Ethics Newsline®

“I wanted to get your thoughts,” ESPN Radio talk show host Chuck Wilson wrote me the other day, “on the argument that steroid use in baseball, prior to its being banned from the sport, does not constitute ‘cheating.’ I have argued that players who used steroids cheated the sport. My co-hosts and many listeners have argued that it’s only cheating if you break stated rules. What do you think?”

It’s a great question, because it seems to be about only baseball. In fact, it’s about business, government, education, the professions — anything that puts scandals into the headlines. But let’s stick with baseball, where it rings hollow for three reasons.

First, it overlooks the distinction between law and ethics. Law is obedience to the enforceable. When laws or rules are laid down, there’s typically a punishment for breaking them. Rules compel obedience because of fear of penalty.

Ethics, by contrast, is obedience to the unenforceable — to the powerful canons of our culture. What compels ethical obedience is a communal agreement about wrongness. A thing can be wrong even though it breaks no stated rule, calls forth no punishment, and is not illegal.

So if the argument is that “it wasn’t illegal to use steroids before they were illegal,” that’s self-evident. But if it’s that “it wasn’t unethical to use them before they were illegal,” that doesn’t necessarily follow, since ethics and law differ so fundamentally.

Second, the “it’s not cheating” argument doesn’t square with the way we use that word. Some examples:

• Suppose a father, after promising to pay his young daughter for mowing the lawn, withholds the money because he’d rather keep it. Is she being cheated? Most would think so, but show me the law that makes it illegal.
• If I share with you my plan to buy a house for a certain price, and you race out and trump my bid by one dollar, did you do anything illegal? No. Did you cheat me? That’s the word that would spring to my mind.
• We have largely abolished legal penalties for adultery, but we still say someone “cheats” on his wife. As the term implies, we still think of such behavior as wrong.

What about steroids? They’ve long been thought wrong in amateur sports and in public opinion. In the early days of black-and-white television, I remember seeing bulked-up East German athletes at the Olympics and hearing reporters say that steroids were suspected. The very tone of their reports made it clear that this, to them, was “cheating” — maybe not illegal in some countries, but surely wrong.

Why “wrong”? Because, third, steroids aren’t morally neutral. They damage bodies through prolonged use and give unfair advantage to those who use them. In the past, given the public distaste for steroids, many athletes refused them, so the only users were athletes who either felt no moral tug from that distaste or overcame that tug through rationalization. Result: a classically unlevel playing field on which winning arose not from athletic prowess but from unfair competition.

So why cheat? Because it appears to work. It shouldn’t surprise us that those willing to act unethically often seek advantage over those holding to the ethical; it’s been ever thus. But it should sadden us to see the argument of effectiveness used to justify cheating. The notion that a thing is right merely because it works arises from the worst sort of ends-justifies-the-means logic. By that logic, every form of cheating should be embraced and even encouraged, because through it you “win.”

That false logic, in this case, could end up destroying baseball. How? Well, we already have a sobering example of a fine sport — wrestling — still honored at the collegiate level but wholly discredited in the professional arena. It’s hugely popular on cable TV, but nobody treats it as a sport any more. It’s now seen merely as commercial entertainment.

What happened? A surprisingly simple thing: loss of public trust. When you and I say of any game, “That’s a sham,” it begins to spiral downward into mere showmanship. What if the public comes to suspect — after hearing all of the public justifications for cheating voiced by athletes, coaches, and commentators — that the whole thing is a fraud? We’ll start to lose trust. Then the question will not be whether professional baseball joins professional wrestling as a schlock sport, but simply when. Professional wrestling is probably gone for good. If baseball joins it, there won’t be any returning.

The moral: Trust once lost — in baseball, as in business, politics, love, and friendship — is devilishly hard to rebuild. Not incidentally, Chuck Wilson has asked to leave ESPN Radio after 14 years of hosting sports shows that raise questions like this — since, apparently, his managers think their audiences aren’t interested in such ideas. But that’s another column.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics