“Truly play” vs. “play true”. Why doping is not the problem in sport

Abstract

Doping helped a lot in the recent discovery of sport by philosophers. Doping seems to be an ethical problem in sport and philosophers are experts in ethics. Therefore, many philosophical publications on sport research the moral implications of doping in sport. Usually, this topic is discussed by using ethical terms like justice, fairness, equality or health in a frame of discussions on human enhancement. The main part of this article will address some of the results of these philosophical debates. But my main goal is to open up on another problem of sport that is underlying and far more fundamental than the problem of doping. The thesis is that sport’s main problem is the oblivion of an attitude that one could call “amateurism”. Without reinstalling the humanistic value of sport we will not find intellectually satisfactory and conceptually sound solutions to the doping problem. Sport’s humanistic values are undermined by the modern version of sport obsessed with specialization and scientific capability enhancement and the digitalization of results and events.