I’ve found that I’m more skeptical than average about whether the deliverances of political institutions carry some sort of moral authority. It no longer surprises me that much when people disagree with me about this. It still surprises me a little when people take the side of the rules of institutions in which they have no stake at all.
The latest case is about Russian Olympic skater Kamila
Valieva, who tested positive for a banned drug but is still being allowed to
compete this week. Lots
of people find this egregious. NBC’s
announcers were so incensed that they declined
to comment on her short program.
The general feeling seems to be that it’s unfair for Valieva
to skate, given her failed drug test.
Letting her compete upends the “level
playing field,” thereby compromising “the integrity of the sport.”
I’ve been exercised
before about how I think rules
are overrated. Here I want to make
two more points. First, rules aren’t
always connected to fairness. Second,
fairness isn’t always the most important thing.
Consider five ways that rules and fairness can come apart:
(1) There
may not be good reasons supporting rules.
Just because there are rules, it doesn’t mean they’re the right
rules. I don’t work for the IOC, so why
do I care about what rules they happen to have?
Remember the runner who got banned from the Olympics for using
marijuana? That doesn’t make sense,
right? It’s not as though smoking
marijuana improves one’s sprinting.
There’s no
issue of fairness here. Some
journalists have made the entirely
fair point that “if you cared about the ‘rules’ with Sha’Carri Richardson
and weed, make sure you still care about them with Kamila Valieva and
trimetazidine.” I would just add that we
can put the point the other way, too. If
you were against the rules then, I invite you to side against them now, as well.
(2) Even
if there are good reasons for rules, those reasons may not be based on
considerations of fairness. Sometimes it does make sense to have a rule, but it’s not because
violating the rule would give a competitor an unfair advantage. It might be that there are other reasons to
constitute the game in some ways rather than others. I’ve heard differing explanations about why
the drug in question – trimetazidine – is banned. Some experts seemed puzzled why one would be
motivated to take it at all in pursuit of an advantage.
(3) Even
if there are good, fairness-based reasons supporting rules, the underlying
value may not be implicated by the case at hand. Maybe it’s true that in most cases, taking
the drug would confer an advantage by enhancing heart performance and increasing
endurance. But it seems like there is
reason to doubt this holds for Valieva, a 15 year old and a high level
athlete. As an NPR
explainer observes, “certainly for an elite athlete, this may not make much
of a difference.”
(4) Even
if there are good, fairness-based reasons supporting rules that are implicated
in the case at hand, some penalties might still make things less rather than
more fair. The IOC’s
take, which has really been getting worked over, strikes me as
completely reasonable. It might both be
true that there is a reason for the rule, that the reason is based on fairness,
and also that enforcing the rule by banning Valieva would be more unfair. Set aside all this debate about how
she’s a protected person and how best to protect her. Suppose we are running a race and you step
slightly out-of-bounds, shortening the distance between you and the finish line
by – say – 3 inches. That's unfair. But suppose also that you beat
me by twenty yards. I guess I could tsk
tsk you about the misstep, but that seems like poor sportsmanship. My point here is that these issues will
depend on local facts to the activity in question. Admittedly, I know nothing about professional
skating. I’m just saying that we would
need to know more about how the rules
work – not just the facts about what the rules say.
(5) Fairness
might just be outweighed by other considerations. Remember when Michael Jordan, in the last
seconds of his last game playing for Chicago, pushed off of Byron
Russell to hit the game winning shot for a sixth championship? In Utah, people
still remember. Anyway, my understanding
of the basketball consensus on this point is that Jordan did in fact foul
Russell, but also that no NBA referee would call the foul. Why not?
Well, to have the greatest player in the world in the moment of his
greatest achievement – and then to intervene to settle things with a rules
violation – that doesn’t seem right. In
other words, it might not have been fair that Jordan got the call, but fairness
wasn’t the most important value in the moment.
I’m not saying that morality doesn’t trump; rather, maybe morality isn’t
really the issue in these cases. Russell
himself was philosophical in his reflections on the moment. “Why have somebody that works
that hard against you? Why not have him
with you?” Russell asks. “It doesn’t
matter,” he says.