Positive Liberty

“Steroids,” I suggested.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” replied the Cynic. “That’s so two weeks ago.”

“I’m afraid not,” I replied. “Or in any event, I pay you quite handsomely to indulge my interests.”

I had assembled both the councils this time, the Ethical and the Un-. The ordinary conference room wasn’t large enough to hold them all; we met outside and sat about the gently curving benches of an ancient coliseum.

“And why does this interest you?” asked the Empiricist. “You don’t care about sports at all.”

“I don’t. But I use steroids every day of my life. I have asthma, and a steroid inhaler helps me to breathe. I’m worried, though, since Congress seems to think I might be doing something immoral.”

“Spare me,” said the Cynic, “I have competition enough as it is.”

“You’re taking that inhaler because you are ill,” said the Humanitarian. “Baseball players take steroids even when they aren’t.”

“I don’t feel ill. I’m just able to do more when I take it: I can lift more, run faster, and work harder, all thanks to steroids. I want to know why it’s perfectly okay for me to say this–but perfectly wrong for baseball players.”

“The guy’s got a point. So people are taking drugs to get stronger,” said the Malthusian. “I can’t say I blame them. It’s a tough world out there, and you’ve got to do whatever you can to get by.”

“To get by?” said the Capitalist. “Have you seen their salaries? This is hardly a matter of mere sufficiency.”

“And think of all that fame!” said Amour-Propre. He nudged False Seeming with his elbow, feeling pleased with himself as always.

“Let’s say nothing of the other kinds of attention,” added Lust. Amour-Propre stopped smiling.

“An honorable person wouldn’t resort to steroids,” said the Stoic. “Not even if it meant getting ahead. A victory by cheating isn’t a victory at all.”

“Behold a philosophy for chumps and losers,” said Thrasymachus. “I’ve never heard such a sour grapes story in my entire life.”

“It’s a prisoner’s dilemma,” said the Capitalist. “Once one person cheats, everyone else has to cheat too–that, or they end up losing. Of course, the best outcome would be if no one cheated. But all it takes is one person, and from there on out it’s devil take the hindmost.”

“But wait just a minute,” I replied. “You’re going about this all wrong. Baseball is supposed to be entertaining, right? That’s why fans turn out for these games in the first place. So let me ask you this–How do steroids actually hurt the entertainment value of the game?”

“They shouldn’t hurt at all,” said the Epicurean. “Is seeing a really great game any less entertaining–merely because there are certain chemicals in a player’s blood? It’s not like you can see the chemicals, after all.”

“He’s got that right,” said the Stoner. “And it would be a pity, too, having to scratch this one out of the record books.”

We looked it up, chuckled, and moved on.

“I can tell you why the fans want steroids out of the game,” said the Empiricist. “It’s simple, really. Baseball is among the most statistically rigorous sports ever designed. The integrity of the statistics, year by year, depends on a more or less constant set of physical conditions. Witness how upset baseball fans get about even tiny changes in the manufacture of the balls, the bats, or the playing surface. Steroids play havoc with the numbers, and thanks to them, we might never be able to compare Hank Aaron and Mark McGuire.”

“And we could compare them before this mess?” I said.

“Exactly,” said the Academic. “Lots of people make a good living doing just that; they’re called sportswriters.”

“Not so fast,” said the Humanitarian. “Sure, steroids are new. And they’re even artificial. But what about the MRI? How many injured players have had MRIs? Didn’t they get back into the game faster, and with better care for their injuries? You can’t tell me it didn’t affect their statistics. And the same can be said of countless advances in diagnosis, surgical techniques, antibiotics, training regimes, even nutrition. In a sense, they are all artificial.”

“You mean you can never step into the same baseball game twice?” asked the Skeptic.

“Something like that,” replied the Humanitarian.

“Then baseball isn’t what we thought it was,” said the Skeptic. “The playing field is far larger than we imagined. Properly speaking, we don’t merely play baseball on a diamond with a bat and a ball. We play it all the time, in the weight room, at the breakfast table, while we sleep, and at every other moment of the day, so long as we’ll eventually get onto the literal field of play. And we are even playing the game at the very moment when we are most convinced of the contrary–in the hospitals where they patch up our injuries.”

“Nonsense,” said the Social Darwinist. “We can take pride in medical advances that produce or restore the health of the players. We can look at the statistics of baseball and see them improving, year by year. They give a measure of our culture’s superiority, and we ought to be proud of it. Steroids, though, are way too easy and way too cheap.”

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“I think you are getting at something very important when you talk about culture,” said the Academic. “Who exactly are we when we play baseball? We are members of a self-declared community, one that stretches from our great-grandfathers’ day right up to the present. Yet we can’t all be quite on the same page at the same time. It’s romantic nonsense to think otherwise.

“If you really want a test of skill between the players of old and those of today, then you have to recognize that times have changed. Once we ask ourselves, ‘Which ones are the real players?’ we will have no end of pointless debates. Maybe we should standardize absolutely everything–and let the genes be the only difference?”

“How many would pay to see that?” asked the Cynic.

“Who cares?” asked the Empiricist. “More to the point, what are we to do about the persistent feeling of corruption in baseball? It might not be well-reasoned or consistent, but it sure can be annoying.”

“Thought experiment,” said the Capitalist. Thrasymachus sniffed.

“Imagine that there were two completely independent leagues. In one, the players may use steroids however they wish, while in the other they may not–and somehow, against all odds, we are completely certain that the drug-free league has no violations. Which one would have better ticket sales?” The crowd was silent.

“And which league would be safer and more enjoyable to play in?” He didn’t need to answer.

“And which one would have the more commensurate statistics?” Again, no need to answer.

“Now what if there were no limits on the number of professional baseball leagues and teams, no limits on which teams may play whom or for what, no antitrust to muck up the works? What if there were no laws against steroids? Suppose”–a smile crossed his face–”that there were a free market in baseball?”

“You would have all kinds of leagues,” said the Academic. “And most teams wouldn’t make very much money, I imagine. In nearly all of them, using steroids would either not be worth the risk–or at the very least the risk would be kept scrupulously in proportion, since the rewards would never be so great as to encourage anything all that foolish.”

“The fans could choose the teams and leagues they wanted to favor; each could compete by offering different levels of drug testing, different standards of ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ substances–even different levels of medical care, for those who really wanted a fair comparison with Babe Ruth’s era,” I said. “If you want to compare today’s statistics to any other time period, under any other set of conditions, the numbers would not be lacking.”

“But some leagues,” said the Devil’s Advocate, “might even make a pretense of drug testing–but just for show, while the players never really get caught.”

“That would be false advertising,” said the Capitalist, “and illegal.”

“Oh yeah.”

“And it would scarcely be worse than what we have today,” said the Cynic.

Someone produced a bat and a ball. We took out our gloves, paced out a diamond in the ruined coliseum, and played the game exactly as it was meant to be played.

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