Is Any Olympic Athlete Truly Natural? A Philosophical and Ethical Inquiry
Reflections on Naturalness, Fairness, and Performance Enhancement
Disclaimer: This post is an improved version of an earlier one. Here I go further and rethink it in the context of the Olympics. For the former, see:
Sports competitions like the Olympics always come with their share of questions and scandals. This year Olympics in Paris was no exception and I would be willing to bet that future Olympics will also face similar questions.
The main issue that comes up again and again in sports is doping. We question whether an athlete’s performance is natural or whether they might have had an unfair advantage. The first thing we think about when considering if an athlete is ‘natural’ is the use of performance-enhancing drugs. However, consider the following.
Athletes are well trained and capable of performances that ‘normal people’, whatever such an expression may mean, cannot even dream of. Most of us will never be able to run a marathon in under 2:10 like the top 16 marathoners, or run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds, like the finalists for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
From a philosophical point of view, such a question as “Are these athletes natural?” is far from simple. What do you mean by ‘natural’? since it is certainly not ‘natural’ for most people to run the 100 meters in only 10 seconds.
In this article, I will take a philosophical look at the concept of ‘natural’ and the implications it might have for our thoughts about sports and other walks of life.
What is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’?
The word “nature” and its equivalent in other languages has a rich variety of meanings, as noted in recent research (Ducarme et al. 2020; Droz et al. 2022).
As explained in this research, the meaning of this term varies in space and time, according to cultures, historical, and intellectual contexts. In what we commonly call ‘modern Western culture’, the word ‘nature’ refers to the object of study of the physical and biological sciences.
By contrast, ‘unnatural’ is qualified as that which is not found in nature. We can divide ‘unnatural’ into different categories such as:
That which does not exist and is imaginary.
That which cannot even be imagined.
That which is artificial, i.e. man-made.
When we speak of an ‘unnatural’ performance, we do not mean that the performance is not real or imaginary, but of course that it is achieved artificially.
But the question is, what does it mean to say that something is artificially achieved, and what could be the opposite: an un-artificially achieved performance, an un(man)made performance?
Is Training ‘Natural’?
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