Wednesday Morning Astros, etc Round Up

but this was posted over at BTB in the link you posted, and I thought it was fairly interesting. As a philosophy student, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about moral problems, and the steroids issue is probably the only moral issue that really intersects with my love for baseball (well, that and some collective bargaining issues, but by now I’ve been trained to look at those through an economist’s eyes).

Anyways, the author (Goldwater) attempts to come up with a moral principle explaining why so many people think that steroid use is wrong. He settles on what I think is a fairly accurate description of how people think the universe operates:

Many people operate — implicitly, probably — with what I’ll call the "religious concept" of the person. This religious concept holds that there is a Way People Are, and this Way is Natural and Right. This Way, perhaps crafted in the image of God, is immutable and unchanging, an essence, if you will (and even if you won’t).

If the Natural is Right, then the Unnatural is Wrong. If there is a Way People Are which is natural and right, then there is some other deviant Way People Could Be, which is unnatural and wrong. And because this Way People Are is Essential, and so unchanging, the religious concept of person believes that tampering with- and so changing- what is natural is itself unnatural and wrong.

I think that’s a pretty good description of a certain view of the difference between the “natural” and “unnatural.” I’m not sure that that is how people really operate – while the vast majority of people seem to have a moral problem with steroids (that’s not to say that they have the same “Off with their heads!” attitude that many in the media have), they are also quite willing to do a lot that would seem to cross that natural/unnatural divide. And (and this was brought up in the comments section of the article) they don’t seem quite as upset about football players using steroids.

In philosophy, we have this tendency to see defining principles where there probably isn’t any such principle. The exercise that Goldwater engages in is similar to what philosophers try to do with the “Trolley Problem” and other such thought experiments that seem to reveal people’s inconsistencies. I don’t think most people are really rational when it comes to ethics and morality. They don’t say steroids are bad but performance-enhancing equipment is good because they have really thought this thing out – they do it because one thing is alien and the other is familiar. Trying to find some principle in this is just a silly exercise. Really, I think the guiding principle for people in steroid use is that it just seems wrong. But that’s no reason to ban it.

Dodgers pitcher plunked Prince Fielder with 2 outs in the ninth as retaliation for Brewers hitting Manny Ramirez. Fielder after the game stormed toward the Dodgers locker room, to be stopped before he entered the locker room. Here’s a recap from the Brew Crew of the ninth inning aprt:

Sure, the Brewers lost 17-4 and that sucks and is also really embarrassing (it was the most runs by the Dodgers at home since 1979), but the bigger story is the inexplicable drilling of Prince Fielder in the top of the 9th with two out.

Former Brewer Guillermo Mota was on the mound. The Dodgers were up 13 runs and had one out to go and HAD A PITCHER WARMING IN THE BULLPEN.

Then Mota drills Fielder in the leg and immediately heads towards the dugout, with a bit of a chest puff out, glaring and generally preening.

Bourn won’t be in the lineup tonight.