thus the prohibition against technologies that “enhance
performance beyond the natural physical capacity of the
athlete,”(International Paralympic Committee 2016).
Paralympic competitors want results to reflect talent
and effort, not differences in equipment, doping, or type or
level of impairment. The IPC recognizes ten impairment cat-
egories and, within categories, “classifications” representing
degrees of severity. That is why, while the 2016 Rio Olym-
pics held two final races in the 100 meter sprint, one for
men, one for women, that year’s Paralympic Games
required 30 finals so that regardless of type or severity of
impairment or gender, every competitor has an opportunity
to win according to her or his talent and dedication.
Immersion in the realities of sport can also play a posi-
tive philosophical role. Good Sport: Why Our Games Mat-
ter...And How Doping Undermines Them (Murray 2018)
is an effort to understand what gives sport its meaning
and values. It explores critically how sport’s rules and
practices reflect underlying beliefs and values about fair-
ness, the wonders and frailties of our bodies, and the cru-
cial importance of virtues in bringing natural talents to
competitive fruition. The analysis relies on close observa-
tion of how and why people play, and how sport strives to
foster fair and meaningful competitions.
In Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer described a simi-
lar approach to a different problem: “Another way of
doing philosophy is to interpret to one’s fellow citizens the
world of meanings that we share.”(Walzer 1983, p. xiv). In
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls writes: "We start...by
looking to the public culture itself as the shared fund of
implicitly recognized basic ideas and principles. We hope
to formulate these ideas and principles clearly enough to
be combined into a political conception of justice congenial
to our most firmly held convictions. We express this by
saying that a political conception of justice, to be accept-
able, must accord with our considered convictions, at all
levels of generality, on due reflection, or in what I have
called elsewhere “reflective equilibrium” (Rawls 2005, 8).
Shared meanings within the communities that play
and love sport include ideas, principles and firmly held
convictions such as a profound commitment to fairness in
competition and great respect for the admirable dedication
athletes must show to develop successfully their natural
talents. The talents themselves are not earned or deserved
or worthy of moral praise; either you have them or you
don’t. On the other hand, it matters very much morally
whether and how you perfect those talents. In Good Sport,
I argue that the likely outcome of such a process is a con-
ception of sport that celebrates the virtuous perfection of
natural talents. This conception renders intelligible our
considered judgments, practices, rules and customs in
sport.
In his extensive and influential scholarship on philoso-
phy of sport, Loland has made many notable contribu-
tions. His article in this issue of AJOB provides a
persuasive account of how a contestable yet “serviceable”
concept of natural talents can buttress useful distinctions
and help resolve controversies over various methods of
improving performance.
Loland’s sport-specific version of the Fair Equality of
Opportunity norm demands that we eliminate or compen-
sate for inequalities we can’t control or be held responsible
for. Natural talents, of course, are just that sort of inequal-
ity. He asserts that competitive sport is “primarily
meritocratic.” This is true, but only against the reality that
athletes competing in elite sport all possess abundant natu-
ral talents. Among those of roughly equal talents, hard
work, courage, and intelligence shape the outcomes. In
that sense, competitive sport is indeed meritocratic, but it
is undeniable that sport also recognizes and celebrates nat-
ural talents.
The American Journal of Bioethics
2ajob June, Volume 18, Number 6, 2018

Those of us lacking great natural talents for sport need
not despair. If we wish to compete, we can usually find
communities of competitors at our talent level so that mor-
ally relevant factors such as dedication and preparation
prevail. Even if we don’t want to compete against others,
we can channel that dedication into improving our own
performance, pushing ourselves to discover what our
body and our will can accomplish.
When I first began investigating the ethics of perfor-
mance enhancing drugs in sport, it soon became apparent
that individuals and organizations surrounding athletes—
what I came to call the doping ecosystem—were also
responsible. Doping is a threat to what is meaningful and
valuable to sport, to be sure; it thrives in an environment
of weak governance along with other corrupt practices
such as the abuse of young athletes and match-fixing. For
the sake of justice and meaning, we must hold all those
involved in sport—not merely athletes—accountable. &
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