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ABSTRACT
Stories pervade sport. In elite spectator sport, stories play out in packed stadiums while being broadcast simultaneously to immense TV audiences. These stories, which present controversial goals, great comebacks, underdog victories, or clever instances of cheating among other incidents, can foster moral reflection. This paper explores the relationship between sport, stories, and morality. It discusses Richard Rorty’s insistence on narrative as a powerful vehicle to moral change and progress, as one way to understand this relationship. Stories about Justin Gatlin and Therese Johaug – two world-class athletes who tested positive for prohibited substances and served doping bans – are discussed as exemplars of redescriptive narratives: stories that can foster our moral imagination, broaden our conversations and help us to enhance our descriptions and practices of solidarity. In this Rortyan approach, moral progress can occur when the work of narrative redescription joins forces with philosophy’s rational struggle for coherence. Building on this conception of progress, the paper concludes with a reflection on narrative redescription as a method in sport ethics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For an overview of the various claims narrative ethicists have made about the relationship between stories and morality and a thorough discussion of four of these claims, including Rorty’s, but also MacIntyre’s, Nussbaum’s and Taylor’s, see Lindemann-Nelson (Citation2001, 36–68). There are significant differences between Rorty’s narrativism and other narrative accounts that have proved useful to the ethics of sport, including MacIntyre’s in particular. Further exploration of these differences, both in the context of the topic of the present paper and more generally, is an intriguing topic for future papers. For more general discussions of Rortyan approaches to sport ethics, dealing less explicitly with the role of stories, see Burke and Roberts (Citation1997), Dixon (Citation2001), Morgan (Citation2000, Citation2004), and Roberts (Citation1995, Citation1997).
2. The decisive role of redescription in Rorty’s project springs out of his anti-essentialist philosophy: rejecting the idea that the truth about ourselves, morality, or anything else is ‘out there’. ‘The world is out there’, Rorty grants (Citation1989, 5), ‘but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false’. As our descriptions are not confined within ‘the Real’, matters are always open to redescription, and there is always a potential for descriptions better fit for our similarly improvable purposes. Rorty acknowledges that the world contains the states of affairs that allow us to decide among competing descriptions. Some claims, for instance about the colour of a wall, seem simply wrong, and we can point to the world ‘out there’ in order to show why this is so. However, it does not follow that the world can tell us what to decide. The world ‘out there’, says Rorty, ‘is indifferent to our descriptions of it’. Descriptions of colours and truths about colours emerge simultaneously, as human creations.
3. Not all stories are good or useful to the project of enhancing one’s descriptions and practices of solidarity. A merited concern is whether Rorty’s anti-foundationalist approach carries sufficient tools to distinguish useful stories from useless or even counterproductive ones. Indeed, Rorty seems to hold that all stories can appear good to someone, somewhere. However, he does not conclude from this that any story can appear good to everyone, everywhere, including Rorty or any other liberal. Rorty’s project is not an unguided search for just any story that conveys alternative descriptions to one’s own. Rather, it is the search of a liberal guided by the socially and historically contingent perspective of a liberal: a person that loathes cruelty and appraises solidarity, is acutely aware of previous and present cruelties in her own culture and beyond, and adds to this awareness an equally acute strive to uncover or learn about new ones. Thus, Rorty trusts the liberal – in her hermeneutical project of refining her ‘final vocabulary’ – to distinguish useful stories from useless ones. This is not to say that Rorty’s liberal is immune to the influence of bad stories, only that her liberal idiosyncrasies and inclination towards redescription point her in the right direction.
4. I stress that the Gatlin and Johaug stories presented herein are my interpretations. Indeed, both stories are ambiguous and open to various interpretations. An empirical enquiry into Bolt or Gatlin’s intentions for doing what they did, or Johaug’s emotional turmoil, or the extensive media coverage in both cases, would probably shed light on several, perhaps conflicting storylines rather than one story. The rationale for offering these interpretations is to explore how sport stories can enter into the Rortyan liberal’s project of enhancing conceptions and practices of solidarity. Whereas I point to some evidence to this effect, I do not intend to say that the cases cannot serve different or even conflicting functions in society.
11. Justin Gatlin, cited in: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-4764534/Justin-Gatlin-Usain-Bolt-said-deserved-world-title.html.
20. Synnøve Solbakken is a novel written by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. It portrays the struggle of protagonist Torbjørn, from the shadowy side of the valley, to marry Synnøve, a girl from Solbakken, a place where the sun always shines. In Norwegian culture, the figure of Synnøve Solbakken has come to symbolize a form of archetypically Norwegian femininity centering on rural background, beauty, goodness, and kindness (and, more shallowly, blond hair.)
21. The value of the tragic hero metaphor to shed light on the Johaug story was brought to my attention by Vinje, who understands the Johaug case an example of Aristotle’s discussion of beauty in tragedy in Poetics, with Johaug as particularly well fit for the role of a tragic hero. Both my use of the term tragic hero and the discussion of the unresolved tension in the story between harm brought upon oneself and harm occurring by no fault of one’s own is inspired by Vinje’s opinion piece in Morgenbladet: https://morgenbladet.no/ideer/2018/11/skisportens-tragiske-helt.
23. Ibid.
29. As codified in the World Anti-Doping Code (2015), the principle of strict liability means that an anti-doping rule violation occurs whenever a prohibited substance, its metabolites, or markers are found in the bodily specimen of an athlete, whether or not the athlete intentionally or unintentionally used a prohibited substance or was negligent or otherwise at fault.
35. The significance of this distinction was suggested by an anonymous referee for Journal of the Philosophy of Sport.