William J. Morgan

Why Sports Morally Matter

Preface Introduction 1. The State of Play: A Genealogy 2. The Moral Case Against Contemporary Sports 3. Taking the Longer Moral Measure of Sports 4. Moral Inquiry in Sport: What Counts as a Moral Consideration of Sports? 5. A Short Moral Hisotry of America 6. A Short Moral History of American Sports 7. Progressive Sport and Progressive America: A Dialectical Summing Up

Broad Internalism, Deep Conventions, Moral Entrepreneurs, and Sport

My argument will proceed as follows. I will first sketch out the broad internalist case for pitching its normative account of sport in the abstract manner that following Dworkin’s lead in the philosophy of law its adherents insist upon. I will next show that the normative deficiencies in social conventions broad internalists uncover are indeed telling but misplaced since they hold only for what David Lewis famously called ‘coordinating’ conventions. I will then distinguish coordinating conventions from deep ones and make my case not only for the normative salience of deep conventions but for their normative superiority over the abstract normative principles broad internalists champion.

Moral Antirealism, Internalism,and Sport

level neither our descriptions nor our normative judgments can make intelligible sense of what they are looking at anymore. And this is precisely what Feezell shows in his Nagelian-friendly analysis of sport when he observes, quite correctly I think, that when viewed objectively—that is, from outside the world—sports, just as the rest of our lives, come off as thoroughly absurd enterprises (5: p. 9). But here is where Williams’s point about the indeterminacy–determinacy conundrum that dogs absolute, objective conceptions of the world kicks in, and with it the relevance of the obvious intelligibility of Dixon’s general principle that success in sport should have something important to do with excellence in performance. The gist of Williams’s point, to reiterate, is that if our account of the world reflectively strips away all determinate content, all appearances, there is no doubting that it is an absolute conception, but, and here is the downside, there is also no doubting that it has nothing intelligible to tell us about our lives in the world (hence Feezell’s thesis regarding the absurdity of sport). On the other hand, if our account of the world contains some determinate content, there is every reason to suppose that it is not an absolute, objective conception at all, in which case it will have something to tell us about our lives that is intelligible and, depending how much determinate conduct its general principles manage to soak up, more or less substantive. Now, it is, I think, no coincidence that most realist pictures of the world and of values have something intelligible and variously substantive to say to us. For instance, it was hardly an accident that one of the intrinsically normative entities that Moore singled out for praise—the appreciation of beauty—was a value cherished by his cherished Bloomsbury friends. What this should immediately tell us is that Moore’s account of it could not have been an objective one in the relevant sense—that it was not a hard-won because absolutely conceived philosophic discovery but much more likely a product of an aesthetic temperament he shared with his friends and they with their friends, one owed to their common socialization or, if you prefer, their shared aesthetic upbringing. The same can be said, I think, for Dixon’s general normative principle concerning athletic success; the fact that it resonates with us modern-day commentators and observers of sport suggests that it, too, is a product not of any objective conception of the world but of a reflective effort much closer to home and, therefore, one much more at home with our contemporary intuitions concerning sport conduct. However, this is not the impression one gets in reading Dixon’s own account of his general principle of athletic success. He consistently keeps his presentation of it at a fairly general level, continues to insist that it was generated and vindicated by reasons and arguments that stand on their own—that is, independent of any individual’s or group’s endorsement of them—and remains steadfast in his conviction that moral inquiry in sport should aim for the truth even if it is not likely to get it. In short, Dixon shows no signs of easing up on his realism about reasons, and the reason, I conjecture, is that he cast his lot with realism in the belief that antirealism was incompatible with his reflective project. What I want to show next, however, is that any supposed incompatibility between Dixon’s project to rehabilitate internalism and antirealism is more imagined than real, at least for the version of antirealism I want to defend. More strongly, I want to argue that the normative promise of Dixon’s own account of sport—whose determinate content, I have argued, betrays its philosophically objective pretensions—not only is better fitted to an antirealist rendering but also implies MORGAN 170 Moral Antirealism, Internalism, and Sport 171 such a rendering. If I am right about this, by dropping a realist for an antirealist approach, which means at very least an outsider for an insider view, and substituting justification for truth as the goal of inquiry, we will be in a better position to draw out reflectively Dixon’s considerable insights into the moral workings of sport on display in the present essay and in his other no less impressive writings. Moral Antirealism and Sport To recap, I