Pragmatic conventionalism and sport normativity in the face of intractable dilemmas

ABSTRACT

We build on Morgan’s deep conventionalist base by offering a pragmatic approach (‘transitionalism’) for achieving normative progress on sports most intractable problems (e.g. performance enhancement restrictions, collision sport dangers, competitive classification discord). Our account picks up where Morgan suggests disparate normative communities ‘default’ to inferior yet functionally ‘pragmatic’ resolutions to conflict. Pragmatic resolutions, we contend, offer normative substance by providing the means to move beyond intellectual stalemates by re-orientating our normative efforts relative to the three cornerstones of Morgan’s deep conventionalism: the nature and status of different sporting conventions; the difference between conflicts of an ‘intramural’ and ‘extramural’ kind; and what constitutes a resolution to sporting disagreements.

KEYWORDS:

• Pragmatism
• conventionalism
• normative
• sporting problems
• intractable dilemmas
• sport ethics

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Paul Gaffney and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and critical comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is common in the sport philosophy literature to critique the work of Richard Rorty based on secondary interpretations, particularly those offered by Michael Burke and Terence Roberts. We are not suggesting Burke and Roberts get Rorty ‘wrong’ but that they use his writings in a particular way, emphasizing a subjectivist reading of the pragmatist’s work.

2. These classifications mirror Morgan’s (2007) descriptive separation of moral and non-moral (aesthetic, prudential) types of values (xvii-xviii).

3. Hilary Putnam (1995) suggests that the basic insight of pragmatism is that ‘one can be both fallibilistic and anti-sceptical’ (p.21); Richard Bernstein (1991) argues that pragmatism deeply influenced twentieth-century philosophy and beyond by dismissing the need to ‘give strong foundational justification in any area in human inquiry’ while at the same time distinguishing between ‘better from worse reasons … even if what are to count as “good reasons” are themselves historically conditioned and contestable’ (p.277); Michael Bacon (2012) concludes that pragmatists of all stripes ‘focus on the importance of taking seriously the particularities of human practices’ (p.9).

4. See https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/CAS_Executive_Summary__5794_.pdf.

5. As Emerson (2014) writes in his essay ‘Experience’, ‘Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight’ (p.341).

6. Peirce (1998) continues: ‘Although it is better to be methodological in our investigations … there is no positive sin against logic in trying any theory which may come into our heads, so long as it is adopted in such a sense as to permit the investigation to go on unimpeded and undiscouraged’ (p.48).