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Steroids Should Not Be Allowed In Sports

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Coercion limits freedom by manipulating a person into believing that he/she cannot refuse a choice they were offered (i.e has no other option but to make the choice imposed onto them by a manipulator), by means of societal pressure. In sports, many athletes feel compelled to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) like steroids. The use of PEDs is strictly illegal in professional sports, but many athletes use PEDs hoping to give themselves an advantage over their competition; and in the world of professional sports, the difference of a fraction of a second can be the difference in first and second place, setting a world record or not, and/or earning millions of dollars. The incentives to use PEDs in professional sports are especially high considering that …show more content…

Robert Simon, Ph.D., in his book The Ethics of Sports, reports that “world-class athletes are taking steroids at dosages so high that it would be illegal to administer them to human subjects in legitimate medical experiments” (Simon et al. 87). The pressure these athletes face is a type of coercion known as the coercion of unrefusable offers (Radcliffe-Richards 7). Coercion of unrefusable offers in sports occurs when an undesirable proposition (PEDs) has benefits that are so irresistible that element of voluntariness (i.e. consent) vanishes and the athlete has no choice but to accept that offer. Coercion limits the freedoms of athletes because they feel as if they have no choice but to take PEDs even if they do not want to take PEDS if they wanted to compete with other players of that sport: “either use steroids and risk harm, or cease to be competitive” (Simon et al. 97). The problem with the coercion of unrefusable offer in sports is that it makes competing in a sport unfair to the athletes who do not want to take PEDs because their naturally earned talents cannot compete with the chemically altered talents of athletes using

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