have argued that strong realist accounts of rationality and argument are self-defeating ones because they cannot deliver what they claim to deliver— impersonal standards of appraisal that by allowing us to look at the world and our lives from the outside can tell us which of our views and values on the inside are true ones. I argued further that an outside-in take on the world and our lives is not only impossible but normatively fruitless, because even our closest approximations of it (the alien visitor from space, the cultural outsider) cannot make sense out of social practices like sport or of any other feature of our embodied lives. This prompted my claim that Dixon’s realism about reasons, his promotion of their intrinsic (self-contained) argumentative and normative force, needed to be relaxed and that antirealism was just what the doctor ordered to do the trick. But what sort of antirealism about sports do I have in mind here? And how precisely does it promise to remedy the hyperrationalism and concomitant normative underperformance of moral-realist accounts of sport? I think the best way to answer the first question is to begin with trying to answer the second. The answer to that latter question is the rather simple one of cutting reasons and the arguments that string them together down to their rightful size. The sort of conceptual downsizing it favors should already be apparent: Drop any pretense that there is some dividing line that has to be philosophically divined and then crossed if we ever hope to leave behind our notoriously unreliable first-person reflective efforts for our far more reliable impersonal ones, and let our reflective endeavors do the social and historical work they were meant to do and do best. In a word, historicize and socialize our rational and normative judgments. Now, cutting reasons and arguments down to size does not entail some wildeyed idealistic gesture that cuts the world out, that is, that implausibly denies any influence of extramental, nonlinguistic reality over our conceptual apparatus and language games. Rather, it insists on the influence of nonlinguistic reality on our language games but construes it in causal rather than representational terms. That is to say, there is no question that, to borrow an example from Rorty, “the movement of a tennis ball causes the referee to cry ‘Out!’” (22: p. 5), but it is ludicrous to say that representation plays any role here, that there are wayward “balls” out there that have been hit in such a way that they caused themselves to be represented accurately by words like “out.” The first, causal sense is intelligible whereas the second, representational one is not, and that is all any antirealist needs to insist on in accounting for the utility of our judgments. So in calling for us to scale back our judgments the antirealist is not insisting on some wholesale idealist retreat from the world but only a retreat from any effort to make sense of our lives from the outside in. And because I am on record in claiming that Dixon’s principle that success in sport should be adjudged primarily by the qualitative worth of the performance of its participants is not itself a general MORGAN170 Moral Antirealism, Internalism, and Sport 171 principle in the relevant impersonal sense—otherwise it would have nothing sensible or interesting to tell us—but a historically rooted, contextualized one, I feel comfortable in saying that his commitment to it already implies a commitment to antirealism rather than realism. If I am right about this, the normative point and salience of this principle very much depends on the reflective endorsement of his contemporaries rather than on the reflective endorsement of any rational agent that considered the principle aright (impersonally). In other words, Dixon’s standard of what counts as athletic success is best seen not as some sort of transcendental deduction from pure (impersonal) reason but rather as a historically qualified, socially dependent thesis. And it is this point that I want now to further comment on. When I say that the principle of success in sport should correlate directly with excellence in performance is a socially contingent rather than a transcendentally backed universal claim, I mean that it speaks to a standard of evaluation that exists only because contemporary folks like us exist. To put it more baldly, we have such standards and the values they sponsor and oversee only because people like us go in for sports that feature this kind of excellence. Joseph Raz, in his recent book The Practice of Value, calls this what I have already called it above, the “social dependence thesis”. Raz offers two versions of the thesis: first, the “special social dependence thesis,” which holds “that some values exist only if there are (or were) social practices sustaining them,” and second, the “general social dependence thesis,” which holds “that, with some exceptions, all values depend on social practices either by being subject to the special thesis or through their dependence on values that are subject to the special thesis” (21: p. 19). Sport clearly falls under the first version, and so, too, therefore, or so I claim, does Dixon’s principle of athletic success. And in urging him to drop his realist approach for an antirealist one in his articulation of it, I am, in effect, claiming that to further unpack what this standard means and what sort of appraisal, moral and otherwise, it augurs for sport, we need to know more, not less as realists are wont to believe, about what the people who make up the re

