I am not aware of any system of morality in which "but everyone else did it" is considered to be a watertight argument. I feel strongly about matter, having co

I am not aware of any system of morality in which "but everyone else did it" is considered to be a watertight argument. I feel strongly about matter, having competed in weightlifting, because of the recent influx of steroid apologists into the weightlifting community. The question of whether PEDs should be allowed is distinct from whether they are allowed. A sport is an arbitrary collection of objectively determinable athletic trials. It doesn't really matter how they start. Two people want to see who is the "best" at something, so they compete. Eventually there is an argument about who won. Alex thinks Bob has cheated, because Bob used a technique or technology that Alex thinks grants an unfair advantage. So Alex and Bob agree to rules. These rules create the space of permissible actions in which the arbitrary trials take place. For example, for sprinting, the rules create a space in which driving a sports car is excluded. Eventually a name is attached. What is the sport? The sport is the rules. It follows that actions taken outside the rules, even if unobserved, are not part of that sport. Consider the sprinting example: if the stadium lights go out and I drive to the finish line in 5 seconds, did I win, given that nobody detected my action? No: I did not win. I was incorrectly observed to be first, but I did not win. If you argue that it's based on the observation, it still requires rules against which the observation is applied. If instead you argue that there are no rules, then you do not have a defined athletic trial -- you can sprint, I can throw, and both of us claim to be the best pistol shooter at the end of the contest. That is, sports is a positivist legal framework. There is no "real" sport outside of the rules. The rules are the sport. If you break them, even unobserved, then by definition you cannot win and have not won, even when you appeared to. The nature of modern professional sports being what it is, this means that most winners are the 20-something-th placegetter. But there's a reason we have separate words for "truth", "honour" and "glory".