Camus and Ethics
As long as enough folks sign up, I’m offering two new courses through Duke Continuing Studies this fall.
For eight weeks (September and October), we’ll be discussing contemporary ethics and the life and writings of Albert Camus. To read course descriptions or register for a class, follow this links.
Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson
Carnival of the Green
The air is thick this morning, my first day back to work since vacation. It’s dense with water vapor and a stagnant quality that makes it hard to breathe. It feels like the air trapped by plastic wrapped tight over the top of a bowl of left-overs that mistakenly sat overnight on the kitchen counter.
I was noticing the unusually thick smell of auto-exhaust when the three dump trucks passed me, each blowing an opaque cloud of soot. These clouds hung in the asphalt corridor between the trees as I made my way through them. Consciously, I tried to breathe shallow, but instinctively, I breathed deeply — I was in middle of a two-mile climb with more than 40lbs of gear and bike to haul.
A gray and brown swirl of soot and grime circles the drain of the shower at work. The same particulate dulls the brightness of my otherwise yellow jersey. I wonder what breathing that stuff does to my lungs, then wonder why I ride in a place where days like today are the norm.
Durham’s air is thick for the same reason that exhaust clouds hang in the Cornwallis Rd corridor — the wind just doesn’t blow.
In the three cities I visited recently there was a constant breeze. The Gulf-born winds across Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida constantly scrub the air. Residents of those cities can exercise outdoors without concern for ozone pollution. Even Atlanta, a city that seems more red — Republicans, Coca-Cola, banking — than green, enjoys the benefits of clean air because the wind is constantly moving across the sky.
So, why not move to one of those places? If I am going to bike commute, then, in Durham, that means filling my lungs with voluminous amounts of toxins every morning and evening. And even though public health officials think that the benefits of a regimen of exercise outweighs the individual costs of exposure to poor air quality, just think how much better it would be to ride every day in clean air. Such thoughts are immanent on my daily ride to work.
But to bail on Durham and move someplace else is to give up on the work that needs doing here. It’s the moral equivalent of abandonment: rather than take responsibility for the mess you’ve made, just move somewhere else and start over. Communities are not fungible. If I don’t do what I can to create a clean environment here in Durham, I’ll not likely appreciate Tampa’s environment either.
A better idea is to love the place where you are. Durham’s Greenhouse Gas Plan needs support, and I’m sure there’s something in your town, in your place, that needs your support too. (Link updated; thanks Ellen)
This week’s Carnival of the Green includes submissions from others who are rolling up their sleeves, unafraid of real work.
At Behavioral Ecology, Matt MacManes asks whether the Moss Landing power plant (near San Francisco) is killing marine mammals? “The power plant releases 900,000 tons of CO2, 60 tons of NOx and 4 tons of SO2 into the atmosphere yearly, and 1.2 billion gallons of hot water (50C) DAILY into the ocean,” he says. “ Why do we continue to operate it? Will darkness fall upon San Francisco if we closed it?”
Nina at Queercents asks us to consider the effects of congestion pricing in major metropolitan areas of the United States. “Have you heard the buzz about congestion pricing?” she asks. “What can $8 a day buy you? Soon, the right to drive into NYC.”
The Coding Grasshopper has a follow up to a documentary about Carbon offsetting and whether it actually works.
Leon, at Sox First, takes a look at ways that climate change is affected corporate board room discussions. “Climate change is shaping up the big corporate governance issue of the 21st Century,” he says.
David at The Good Human asks a question I’ve wondered myself — “Why In The World Do Businesses Leave Their Lights On At Night?”
One more corporate concern is whether Burning Man is selling out?
Arvind Devalia submits an urgent plea to save the greenery of Regents Park in Central London for future generations.
Chris Baskind at Lighter Footstep reminds homeowners that traditional milk-based paints are a safe, non-toxic alternative to interior paints containing petroleum products and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
GP presents Present Simplicity posted at Fish Creek House - INNside Innkeeping.
Tracy at Eco Street offers tips to give your garden a green makeover.
and Tiffany Washko presents Eco Friendly Birthday Party posted at Natural Family Living Blog.
