Drug Use Among Navy SEALs
The case for the ethical acceptability of performance-enhancing drugs
A main explanation for the wrongness of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) is that they give users an unfair advantage over their competitors. This unfairness is due to a couple things. In organized games, using drugs is cheating when it’s against the formal, explicit rules. Thus, Lance Armstrong cheated by using drugs, and this was wrong, the explanation goes, because it gave him an unfair advantage over his competitors. Even when there aren’t formal rules prohibiting drug use, it can be unfair according to broader norms such as the law or a shared understanding of good conduct.
In sports, an unfair advantage is also wrong because the outcomes are zero-sum. You winning a gold medal necessarily prevents me from winning one, so your gain is my loss. If you got your gold medal at least in part because of the use of banned drugs, then you cheated by having a means of success that wasn’t available to me.
This is so even though many rules in sport are arbitrary in the sense that, at least within a range, the rules could change without making it a different sport. Thus, we get debates about ‘super shoes’ and track material in running, super swimsuits in swimming, pole length and wax use in cross-country skiing, and on and on. There’s no pure essence of each sport that is captured by each and every rule. Some rules are essential (no using hands in soccer), while others are not (the length of the game). It’s more important that people are following the same rules, whatever they are.
It gets trickier when we try to extend this framework beyond sports. For example, some people object to the high use of cognitive enhancers by college students because, they contend, it gives these students an unfair advantage. But it’s less clear what’s unfair about it in academics, since many schools don’t have explicit rules against it. The students who aren’t using them could start, so there’s no intrinsic problem (although acquiring drugs without a prescription can be expensive, which will be more of a factor in some contexts than others). There’s also evidence that the most commonly used prescription drugs, such as Adderall, don’t actually do much to improve academic performance relative to a placebo for people who don’t have ADHD (and especially in the long term). The effects of other differences, such as being able to afford a tutor or to avoid working during college, are surely more significant.
As with rules in sports, another extension problem is that distinguishing ethical from unethical forms of enhancement is arbitrary. This is because it’s hard to define ‘enhancement’ in a way that captures just PEDs without capturing other types of enhancement that are considered permissible, such as training at altitude, using permitted supplements such as creatine, special equipment for recovery or performance, etc. The law is also often unhelpful, since some things that are illegal in some countries, such as cannabis, are prohibited elsewhere (and are prohibited in competition by the World Anti-Doping Agency).
More generally, glasses, books, cars, computers, and pretty much everything else in society are enhancement technologies, so the argument that using x is wrong because x is an enhancement technology doesn’t work.
Anyway, an article in the New York Times a few days ago describes the brutal training program U.S. sailors must go through to become Navy SEALs members. Sailors are pushed to exhaustion, regularly sustain serious injuries such as concussions, broken bones, and swimming-induced pulmonary edema, and there’s little medical oversight or help available if something goes wrong. The article also reports that many sailors, including one who recently died immediately after completing ‘hell week’, regularly use prohibited PEDs.
There are a few different concerns. One is that rampant drug use might select for the wrong people. A SEAL team leader is quoted in the article as follows:
“What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?” said the leader. “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision?”
Another concern is unfairness. The article describes a sailor who refused to use drugs and didn’t make it through the course. The sailor later died by suicide and told his father that he felt that “he’d been cheated out of something he had worked hard for.”
A final concern is about the difficulty of the course. The article puts it as follows:
If enough people in a community are doping, […] it spreads risk even to those who are clean, as the level of competition rises and more people are pushed to exhaustion and injury.
These concerns are appropriate, but the article puts too much blame on the wrongness of drug use when, in reality, it’s the choices of SEALs leadership that have led to these problems. The sailors’ use of PEDs is probably ethically acceptable.
Consider the concern that doping increases risk for everyone, since more people will be pushed to exhaustion and injury. First, it isn’t clear from the article if the rate of injuries in the course has increased. If it hasn’t, the argument doesn’t hold much water. But even if it has, other factors are doing more work. If the rate of drug use has increased over time and this increase caused the SEALs leadership to make the course proportionally harder, the course pass rate should stay about the same. But this isn’t what has happened. As the article says, the pass rate has dropped from 40 percent in the 1980s, to 26 percent over the past 25 years, to 14 percent in 2021 (with some classes being even lower). Therefore, the bigger reason is that the course has become much harder, which better explains the high rate of injuries. PEDs use doesn’t justify how hard the course is. (And, to be clear, I’m not assessing whether the course is too hard, all things considered.)
The core concern is about fairness, which, as I described above, is more of a factor as competition gets closer to being zero-sum. College and SEALs training are similar in that they’re not purely zero-sum, but competition is a factor. Most college courses aren’t graded on a curve, so one person’s A+ doesn’t preclude someone else from getting an A+. However, the quality of other students plays a role, though it’s harder to measure. And competition exists in other aspects: undergrads compete for jobs, graduate/med/law school spots, etc.
SEALs training is similar. The pass rate isn’t fixed, which is why some classes have higher pass rates than others. It isn’t zero-sum. However, it’s still a competitive process; passing the course doesn’t guarantee a spot on a SEALs team. Therefore, there’s something to the argument that drug use is unfair because it hurts others, but the effects are diffused.
The central question is whether drug use was unethical. The SEALs leader asked what he was going to do with “A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an ethical decision[.]” Here’s an argument that using PEDs was ethically acceptable. Fair competition is about an even playing field—about not having an unfair advantage—based on shared norms. Therefore, if lots of people are using PEDs, the norms have changed and it’s no longer an unfair advantage to use them yourself.
The Times article paints a clear picture that PEDs, and ‘cheating’ more broadly, is a norm among potential SEALs members. The SEALs apparently have a saying that “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” Drug use is described as “deeply embedded” and “rampant”, and sailors felt compelled to use them because so many others were.
Given this, the argument that PEDs are an unfair advantage looks less plausible. Instead, sailors who don’t use drugs are the outliers and are at a disadvantage relative to the majority. Using PEDs levels the playing field. Given that fairness is relative to what everyone else is doing, once enough people are using PEDs, it’s ethically acceptable to use them yourself.
There are reasons not to like this argument. For one, it makes it easier to convince yourself that PEDs are justified in contexts where they aren’t actually that common, which could lead to more drug use. Another is that it changes the ethical status of other examples of cheating, including Lance Armstrong’s. Eric Moore uses the argument above to conclude that Armstrong didn’t actually cheat, since drug use was common and the rules weren’t enforced. (Others have pushed back.) A broader point is that cheating can become part of the skill and strategy of the competition, which aligns with a former SEAL member’s description of cheating being encouraged. He says that “No one can do everything the instructors ask, so you have to learn how to cheat to get through,” and adds that “Everyone knows it happens. The point is to learn how to not get caught.” Given this environment, PEDs are no longer a form of wrongful cheating.
I find the argument plausible, so I don’t agree with the SEAL leader’s claim that drug use signals an inability of sailors to make ethical decisions. Drug use in this case was ethically acceptable.
This doesn’t mean that nothing should be done. The problem with the current system is that some people are using PEDs while others aren’t, which is still unfair. One way to address this is to test for drug use, which the SEALs did for a few years but then stopped. Another way is to let everyone use drugs. This might actually be more fair, since drugs can equal out some of the natural differences in ability that people are born with (and which aren’t fairly distributed). It’s also a harm-reduction method.
Focusing on drug use is a distraction from the real issue, which is the design of the course and the lack of medical oversight. Those are leadership decisions that should be rectified.