Athletic Perfection, Performance-Enhancing Drugs, and the Treatment-Enhancement Distinction

The idea that performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) should be outlawed because they possess certain morally objectionable features (that they are harmful, coercive, etc.) has little or no currency in critical circles today. The reason why is that there are too many other substances (specialized diets, pain-killing drugs) and athletic practices (marathon training sessions) that the contemporary sports world considers perfectly acceptable despite the fact that they exhibit many of these same supposedly morally troubling features (8: p. 268). Unfortunately, however, that is where the agreement among philosophers of sport ends and the real disagreement begins. That disagreement pits, on the one side, pharmacological libertarians, who steadfastly resist any attempt to limit the freedom of athletes, at least the rationally competent among them, to ingest any substance or do anything they please to push the limits of athletic performance so long as no one else is harmed in the process. On the other side of this issue, are essentialists of varying stripes, who just as steadfastly insist sports should be regulated by athletic ideals that appeal to their intrinsic features and that militate against things like PEDs because they supposedly morally conflict with such ideals. I wish to pursue, following Michael Lavin’s lead, a third, alternative way to think about this vexing issue, which, I hope, offers a way out of the argumentative standoff we presently find ourselves in. That way picks up on Lavin’s suggestion to seek a democratic justificatory route that, when followed, leads to a widely shared athletic ideal that requires the current ban on certain PEDs like steroids and amphetamines be lifted but leaves that ban intact for other PEDs like Human Growth Hormone (hGH) and beta blockers. However, I part ways with Lavin in three important respects. First, what he calls a democratic justification is better understood and interpreted, as I see it, not as something akin to voting, as a procedure for securing a majoritarian take on this issue, but as a way to historicize our athletic ideals so as to make them speak to the social and historical contingencies of our actual athletic practices.1 Second, while Lavin was content to let the athletic ideal he alluded to in his essay remain covert, I want to argue that the athletic ideal best suited to do the normative work needed to make my case here is, in fact, a metaphysically stripped down version of what Simon calls “the mutual quest for

Fair is Fair, Or Is It?: A Moral Consideration of the Doping Wars in American Sport

I argue that the recent major shift in anti-doping strategy by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which cracks down on athletes who dope by, among other things, trying to build criminal cases against them and by lowering the standard of evidence required to convict dopers from ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ to ‘comfortable satisfaction’, is morally problematic because it treats athletes unfairly. That is not to say that the efforts of USADA to curb doping in sport is itself unjustified, for athletes who dope do indeed violate the principle of fair play – a principle vital to the integrity of all sport. Rather, my argument is that the new anti-doping measures pursued by these athletic agencies go too far and are themselves unfair in the classical sense that they treat similar cases in a dissimilar way.

Social Criticism as Moral Criticism A Habermasian Take on Sports

Sports at all levels have been racked by one moral controversy after another. It is almost a truism that socialization into sports nowadays has as much to do with becoming adept at breaking and bending rules, not to mention other forms of cheating and violence, as it does with the furtherance of athletic excellence. Surprisingly, although critical social theorists of sports have had plenty to say about these and other shortcomings of contemporary sports, little of what they say touches on their specifically moral character. Habermas’s critical theory of society is a notable exception, claiming, as it does, that if one wants to understand contemporary social practices such as sports, one cannot turn their back on the moral ideals and values that drive them. The author puts Habermas’s theory to the test here, examining how successful it is in shedding light on the moral dilemmas that presently plague sports.