The finale for this week’s Carnival is an entry that wasn’t submitted — just one I came across while reading. The author asks a pertinent question that bears repeating in this new wave of popular environmentalism: whether the green aspects of green consumerism outweigh the costs of consumerism itself. Like her, I too am skeptical. Living green is about simplifying one’s demands of the world, and green consumerism is still consumerism. How do we get out of this box?
Thanks to everyone who submitted entries, and thanks for the work you all do to raise the profile of environmental issues. Enjoy this week’s Carnival. Next week’s host is the Organic Researcher.
“death by veganism” — letter to the editor
I’m posting below a letter to the editor written by a friend. This is her letter to the Opinion page editor of the New York Times for running Nina Planck’s ridiculous op-ed, “Death by Veganism,” which contains such gems of research and argumentation as
I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.
and
The fact remains, though, that humans prefer animal proteins and fats to cereals and tubers, because they contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio. This is not true of plant proteins, which are inferior in quantity and quality — even soy.
While other letter writers let Planck have it on the grounds that she can’t get her facts straight, Nancy’s response is, I think, more to the point.
How convenient – not to mention trite – it is to defend humanity’s right to exploit animals in the name of the survival of the human race (”Death by Veganism,” Nina Planck, May 21, 2007). I could not argue with well-made facts about health and nutrition, even if they had been tendered here. But why the relentless campaign against conscious living? Cannot the intelligent resources available to science and the media serve to advance our ability to meet our needs without appealing to speciesist superiority? Is our craving for universal domination so beyond our control that we would rather condemn devastated parents, by whom reasonable risks were taken in the absence of earned community support, than invest in solutions that can protect human life without demanding the misery, suffering, and death of others? Contextualizing this tragedy in the vegan diet does nothing to solve our pandemic public health problems, in a resource-rich nation where children raised on junk food suffer the most. No matter how tempting are the sacrosanct declarations of a benevolent pregnant woman, our survival does not depend on the subordination of animals. Only our hideous arrogance does. An arrogance that has claimed so many lives that it shamefully buries its responsibility for them in the despised, compassionate lives of the forward-thinking vegan in order to survive.
nancy o. gallman
Carnival of the Philosophers
Plato, the person whom many philosophers still admire as the quintessential thinker, conveyed all his thoughts on the emerging discipline philosophy through a character appearing in dialogues. That character, Socrates, lived a fairly marginalized life. He did not teach in a school; he taught in the streets of Athens. He did not engage is very esoteric discussions; there is some practical, real world concern at the heart of each of Plato’s dialogues. And Socrates challenged everyone with whom he conversed to think through their beliefs.
Historians of philosophy tell us that Plato’s emphases on dialectic, skepticism, and reason are the key features of philosophy, but I have always believed that the public relevance and practicality of Plato’s concerns ought to be emphasized as well. So, this week, I present to you a carnival of philosophical inquiries into practical issues.
Gualtiero Piccinini presents Simulation Theory and Robotics posted at Brains. The Leonardo character looks an awful lot like one of the pre-water Gremlins, if you ask me.
David Hunter presents two pieces on the ethics of killing. Killing me softly with his political theory: Social Change, Suicide and Political Theory appears at the International Network for Ethical Issues in Resource Allocation and Killing people in Research: Would you approve? appears at Philosophy and Bioethics.
At a time when war goes largely unquestioned and unexamined, Shaheen Lakhan submitted a refreshing piece by guest writer Frank MacHovec asking whether war is a psychosis?. It’s over at GNIF Brain Blogger.
Enigman asks whether philosophical materialism amounts to an unjustified conception of a god in A Mysterious Subject.
Thad Guy submitted his comic entry Denying Causation, and I invite you to look at his other question-raising strips as well.
Philosophers throughout history have weighed in on how students ought to be educated, but Michele Loi wonders what kind of parents Humeans, Kantians and Aristotelians would be.
The self-proclaimed self-consciously pretentious Adam presents his Personal Foundation for Discussion over at Sophistpundit.
