2013 MLB Hall of Fame Screechfest

A) The comparison is obscene on its face. Voting for a nonsense honorific in baseball shouldn't be compared to murder.

B) The army had then and has now specific proscriptions against murder.

C) The army didn't incentivize murder at My Lai by giving Lt. Calley a better contract based on the body count.

 

If you accept that steroids are ethically wrong, and proceed from that premise, then the difference is merely one of degree. The underlying principles line up.

 

I'm not sure they were ethically wrong in the baseball environment circa 1990s. Particularly when you walk into a GNC and see the hundreds of products lining the shelves that can give you varied levels of performance, just as "steroids" can. It's like you attach the word "steroids" and all the sudden there's a moral imperative. Since there's no definitive line as to what's right and what's wrong that can be universally agreed upon, there is no ethical equation to discuss.

 

A) I reject this one. The difference, again, is of degree, not kind. The underlying principles are precisely the same. Does encouragement by authority condone bad behavior? And, on top of that, I think this is bigger than just the honorific. The honorific - the Hall of Fame - is just the means through which we collate players and eras. What we're doing is bigger than Cooperstown. It is, essentially, trying to come to a consensus as historians.

B) Steroids were illegal. They remain illegal. But your point is well-taken and I think this is a major issue in all this that I continue to wrestle with myself.

C) Better contract? No. But I don't believe for a moment that military members aren't incentivized in one way or another to follow orders, unquestioned. Their entire system is predicated on that, practically.

 

I'm not, either. But I think a full exploration of the issue requires one to at least proceed from the premise, for the sake of argument, that they were. And also that they weren't.

 

Again. These are terrible, nonsensical, anti-historical comparisons. Awful.

 

Again. Show, don't tell, then. Shouldn't be hard.

If: Person A is morally exonerated when acting immorally under the direction of authority.

Then: Does that principle carry over into all realms?

And if not: Why the distinction?

 

I miss the oop-Tom Petty thread when this was more rational.

 

A less emotionally charged analogy:

Was fraternity hazing OK?

Was it OK because colleges turned a blind eye to it?

 

You could use that approach to argue anything then. Speeding and pedophilia are ethically wrong. Therefore ...

I often appreciate your willingness to play Devil's Advocate, Dick, but you're way off base here.

 

One obvious difference between the Vietnam and slavery examples is that you are torturing or enslaving someone else, as opposed to using steroids in which the only victim is the record book.

You can make an argument that the victims of steroid use are the players who lose their jobs while trying to play clean. I get that, and it's legitimate, but that's hardly analagous to slavery.

I stick to my premise that the most comparable thing to steroid use is speeding on the freeway. If the cops aren't going to pull over anyone who drives 80 in a 65, everyone will drive 80.

It's illegal and you could kill someone, but it's the way we live.

 

I certainly think that, in the second step, you can proceed to, "Yes, it was wrong, but not that wrong." I have no issue with the degree argument coming into play. But this is step one. And Gee argues that PED use wasn't wrong because authority condoned it at the time. And I think the first question has to be: Does authority's stamp of approval, generally, excuse bad behavior?

I just think we're letting the players off way too easy by using Major League Baseball, the institution, as the only scapegoat.

I think Az's answer, by the way, is, "Yes, sometimes it excuses bad behavior. Depends on how bad the behavior is, though." And I think that's the right answer. But I wanted us to get to that nuance, as an exercise if nothing else.