Some Further Words on Suits on Play

Bernard Suits’s magisterial work, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, is without question the finest book of its kind. It is beautifully written and splendidly argued. Of course, no book is perfect, and Suits’s book, as wonderful as it is, is no exception in this regard. In particular, it is plagued, I think, by one significant weakness, which is that its treatment of the important notion of play is seriously underdetermined. In claiming such, some might think I’m being too hard on Suits here; since, after all, his aim in The Grasshopper is to define games not play. But this objection overlooks the important role Suits assigns play in his account of the all-important utopian “ideal of existence”—I say all important because that account served as the terminus of the ingenious arguments that run throughout The Grasshopper. Contrarily, some might think that in criticizing Suits’s undeveloped account of play I’m being too easy on him, since, as he reminds his readers more than once, he doesn’t provide any explication of play at all in this work let alone a partial one, but rather simply stipulates that by play he means any intrinsically valued enterprise. But that objection also misses the mark, because he does offer a brief explication of play in a later chapter, even if only in passing, that links it to the principle of what he calls “reverse English”—a curious procedure that involves reversing the ends and means of ordinary activities to create a new, challenging activity (one such reversal involved one of his central characters turning upside down what “serious” impersonators like spies do, which is to play a role in order to create a false identity, so that he could engage in what “unserious” impersonators who delight in make-believe do, which is to assume a false identity in order to play a role) (10: p. 93) So I think I am on firm ground in claiming that play deserves a more sustained analysis than Suits gives it in The Grasshopper. But I won’t attempt such an analysis here, since, fortunately, Suits did eventually get around to trying to define play in an often overlooked brilliant essay entitled, “Words on Play,” (11) which was published a few years after The Grasshopper first appeared in print. What I want to do in the current article then, is to use this later essay as my point of departure and argue two points. The first point I want to make is that Suit’s definition of play nicely dovetails with his earlier, Grasshopperian account of it as exemplifying the principle of “reverse English,” and in so doing further strengthens the important claim he makes in that book that play is a necessary condition of leading a good (utopian) life. But my second point is a critical one. I argue that

Toward a critical theory of sport.

A single, dominant ideology informs both bourgeois and socialist theories of contemporary sport. The gist of this ideology, I argue, is that sport is essentially an instrument of the social order whose central function is to further the economic and political interests of the various nation-states. I restrict my critical attention here to the New Lefts perpetuation of this reductionist ideology. My intent in doing so, however, is not to discredit Neo-Marxist sport theory. On the contrary, what I attempt to show is that the New Lefts recent advocacy of this ideology vitiates the major tenets of Neo-Marxist thought. My criticism is geared, then, to a resuscitation of the genuine critical thread underlying Neo-Marxist theory. I thus conclude that Neo-Marxist theory, free of ideological distortions, represents one of the most promising critical approaches to understanding the complexities and subtleties of modern sport.

The Normativity of Sport: A Historicist Take on Broad Internalism

Bob Simon has made many wonderful contributions to the philosophy of sport literature. To my mind, however, at the top of that impressive list is his development of the normative theory of sport he called broad internalism or simply interpretivism. The important advance his theory made was showing how we can rely on general principles of athletic conduct to guide our actions in sport in those hard normative cases when the rules fail us, that is when there is no applicable rule to appeal to, or the rules prove to be indeterminate or contradictory, or when the rules give us the wrong sort of guidance. This is an impressive accomplishment, to say the least, and one those of us who work in this normative domain owe Simon a great debt. However, in this paper, I want to explore a different set of hard normative cases in which conflicting conceptions of the point and purpose of sport raise normative quandaries that are not solvable either by appealing to the rules or the general principles of athletic excellence that Simon champions. My aim in pursuing this critical line is not to discredit broad internalism, but rather to nudge it in a more historicist direction that can better handle the kinds of normative dilemmas that crop up when we are not of one mind as to what is the aim of athletic striving.

Caring, final ends and sports

In this essay I argue that sports at their best qualify as final ends, that is, as ends whose value is such that they ground not only the practices whose ends they are, but everything else we do as human agents. The argument I provide to support my thesis is derived from Harry Frankfurts provocative work on the importance of the things we care about, more specifically, on his claim that it is by virtue of caring about things and practices, really caring about them – even loving them – we are able to regard and treat them as final ends. Sports, I claim, are paradigmatic examples of practices cared about and loved in these deep ways, and as such deserve to be considered, rather than dismissed because of their supposed triviality, as one of those ends around which a life most worth living can be legitimately forged.