In his post Freedom in Physicalism, Bryan Norwood invites us to attempt to figure out with him what the experience of freedom within physicalism might look like. It’s posted on his blog Movement of Existence.
We have two entries from the Florida Student Philosophy blog this week. First, Jennifer Lawson presents Examples for Teaching Intro. Next, Quincy Faircloth asks what makes the difference between mere sexual interest and perversion.
Avery Archer takes on the daunting (and sometimes futile) task of arguing with fundamentalists in The Philosopher vs. the Biblical Fundamentalist.
Richard Chappell revisits and reexamines Socrates claim that the unexamined life is not worth living over at Philosophy, et cetera.
Finally, over at On Philosophy, Peter asks whether laws concerning file sharing are just.
Thank you for all your thoughtful entries, and I hope you enjoy the Carnival. Common Sense Philosophy is hosting the June 4th Carnival, so send your submissions that way.
A final note: I received many more entries than those which appear here. I took editorial liberties, including only those entries I thought were on topic (the topic was posted well in advance), those that are philosophical rather than didactic (i.e. I did not include self-help prescriptions), and those I could understand.
philosophical turtles
A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”
“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Although all philosophy revolves around using reason and rational argumentation to convince others of your position, there is no way to convince others that reason and dialogue matter unless they are already of that mindset. That’s how I interpret “the tortoise myth.” There’s nothing supporting the turtle (except other turtles), just as there is nothing — except for good faith — at the basis of ethics.
nicomachus.net is hosting the May 14th Philosophers’ Carnival. Since finishing graduate school (and really before then too), I have stood firm beside the opinion that practical philosophy is the philosophy that matters most.
Talking about the National Humanities Center recently with Bob Ashley, Editor of The Herald Sun, I told Ashley that the humanities is just the dialogue on topics we all think and care about every day — history, identity, morality. Reason and dialogue have power to change the world, of that I am convinced. But it will change only if we engage the world — the one we live in. Like Albert Camus, whom the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut once described as his favorite Nobel Prize winner, Vonnegut himself concluded that the only moral choice in the face of an absurd universe is to be a force for good. Vonnegut, again like Camus, was not afraid of philosophy. But nor was he afraid of talking about the pain and suffering that define the real world too.
So this issue of the Philosophers’ Carnival will celebrate practical philosophy — that is, philosophy that matters outside the classroom. Anything from environmental ethics to aesthetics to the absurd to the meaning of death and dying is fair game. This list is not comprehensive, but please, just for one week, no Kripke’s modal logic or possible worlds theories. None of theat pie-in-the-sky stuff. Just some down home, unpretentious reflection on topics you think matter.
Email me your entries or drop them in the submission form.
Industries of Cruelty
Less than a week after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employees in North Carolina faced charges of cruelty for performing anesthetized euthanasia on unwanted animals, then tossing them in dumpsters, the state’s council of commissioners had to vote on whether North Carolina’s method for disposing of unwanted citizens is properly antiseptic. While PETA’s employees were cleared of cruel and unusual behavior, it’s not clear whether the State’s death penalty will be.
 Photo courtesy of the Socialist Party of North Carolina |
For a state that condones such agricultural practices as crating pigs during breeding, forced insemination of dairy cattle to keep them lactating and debeaking chickens to bring charges of cruelty against PETA rings hollow. Nonetheless, the case focused unusual attention on an organization that sees itself as the champion of animal rights. While democratic governments ought to be the champions of their citizens’ right, the charges against the State of North Carolina aren’t flavored with the same twist of irony. Perhaps that’s because the State government has demonstrated its investment in cruelty, to both animals and people.
The singularity of the human species is ingrained in our minds from birth. One thing on which creationists and scientists can agree is that in the chain of being there is nothing else like us. Whether we descended from apes or gods, we’re special. Because of the implicit self-importance in that claim (that we, humans, are either the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen few), there is room in human consciousness (and conscience) for hierarchy. The room for hierarchy among species is what makes room for hierarchies within human society.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could interpret our uniqueness as just a collection of attributes which says nothing about our relationship to other species. Or, if we are the pinnacle of evolution, we might see our place in the chain of being as benevolent care-takers of the earth. Instead, we interpret our phylogenetic achievements as the basis of a ranking system where we come out on top. We see ourselves as masters with dominion over all other species. Instead, we are superior, and our superiority justifies the degree to which we discount the interests of non-human animals.
