Ambassadors of the game: do famous athletes have special obligations to act virtuously?

ABSTRACT

Do famous athletes have special obligations to act virtuously? A number of philosophers have investigated this question by examining whether famous athletes are subject to special role model obligations. In this paper, we will take a different approach and give a positive response to this question by arguing for the position that sport and gaming celebrities are ‘ambassadors of the game’: moral agents whose vocations as rule-followers have unique implications for their non-lusory lives. According to this idea, the actions of a game’s players and other stakeholders – especially the actions of its stars – directly affect the value of the game itself, a fact which generates additional moral reasons to behave in a virtuous manner. We will begin by explaining the three main positions one may take with respect to the question: moral exceptionalism, moral generalism, and moral exemplarism. We will argue that no convincing case for moral exemplarism has thus far been made, which gives us reason to look for new ways to defend this position. We then provide our own ‘ambassadors of the game’ account and argue that it gives us good reason to think that sport and game celebrities are subject to special obligations to act virtuously.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral exceptionalism
• moral generalism
• moral exemplarism
• Kant
• Nietzsche
• Aristotle

Acknowledgments

Christopher C. Yorke thanks Dr. Huimei Liu at Zhejiang University’s Academy of Tourism and Leisure, who coordinated his Adjunct Expert research post there in the Fall 2019 academic semester, during which time much of this piece was written. He also thanks Kar Yung Tom of Face to Face Games for publishing the Yorke on Games article series, wherein an embryonic version of the ‘Ambassadors of the Game’ concept was first articulated in 2016. Alfred Archer’s work on this paper was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO Grant Number 016.Veni.174.104. Thanks go to the audience of a draft presentation of this article at the 2019 International Association for the Philosophy of Sport conference in Kyoto, for the many helpful points that they brought to our attention. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport for their critical feedback and excellent suggestions for improvements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Archer and Matheson (2019a) for a discussion of the ethics of admiring immoral artists.

2. See Zagzebski (2017) for a contemporary account of the importance of moral exemplars in moral education and for a moral theory built upon admiration for exemplars.

3. Of course, these will not be the only rules they have followed on the way to stardom. They are also likely to have obeyed cultural norms and the laws of their countries. This prompts the reasonable objection: ‘Doesn’t every kind of celebrity rise to prominence through a similar type of rule-following?’, which will be addressed elsewhere, but must at least be flagged at this point.

4. For a discussion of the Lance Armstrong case and whether or not it should be considered cheating see Eric Moore (Moore 2017), and a response by Jon Pike and Sean Cordell (Pike and Cordell 2020).

5. The proposed chain of duty starts with (1) the voluntary acceptance of and adherence to the ruleset of a game by a player, resulting in (2) the felicitous performance of lusory acts by that player, which can lead to (3) intralusory successes. Once a critical mass of the right kind of intralusory successes have been achieved by a player, (4) that player rises to game celebrity status, which (5) broadens and deepens their powers of social influence, which thereby (6) generates de facto game ambassadorship duties.

6. Naturally, this duty extends beyond the furtherance of rational self-interest, and relates to the interests of others who are similarly invested in the game’s institution. A crude analogy: when I backwash into my own drink, this is not necessarily an instance of a moral failure. However, when I backwash into our shared drink in exactly the same fashion, I have reduced your enjoyment of our mutually-held resource as a direct result of my activity, and can rightly be held morally accountable for doing so. In sport culture, this can result in a kind of ‘tragedy of the football pitch commons’, wherein misambassadors can easily denigrate the reputation of their game, to the disbenefit of all invested stakeholders.

7. Our account helps explain the phenomenon of moral repugnance toward ‘soccer hooligans’: for it seems that it ought to be fundamentally out of character for anyone with a true appreciation for the rules of the sport to behave with such recklessness and disregard for social and legal rules outside of it. We might justifiably call hooligans pseudo-fans on our schema – for hooligans do not primarily value the game of soccer, but the occasions to brawl that it incidentally provides.