I find it hard to pretend that cheating at sports is really similar to trying to stay awake longer and work harder in science. Both might ultimately be motivated by self interest, but the goals of the two fields and the rewards you can attain are just too different and the benefits achieved by doping in each field. Lance Armstrong broke the rules of his sport to help Lance Armstrong and nobody else, and he got very rich as a result. A scientist probably won’t attain those kinds of benefits and other people are going to get more from his work than you and I might get from watching cycling. He’s also probably not cheating in the same sense even though he’s breaking the law and jeopardizing his own work - and if caught he’d probably face tougher penalties than Lance Armstrong ever will.
I don’t care for music that’s made this way, but this is sort of arbitrary. Maybe it’s an issue if you’re representing something as an unaltered live performance and it isn’t, but otherwise, the recording is whatever the recording is. This would be like saying artists can paint with their fingers but if you use a brush it’s cheating.
Drugs don’t necessarily enhance music making, though. Some artists experiment with drugs to open their minds and others are just drug addicts. I think it was Miles Davis who said he used heroin to get through the times he wasn’t making music.
To me, the appropriate analogy would be if he were rewarded not for his achievements but for being the most active doctor in the hospital or any other award that is a comparison award. That would mean he cheated at contest. But you can’t cheat at doing science if your science is accurate.
That said, if I, say, discovered that Albert Einstein used cocaine to stay awake and come up with his theories, I would think less of him. Not because he did drugs, but because I currently think well of him because I think he is so naturally exceptional. The same thing many thought about Armstrong.
I think the thread seems to have come to something of a consensus, just wanted to add that in the hypothetical posited by the OP, it is appropriate that the scientist is censured because they are a public figure, and public figures are role models. However, I would not necessarily agree they should be subject to professional sanctions or removal of awards, although most employers don’t take too kindly to drug abuse.
Actually, I mainly wanted to post in order to show my appreciation for the use of subjunctive in the thread title.
Competitive sports really presents a situation that is so bizarre we would never accept it if we hadn’t grown up with it. There is no need to ride that bicycle all over France – it doesn’t accomplish anything at all.
We could have the same effect either by allowing steroids in cycling, or making the race course a few miles shorter. The thing that “needs” doing was makework in the first place. Making it easier to do is the exact opposite of creating the race to begin with.
I vote we eliminate competitive sports altogether, and pretend we invented the perfect infinitely powerful steroid.