The stratification of species with which we’re so comfortable creates room in our consciousness for treating people disparately based on their behavior. If people behave a certain way, if they violate norms or act objectionably, then those people forfeit their place in the chain of being, leaving them worthy only of the respect due to lesser animals.
Murder is unacceptable, whether it is carried out by an individual or the state. In either case, murders are often derivative of human imperfection. We refuse to accept that frustration, helplessness, panic, and other common feelings sometimes precipitate the most egregious interpersonal violence. And we refuse to admit that the death penalty is merely a legitimized form of retribution. Instead we say that the state is balancing the scales of justice while the incarcerated murderer is a deviant whose aberrant conduct is less than human. The state relies on its claim to superiority, which in this context is called authority, to distinguish its acts of killing as legitimate. Murderers are worthy only of our disrespect, marginalization, and dismissal. Since murderers have acted like animals, so the thinking goes, we can treat them like animals — locked in pens, waiting for slaughter.
Every way that the criminal justice system is unethical is mirrored in our industrial agricultural practices. Prisons are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated people whose executions are often botched. Factory farms are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated animals whose slaughters are often botched.
Some will resist the comparison between the prison industrial complex and the agro-industrial complex, but rejecting the comparison is premised on unfamiliarity with one or both of the industries. That we allow ourselves to be unfamiliar with our past and present industries of cruelty characterizes the limits of our compassion.
We would rather not know how hamburger is made, so not many of us visit factory farms. We would rather not know that we, a civilized people, have a death penalty, so we hold our executions at night and bury them deep in the bowels of labyrinthine cinder block structures.
Some say it’s time to move on and bury our sullied past in the wake of our progress. But the wake of progress smells more like diesel fumes in the wake of inmate transfer buses and is as blinding as the wake of feathers swirling behind poultry trucks.
The change has to begin somewhere. It’s exciting to see Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation spend time on bestseller lists. Perhaps these books can change our conception of food, challenge some of the policies that make factory farming profitable, or turn some hearts. They won’t do it alone, however. Our investments in cruelty are too tangled for any meaningful change to result from tackling symptoms instead of causes. We have to see that we will never treat cattle or hogs or chickens any better until we see that there’s something objectionable about the way we imprison people.
As these ideas percolate, perhaps we will be as discomforted by our habit or throwing away people and non-domestic animals as we were by PETA employees throwing away dogs and cats.
This piece originally appeared at OpEdNews.com and was published as an Op-Ed in the Herald Sun under the title “Institutionalizing Cruelty to Animals.”
spam comments and happiness
Spam blog comments are hilarious to me because of the ridiculously predictable syntactic patterns they fall into. They pretty much all begin with a compliment on your blog so generic that it could be said about any website followed by links to porn/herbal supplement/penis enlargement/loan consolidation/mortgage sites. And when I say links, I mean lots and lots of links. That’s one of the ways it’s so easy to spot spam comments. Who else is going to put fifteen links in one comment?
Thursday, I deleted 8374 spam-comments in one fell swoop, 99.99% of which had been caught by the spam-comment filter.
Here’s a thought — spammers, write bots that post comments with no links. Get yourself approved first as a trusted commenter, then send out your linkage. I mean, come on. Your usual tactics are too obvious. Try something new. I’m not trying to help out the spammers as much as trying to keep my housecleaning interesting. Once I’ve learned to nominalize a type of spam, it’s boring reading the same syntactic pattern 1000+ times.
What I really don’t understand about spam is its prevalence as a method of advertising. I should back up and say that I don’t really understand advertising either. I just don’t get how a photograph of some new car/vacation resort/shirt/cell phone/whatever whose digital enhancements are more obvious than Cybill Shepherd’s glow in Moonlighting is supposed to convince me to part with my money. The more effective kind of advertising is the kind so subtle that you don’t even realize that’s what it is. I would say that bike magazines are an example, because you can’t tell the difference between the articles and the ads, but that’s for a different reason. The ads are clearly ads; it’s just that so are the articles.
