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

The study approaches the problem through the concept of human agency, the capacity of individuals to act deliberately against the constraints of their circumstances. Drawing on theoretical work by scholars such as Albert Bandura, Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu, the author examines whether Black academics are exerting that agency to challenge discrimination, or whether structural pressures are suppressing it. From an intersectional perspective, the paper argues that Black scholars face multiple, overlapping layers of disadvantage, including race, ethnicity and class, which raises the stakes of any public challenge to the institutional status quo.

The central finding is stark: most of the interviewed academics said they were afraid to speak out candidly against discrimination because they believed it could cost them their careers. Participants in the study requested anonymity, reflecting what the author describes as a climate in which candid criticism of racial inequality is perceived as professionally dangerous. The paper contends that this silence is not neutrality but, in the author’s framing, a form of participation in sustaining the conditions that produce it.

To ground the analysis, the study uses two comparative country cases: Britain and Germany. In Britain, the research points to a body of evidence on racial disparity in academia, including reporting in Nature on how UK science is failing Black researchers, work on the barriers facing Black PhD students seeking research council funding, and studies describing what has been called an unspoken system of exclusion for academics of colour in elite universities. Reports by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and a 2023 assessment by United Nations experts, which described discrimination against people of African descent in the UK as structural, institutional and systemic, are cited as corroborating context.

Germany presents a different but related picture. The paper notes that Germany does not systematically collect ethnicity data, a gap that researchers have pushed to close and which, the author argues, makes racial inequality harder to measure and to challenge. Studies and reports cited in the paper, including the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey on the experiences of people of African descent and coverage by Reuters finding that anti-Black racism is rising across EU countries led by Germany, are used to suggest that the absence of data does not mean the absence of discrimination. Historical context, including Germany’s colonial past in Africa, is also invoked to explain the depth of the structural legacy the study addresses.

Theoretically, the paper draws a distinction between the capacity for agency and its exercise. Citing literature on agency across the life course, on autonomy and oppression, and on the way social structures shape individual dispositions, the author argues that the weak exercise of agency among Black scholars is not simply a personal failing but a product of institutional environments in which the cost of protest is high and the reward is low. Concepts from critical race theory and from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality frame the argument that discrimination operates through interlocking systems rather than isolated incidents.

The study’s methodological approach is qualitative, combining semi-structured interviews with thematic analysis of the resulting transcripts and documentary analysis of the contemporary literature on discrimination in academia. The author states that informed consent was obtained from all participants, who chose to take part willingly but only on condition of anonymity. Because the author works as an independent scholar, no institutional ethics committee review was sought, a point declared openly in the paper. The research was conducted in accordance with applicable research guidelines, according to the author’s declarations, and no external funding was received.

Beyond diagnosis, the paper proposes a remedy framed as a renewed Black consciousness disposition. The author argues for a form of scholarly self-awareness that produces academics who are neither pacifiers nor consensus-builders but individuals with critical and reflexive minds, willing to confront injustice directly. The argument invokes a lineage of thinkers and activists, including Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois and Nelson Mandela, alongside figures such as Stuart Hall and Chinua Achebe’s contemporary Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to argue that intellectual courage has historically been central to struggles against racial oppression. In the author’s words, a closed mouth is described as a closed destiny.

The paper also engages with uncomfortable recent events in British academia, including the case of Jason Arday, the former Cambridge University professor who was found dead at home in August 2026 amid a plagiarism controversy that prompted debate about whether media scrutiny was applied with a racial double standard. Black academics quoted in press coverage described the affair as old racist wine in a new bottle, and the study treats the episode as illustrative of the precarious position Black scholars occupy, where public visibility can bring intense and potentially damaging scrutiny.

The study’s implications reach beyond the ten interviews that form its core evidence. If, as the author argues, institutional pressures systematically discourage Black academics from naming discrimination, then universities in Britain, Germany and across Europe are receiving a distorted picture of the problem from within their own workforces, and formal equality policies risk addressing a sanitized version of reality. The paper suggests that strengthening the agency of Black scholars requires not only individual courage but structural change: transparent mechanisms for reporting discrimination, protection against retaliation, better ethnicity data collection in countries such as Germany, and a scholarly culture that values critical dissent rather than punishing it. Whether institutions are prepared to make speaking out less costly, the study concludes, will determine whether the current cycle of silence and sustained discrimination can be broken.

Subject of Research: Black scholars' agency and racial discrimination in British and German academia

Article Title: Is the weak agency of Black scholars escalating the prevalence of discrimination in academia?

Article References: Simuziya, N. J. (2026). Is the weak agency of Black scholars escalating the prevalence of discrimination in academia?. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 453. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01733-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01733-w

Keywords: Black scholars, racial discrimination, academia, human agency, intersectionality, Britain, Germany, Black consciousness, higher education, qualitative research, critical race theory, institutional racism