Is There a Normatively Distinctive Concept of Cheating in Sport (or anywhere else)?

Abstract

This paper argues that for the purposes of any sort of serious discussion about immoral conduct in sport very little is illuminated by claiming that the conduct in question is cheating. In fact, describing some behavior as cheating is typically little more than expressing strong, but thoroughly vague and imprecise, moral disapproval or condemnation of another person or institution about a wide and ill-defined range of improper advantage-seeking behavior. Such expressions of disapproval fail to distinguish cheating from many other types of immoral conduct. The discussion shows that we should set the concept aside and assess the moral disapproval implied by claims of cheating by reference to the moral and other principles that underlie the practice of sport. This allows us to consider carefully the complexity of the issues that are raised when allegations of cheating are made and not be distracted by the emotionally loaded, conversation-stopping tendency of the concept. This means that some types of disputes in sport will be messy and demand more effort to resolve, but the payoff will be better informed and more thoughtful discussions and greater awareness of the moral complexity of sport and of its principled underpinnings.

Keywords:

• Cheating
• Broad Internalism
• Philosophy of Sport

Notes

1. As suggested earlier, another response to Gert’s and Green’s arguments about deception and cheating would be to adopt a stipulated definition of the concept of deception. See Pearson 1995 for a possible example. She talks about cheating as involving ‘definitional deception’ which is an agreement with others to engage in onetype of activity and then unilaterally engaging in another activity. However, this would simply beg the question as to whether what was going on is deception in any meaningful sense or whether it is just failure to live up to an agreement. The example is instructive in that it recognizes that there is no straightforward connection between what is commonly regarded as deception and cheating. Fraleigh’s ‘stipulated’ definition of cheating may imply a similar acknowledgement about the limitations of the terms being used. It will be discussed below.

2. To be fair, Green’s treatment of this sort of case is only briefly mentioned in a footnote. He acknowledges the issue but does not address the difficulty it poses for his view (Green, p, 63n43). Green’s goal was to try to identify paradigmatic features of cheating in enough detail to distinguish it from other types of moral wrongfulness. Nevertheless, this is an evident flaw in his account and raises a doubt about whether his account really reflects paradigmatic features of cheating. Even if it does (and we will see other problems with his view later), it offers no basis for an account of cheating in sport.

3. Although in Fair Play Simon suggests at one point that strategic fouling does not violate rules (2010, 60), a careful reading indicates that his considered position is the one defended here, namely, that some penalties for violating rules can be regarded as prices not sanctions. Thus, he says that ‘if a pricing penalty is fair in sports, then violating the rule should invoke a fair penalty for the infraction’ (2010, 61). Simon confirmed to me that this is his current view (personal communication, June 14, 2013).

4. Undoubtedly, more could be said on this topic, but I am confident that this position is defensible for the reasons given. The notion of laws establishing prices for permissions or options to engage in certain conduct works well for examples like putting tolls on bridges and requiring payment for putting carbon in the atmosphere. These do not seem to involve rule violations. It does not obviously work as well for other examples, as Cooter himself recognizes (1984, 1551), and this is instructive for the current discussion. Cooter argues that the notion of laws creating prices could also be applied to some other legal restrictions, for example, laws against jaywalking and parking tickets, since there is (he says) no moral censure implied for ‘breaking’ such a law and the penalties typically do not escalate for repeat offences. But this of course does not demonstrate that no rule violation is involved, unless one accepts in advance that penalties that can be construed as prices mean that no rules are broken when the penalty is implied. This seems implausible to me on its face, but arguably it is also question-begging. Perhaps Cooter is right that such penalties can best be construed as prices, but they do nevertheless seem to involve breaking rules in the way that classic permissive regulations, like tolling, do not. None of this undermines the importance of the price/sanction distinction, but it does imply that the distinction may cut across categories of rules and cannot be used in any straightforward way to show that strategic fouling is not cheating because it does not involve breaking rules. See Mitchell N. Berman (2011) 1347–1348n65) for a brief discussion that is more sympathetic to applying Cooter’s analysis to strategic fouling. I am indebted to Berman for drawing this issue to my attention.

5. Perhaps it is not cheating when an unfair rule is broken and everyone is doing it and it becomes necessary to ignore the rule to ensure fair play. In this case, Green’s analysis supports the view that the conduct is not cheating, although again it is not just the unfairness of the rule that makes the conduct not cheating. The agreement to abide by the rule has to have broken down and the rule must be ignored to permit fair play.

6. Simon proposes that the ‘distinctive element’ in Gert’s analysis of cheating reflects the idea that ‘the cheater behaves in a way that no one could rationally or impartially recommend that everyone in the activity behave’ (2004, 55). But all wrong-doers make arbitrary exceptions of themselves in this way. We do not have a distinctive conception of cheating yet. It seems rather that this principle reflects something identical with, or very close to what, Kant had in mind with his formulations of the categorical imperative. Simon seems to acknowledge this when he says that Gert’s view is grounded in the idea that cheaters ‘violate the fundamental norm of respect for persons’. I agree, but I do not think it identifies cheating as a distinctive immoral phenomenon. Indeed, it is less specific than the position suggested in this paper that cheating involves some sort of immoral advantage-seeking behavior. The principles Simon attributes to Gert would include immoral behavior that is not necessarily personally advantage seeking, like improper paternalism toward others.

7. It would be useful to consider further the relationship between gamesmanship and cheating, since the former can also involve morally questionably behavior but may not be regarded as cheating, as I have just suggested. This latter observation is also supported by Dixon (1999).

8. I am grateful to an audience at the International Association for Philosophy of Sport Annual Meeting at the University of Porto in 2013 and two anonymous referees from this journal for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am particularly indebted to Mitchell N. Berman and Robert L. Simon for much constructive and challenging criticism. Finally, I would also like to thank the University of San Diego Institute for Law and Philosophy for inviting me to its Roundtable on the Jurisprudence of Sport in February 2012. The rich discussion there prompted the writing of this article.