Mumford on aesthetic–moral interaction in sport

Abstract

Stephen Mumford argues that aesthetic and moral values in sport are interdependent, focusing on cases where immorality taints beautiful performance. This interdependence thesis is insightful but, I argue, in need of refinement, as its normative implications are unclear and perhaps implausible (e.g. the Nazi aesthetics problem). I also challenge Mumford’s perspective on the infamous Dynamo Kiev death match. Whereas Mumford claims that the match’s morally oppressive circumstances detract from it so that ‘it was not something knowingly we should have admired aesthetically’, I argue that, on the contrary, and in light of what Mumford says about other cases, such circumstances actually enhance the game’s aesthetics such that it would be wrong not to appreciate it aesthetically.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• ethics
• Mumford, S
• sport film

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Some of this material was presented at a Department of Philosophy colloquium at Dalhousie University. Thanks also to Charlene Weaving for recommending Watching Sport.

Notes

1. On the Nazi problem, see Schafer (1986).

2. I refer here to Owens’s actual athletic performances, which are distinct from but nonetheless arguably still accessible through different representations of them. Compare the Owens biopic Race (2016) with Riefenstahl’s own Olympia (1938).

3. For other examples of work that engages sport film from a philosophical perspective, see Holt and Pitter (2011) and de Melo (2012).