Condemning human nature

It doesn't make much sense to condemn human nature. It is, at least, unconstructive. But it is what some critics of steroid use in baseball are doing.

From the Mitchell Report, we know, broadly, what we already knew and what perspicacious observers foresaw all along. In a competitive sport in which super-excellence was rewarded with enormous money and fame and in which there was almost no enforcement of a legal and baseball-wide ban on a means of improving performance, a good number of players used the nominally forbidden means.

Some of the alleged users were superstars pursuing an even greater greatness. Others were replacement-level players struggling to stay in the major leagues. Many players, probably a substantial majority, did not use steroids.

Baseball's steroid scandal simply affirms the premise of the American government's design. Most people aren't angels. They tend to pursue their own interests. But they're not generally evil, either. By aligning the self-interests they will perceive with the collective interests of society, institutions--constraints a group of people imposes on its members--may curb undesirable behavior and allow individuals to interact on fair terms.

Major League Baseball and law enforcement should enforce their policies forbidding the use of steroids and other harmful performance-enhancing substances. Those policies are, in my view, justified. The players and their union deserve blame for long opposing testing. If players thought it was right to juice up, the more honest position would have been to advocate overturning baseball's and legislators' ban on steroids--a position, of course, that would have been untenable. And the individual players who used steroids and other banned drugs deserve moral blame. After all, most of their peers, facing the same pressures, probably stayed clean.

While deserving our blame, the cheaters also deserve our empathy. When cheating seemed likely to bring large rewards at little cost, many people cheated. We shouldn't be shocked. We shouldn't even be surprised.