Doping Debates May Hold the Key to Judging AI’s Human Cost

When philosophers worry about artificial intelligence, one of their deepest anxieties has little to do with killer robots or runaway algorithms. It concerns something quieter and arguably more intimate: the slow erosion of human skill. As machines take over navigation, translation, writing, coding, and analysis, critics ask whether people are losing abilities that once gave their lives meaning. Now a philosopher argues that a surprising intellectual reservoir can help clarify this debate—the ethics of sport, and in particular the decades-long argument over doping and biomedical enhancement.

In an open-access article published in the journal AI & Society, Francisco Javier López Frías of Utah State University maps four argumentative strategies that sport ethicists developed to evaluate performance-enhancing technology, and shows how they can be transplanted onto the newer field of AI ethics. His central claim is that debates over steroids and enhancement in athletics are not a niche curiosity but a mature, tested body of reasoning about exactly what is at stake when technology substitutes for skilled human performance. He calls these strategies “old argumentative plays” that may prove fresher and more generative on the “new field” of AI ethics.

The starting point is the deskilling argument that recurs across AI ethics. Defined through the work of scholar Avram Ferdman, deskilling is the loss of valuable, distinctively human abilities as a consequence of implementing a new technology within a social practice. The concern follows a recognizable structure: certain activities confer meaning on people’s lives; when those activities are outsourced to machines, they become unavailable; and that unavailability produces a loss of meaning. A taxi driver’s memorized knowledge of city streets, once essential to the craft of getting passengers where they need to go, becomes obsolete with GPS. Translation tools such as Google Translate and DeepL have sharply reduced demand for the translator’s bilingual expertise. Each case illustrates how technology can hollow out a practice by removing the need to exercise its defining skills.

Critics reply that this argument, as stated, lacks normative force. Plenty of skills have disappeared without moral outcry. Almost nobody today can grow or hunt their own food, yet no one opposes farming technology on deskilling grounds. Societies deliberately encourage specialization, letting some capacities atrophy so that others can flourish. Where machines replace tedious, low-skill tasks, few would object; philosophers describe such shifts as reskilling, in which reduced use of one capacity is offset by increased use of another, or as upskilling, where technology helps people develop broader, higher-level abilities. What the deskilling argument needs, then, is an account of why certain skills carry genuine moral weight—and this is where López Frías thinks sport ethics can help.

The bridge between the two fields is the debate over biomedical enhancement in sport: the use of drugs or medical procedures to boost athletic performance. Sport, understood by philosophers from Bernard Suits to Klaus Meier as a game of physical skill, offers a uniquely clear analytical setting because its emphasis on process over outcome makes the exercise of skill unusually visible. In a game, the goal is not simply to put a ball in a net but to do so through prescribed means—using the body in specific ways, cooperating with teammates, respecting the rules. Suits famously argued that in games, means matter more than goals: a cyclist who completes a race by motorcycle has not competed but abandoned the sport. This inverted priority contrasts with technical activities like carpentry or science, where efficiency of means is paramount. Because games are constitutively vulnerable to any technology that bypasses their prescribed skills, they reveal with unusual clarity what is lost when such bypassing occurs.

From this foundation, López Frías identifies four argumentative strategies, organized loosely around three classic “intrinsic objections” to doping identified by bioethicists—proper processes, proper outcomes, and proper origins—plus a fourth of his own emphasis: proper identity formation. The first centers on agency and meaningful comparisons. Drawing on Scott Kretchmar’s distinction between sporting tests and contests, and on John Gleaves’ thought experiment about a hypothetical harm-free performance-enhancing drug, this argument holds that sport functions as an epistemological enterprise: it tells athletes what they can and cannot do, and lets them compare themselves meaningfully against others. For those comparisons to mean anything, performances must be genuinely attributable to the athletes’ own skill and self-directed effort. When enhancement makes improvement arrive “as if by magic,” in the language of the President’s Council on Bioethics, the measurement is corrupted. The parallel to AI is direct: a student who submits a large language model’s essay has produced work that does not result from their own cognitive capacities, making the assessment the assignment was designed to perform impossible.

