Let us conduct a thought experiment, shall we? You are a world-class tennis player on the eve of the US Open. The night before it begins, a villainous individual steels into your room and injects you with a powerful, performance-enhancing drug. You, in a deep sleep, barely feel a pinprick. To you, it’s all a dream — but one that is about to become a nightmare.
The next day you play lights out and go on to win the tournament. Afterward, though, you test positive for the drug — a revelation that threatens your championship trophy, your accomplishments, your very reputation. Yet you proclaim your innocence. And indeed you are innocent, for you made no choice in taking the drug.
Choice and free will underpin legal and moral responsibility. Make no choice and you bear no responsibility — until you do.
Earlier this week, Joe Drape, who covers horse racing for The New York Times broke the story that Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner, had tested positive for the performance enhancing drug scopolamine after winning the Santa Anita Derby — weeks before the Kentucky Derby, the first race in the Triple Crown, which includes the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes. Since Justify needed to finish first or second at Santa Anita to qualify for the Kentucky Derby, a disqualification would’ve left him out of the Derby. Racing officials and Justify’s handlers did nothing to bring the drug test failure to light, Drape writes.
For his part, Bob Baffert — who trained Justify and the 2015 Triple Crown winner, American Pharoah, as well as five Kentucky Derby winners and numerous other champs — said that Justify’s positive test came from contaminated food. His critics aren’t buying it.
This has been a disastrous year in American horse racing, with 26 Thoroughbreds having died at Santa Anita since Dec. 26; the initial winner of the Kentucky Derby, Maximum Security, having been disqualified; and Bodexpress having run the Preakness without a rider, throwing him off at the starting gate in a moment that launched a thousand memes and metaphors.
Now this scandal, which raises the question posed by our thought experiment. What is Justify’s culpability in all this? Some posters have said the horse should be stripped of his Triple Crown. But why? The horse didn’t know he was drugged. All he knew was that he was trained to run in an oval as fast as he could. In return he would get oats and hay, apple and carrot treats, a bath after a hard day’s run, a kiss and a pat on the nose, and maybe, just maybe a moment when the tiny guy in cake-pop colors on his back wasn’t whipping him.
The horse wouldn’t know scopolamine from scallops. Investigate, of course. Punish the human connections behind the alleged cheat. But Justify simply did what he was trained to do.
It’s not his fault that human beings are far more complicated.