 “Buy-cycling” magazine sinks to a new low |
No, the subtle, insidious advertising that’s most effective has to do with convincing people they need plasma TVs (well, TV in the first place), cappuccino makers, ringtones for cell phones, and Microsoft Windows. Things. Happiness has as much to do with consuming things as The Family Circus has to do with humor: people think they’re related, but they’re just not.
But about spam, what I don’t understand is how it persists as a phenomenon. I assume that it persists because its effective. But that’s what I don’t get. Who buys stuff from spammers? Who falls for the old “you won the lottery… in England… where you’ve never been nor bought a ticket” trick? Who hasn’t yet heard of the Nigerian bank account scam? And even if you haven’t, c’mon folks, you wouldn’t trust a stranger who one day knocks on your door and says they want to share 4 million dollars with you if only you’d turn over access to your bank account. Why would you believe an email saying the same thing?
On the internet we’re anonymous, or so we think. For some reason, we think anonymity protects us. So we can be anonymous in our ignorance, our gullibility. At a conference I helped organize in the fall, neuroscientist Chris Wood told the following joke:
In the brain, there is gullibility. How gullible are you? Do you think you could go to a neurosurgeon and have your gullibility removed, leaving everything else intact? If so, you’re pretty gullible and you probably ought to consider having the operation.
While your online identity may be virtual, the money in your bank account is not. At least, it’s not virtual in the same way that online identities are. More money won’t necessarily make you happy, but your happiness depends on having a baseline of material comfort. Falling for spammer’s scams can upset that baseline. Maybe we fall for it for the same reason we buy lottery tickets: we believe we’re entitled to more in life than toiling away at work.
Advertising works in the employ of the two great lies of happiness we’re told in this country. When we’re young, we’re told that everyone has an equal chance to be happy. As we get older, we learn that happiness has a specific shape — it looks like 401Ks, two cars, a spouse, 1.7 kids, and a green lawn. We also learn that some people have a more equal chance at happiness than others.
Later in life we’re told the other lie. No matter how much happiness you have, it’s not enough. But if you’ll only work a little harder, you’ll have more. It’s never OK to say, “I like my life, and I don’t need that new car, that time share at the beach, or any more insurance.”
Thus, the two lies of happiness are complementary: work hard to achieve happiness, and you’ll never work hard enough.
In August, soon after my brother returned to South Carolina from a year spent in South America, the family gathered at the beach to welcome him home. Parting ways at the end of the week, I took the train back to Durham with a one-and-a-half hour layover in Wilson, NC. At the station, I met Roscoe, a former truck driver and cold war era Army vet. He wonders what it will take for this country to turn around, to realize that there is more than enough money in the United States to make sure no sick person is without health care, no hungry person is without food, no jobless person is without a home. Seeing eye to eye, we both wonder why we’re the ones considered radicals.
After serving in the Army in the 70’s, he went to college and studied a little philosophy. We talked about Plato’s Republic, about trying to figure out what justice really is, and about whether the next generation will be any better prepared for the demands of a liberal democracy. Socrates, Plato’s voice in the Republic, didn’t live long enough to see the iPod or its advertisements. Hemlock ended his life prematurely. But even without seeing the ways that Hollywood and Wall Street distort our sense of value, Socrates knew that materialism is a poor substitute for a life of civic virtue. He died 2400 years ago.
Known since the days of ancient Greece, living simply is no more tied to poverty than happiness is tied to wealth. And yet we still have trouble disentangling both.
Gender Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty System
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Phillip Barron
Originally published in the Radical Philosophy Review, Volume Three, Number One (2000) (pp. 89-96)
Abstract: Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are the criminal justice system’s primary targets, I argue that the system also discriminates against women. Utilizing contemporary feminist theories of gender, I argue that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating norms of gender correctness.