The second strategy concerns effortful striving and achievement. Suits’ celebrated utopia, in which super-efficient machines grant every desire instantaneously, is saved from boredom precisely by games—voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles that preserve “enough effort” to make life worth living. His character John Striver wants not just a house but a house he builds himself, because the challenge, not the product, is the point. Philosophers Thomas Hurka and Gwen Bradford have developed this insight into a perfectionist theory of achievement: accomplishing something difficult through skill creates an objective, rationally guided overlap between mind and world, a good whose value does not depend on whether we happen to feel satisfied. Enhancement threatens this good by shrinking the challenge; if obstacles require less effort, accomplishments become less valuable. Likewise, when a writer outsources composition to a language model, the possibility of achievement is negated—the writer neither causes the mind-to-world overlap nor exercises the capacities that make writing a site of meaningful accomplishment at all.

The third strategy, associated most closely with Michael Sandel, shifts attention from agency and effort to natural talent and the moral dangers of mastery. Sandel imagines a bionic baseball player whose brain implants guarantee a home run every at-bat, and argues that the problem is not merely the drift toward mechanism but the “drive to mastery”—the refusal to accept that some of our gifts and limits are not of our own making. In sport, he observes, people admire naturally gifted performers, yet modern meritocratic culture overvalues striving and treats success as wholly self-made, a “triumphalist” attitude that erodes humility, responsibility, and solidarity. Biomedical enhancement embodies this hubris, and AI does the same: if a writer’s talent or a student’s thinking can be artificially upgraded, deskilled practices foster a false sense of mastery, cementing the belief that achievements are entirely deserved while undermining the recognition that talent is partly a shared, common asset. The fourth strategy centers on narrativity and identity. Following Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of social practices, and drawing on Kretchmar’s idea of testing communities and Marquette Gendreau’s work on public narrative, this argument holds that skilled performance makes practitioners legible—as cyclists, golfers, writers, or surgeons—as genuine members of a form of life. Athletes who dope lie to their communities about who they are, acquiring an identity they have not cultivated. Students who submit machine-written essays and programmers who deploy AI-generated code raise the same problem: they perform the outputs of a practice without exercising its skill, eroding both their own membership and the community’s capacity to recognize who truly belongs.

López Frías does not claim that any single argument settles the AI deskilling debate; each, he acknowledges, carries justificatory burdens, from contested accounts of authentic action to debates over whether difficulty is objectively valuable, to the fact that sporting standards of excellence evolve over time. His aim is more modest and more provocative: to vindicate sport ethics as a discipline with real philosophical contributions to make, and to hand AI ethicists a set of arguments already stress-tested in an analogous debate. The timing is pointed. Robots have recently raced past human competitors in a Beijing half-marathon and beaten elite table tennis players, and surveys of knowledge workers report self-reduced cognitive effort when relying on generative AI. Whether one worries about the meaning gap, the duty of self-respect, the capabilities that ground human dignity, or the solidarity that giftedness makes possible, the philosophical playbook for thinking it through, he suggests, was largely written on the playing field. In an era when the debate over AI’s human cost grows louder by the day, the old argumentative plays of sport ethics may be the freshest resource available.

Subject of Research: Applying sport ethics arguments on biomedical enhancement to the ethical analysis of AI-driven deskilling

Article Title: Old argumentative plays on a new field? Contributions from sport ethics to the ethical analysis of artificial intelligence

Article References: López Frías, F. J. (2026). Old argumentative plays on a new field? Contributions from sport ethics to the ethical analysis of artificial intelligence. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03377-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03377-z

Keywords: artificial intelligence ethics, deskilling, sport ethics, biomedical enhancement, doping, Bernard Suits, Michael Sandel, achievement, human agency, natural talent, narrativity, meaningful work