The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Doping scandals spoiling the spirit of sports
Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
Allegations that cyclists are doping are so common that anyone accused is guilty until proven innocent. And that’s taking its toll on the sport. The cover of the October Bicycling, arguably the sport’s leading monthly, makes plain why it matters – whether Floyd Landis doped or didn’t, “either way, we lose.”
Did Landis pull off one of the greatest accomplishments in cycling’s history? The night before stage 17 of this year’s Tour de France, Floyd Landis told his wife he was going to “go out in the morning and do something big.” He attacked – broke away from his competitors, setting his own maniacal pace — so early in the day that most thought he had no chance of following through. When you attack like he did you ride on your own, without the wind-breaking assistance of the peloton or even your own team. He went on to win stage 17, setting himself up to win the Tour.
Or, did he pull off an incredible fraud? A few days after being crowned champion of the Tour, a blood sample tested positive for irregularities – an unnaturally high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone.
There are good reasons to doubt that he cheated. Testosterone is an anabolic steroid: a muscle-builder. It’s the choice of weight lifters or sprinters, not endurance athletes. Testosterone helps an athlete only cumulatively. Over time, it helps an athlete amass muscle – more quickly, yes, but it’s not an instant effect. If Landis was using synthetic testosterone for a performance boost, traces of it would have shown up prior to stage 17.
Besides, testosterone is produced naturally by the body and the human body is complex in ways that continue to baffle scientists. In addition to controlling muscle-growth, testosterone regulates bone density. A few days into the Tour, Landis announced he was suffering necrosis of the hip and was scheduled for hip surgery immediately following the Tour.
Human performance, at the level of a professional athlete, is a matter of refined efficiency. Do we know that the human body, especially one tuned as efficiently as Landis’ and suffering a degenerative bone disease, could not independently and naturally slow its production of epistestosterone and accelerate its production of testosterone as a matter of survival? Landis may be right; he may not be able to give a good explanation of his blood sample.
If he successfully defends himself, Landis may recover his place on a pro-team and maybe even his reputation. He may keep his title to the TdF, but the damage seems to be done. The culture of drug-use in sports is so pervasive (or at least apparently so) that we’re ready to believe the accused are guilty before all the evidence is in and without understanding the contested accuracy of the blood testing techniques.
About the only thing going for cycling’s continuing dope-scandal plague is that it’s not just cycling’s problem. The U.S. Congress held special hearings in 2005 to investigate alleged drug use in Major League Baseball and is currently holding similar hearings investigating steroid use in the National Football League. Earlier this summer, Marion Jones and Justin Gatlin, international level track athletes, each failed doping tests and subsequently lost their multi-million dollar contracts with Nike.
The real problem is that while the margin between winning and losing is usually small on the clock, it’s much bigger in the paycheck.
Athletes competing at the elite professional level live or die by the fractions of seconds between finishes. Taking any amount of drugs won’t make me ride as fast as Landis, but it might give someone who is already training as hard as Landis the boost he needs to edge out a competitor. And there’s his incentive.
The difference in lifestyle between a first place finisher and a fifth place finisher is more exaggerated than the differing times it takes them to cross the finish line. Corporate money in sports is corrupting sport itself. And it’s the willingness to be bought, that most capitalist of virtues, that infects the players and brings the gods of physical performance down to our very human level.
Don’t believe me? Tell me (and without Googling it) who finished second to Lance in each of his seven Tour de France wins. Or, this year, who stood in the third place spot on the podium while Landis stood on top? We don’t know because OLN, Nike, Campagnolo, Phonak, Gerolsteiner, and everyone else who has money in sports reward one spot: the top of the podium.
What’s the answer to doping in sports? I don’t know… I don’t have an answer, but I think a worthy pursuit in life is to ask questions the answers to which cannot be Googled. It’s often useful just to articulate the problem, and that may be all we can do.
The growing popularity of single-speed rallies (Happy Fun Racing hosts one locally each year) and alleycats (five in the Triangle area so far in 2006) speaks to the growing uneasiness with the one-winner-one-reward paradigm. Weekend alleycats have traditional race elements, as does the Single Speed World Championship, but their rewards range from tattoos to messenger bags and bike parts, which are often distributed more democratically. They’re often more anti-race, and more fun.
The monthly Tuesday night Cruiser Ride – Carrboro’s social ride praising the virtues of low-tech and slow pace – is no race at all. It’s a creative reminder that riding a bike is supposed to be fun.
Good news — Yesterday, Marion Jones was cleared of doping allegations when her “B” sample tested negative. Let’s see if Nike treats her a little more favorably.
The Outspokin’ Cyclist: Some athletes lose sight of sportsmanship of biking
Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
Jan Ulrich and Ivan Basso lost their bids for the yellow jersey to Operation Puerta before this year’s Tour de France even began.
Operation Puerta isn’t a new contender for victory; it’s a six-month doping investigation and arguably the most significant doping scandal of bicycle racing. Thanks to OP, thirteen professional riders were kicked out of the race and more than forty others are involved in a continuing investigation.
Around the same time Operation Puerta’s news was breaking, Lance Armstrong was wrapping up his latest victory. He settled a libel suit with a British newspaper that had accused him of using banned drugs to speed his recovery from cancer and boost him to a Tour de France victory in 1999.
What’s at issue when cyclists are accused of doping is whether or not professional athletes have cheated. The Tour de France is a stage race, spanning nearly a month with riders covering up to 130 miles per day with brutal climbing stages in the Alps and Pyrenees. Since stage races in cycling are tests of endurance and aerobic strength, cheating methods revolve around ways to increase the rider’s aerobic efficiency.
Did Lance use EPO? Did Jan Ulrich freeze his own blood for a transfusion at a later time? What would it matter if they did? More plainly, what’s wrong with doping anyway?
The superficial answer is that doping is against the rules. Every professional sport has a governing body that establishes the rules of the sport and the conditions under which athletes may compete. Doping is breaking the rules of the game. In a sense, it’s like goaltending in basketball or slide-tackling in soccer.
But goaltending or slide-tackling can happen by accident, whereas doping is intentional. That’s why the penalty for doping is more serious than giving the other team a foul shot or a free kick.
Doping is rule-breaking that you try desperately and secretly to get away with. An athlete caught doping will usually have gone to elaborate lengths to hide it.
In other words, doping is cheating.
For a more meaningful answer to the question what’s wrong with doping, we have to see sport in a more meaningful context. And to do this, we turn to the arbiters of meaning – philosophers.
In The Philosophical Athlete, Heather Reid says that all sports have moments of challenge — “times when an athlete finds him- or herself alone, faced with a particular task and the very real possibilities of success or failure.”
It is these moments of challenge that make sport meaningful. Whether or not you can rise to the challenge – whether the challenge is to make the free throw, outrun a defender, or beat the current best time in a bicycle race — is a matter of discipline and skill. Whether you can do so while respecting your opponents is a matter of personal integrity.
An athlete who dopes disrespects him or herself as well as his/her competitors, officials, and fans.
Without opponents there wouldn’t be any competitive sports. Using drugs or blood transfusions to gain an advantage over your competitors is to disrespect your competitors by ignoring the rules of game. Without a competitor, there is no opportunity to win. Opponents are necessary to play the game or race the race. So, respect for your competitors is what fairness in sport is based on.
Cheating (or doping) enters the picture when the desire to win the game supplants the desire to be an athlete who is worthy of winning.
Pop culture’s values may be different. On reality TV or in a culture of on-demand instant gratification, cheating is more a strategy to get ahead of your competitor than the forbidden alternative. Indeed, in these nihilistic venues getting caught, rather than cheating, is the sign of weakness.
But the concepts of respect and fairness, archaic as they may sound to some, are still what sport is based on. Training is a performance enhancing activity done in earnest. Preparing for a race, there is no substitute (physically or morally) for practice. If sport is a measure of physical discipline, mental toughness, and moral determination, then cheating leaves us unworthy of playing the game (much less winning).
Without Jan Ulrich, David Zabriske, Ivan Basso, Floyd Landis, or George Hincapie racing against him, Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories would be meaningless. They also would have been meaningless if he hadn’t developed the muscle-tone or dexterous precision needed to rocket his body and bike across the French countryside.
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