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ABSTRACT
I argue that ethical features of sport strongly interact with aesthetic features of sport, such that all pro tanto ethical merits/defects count as aesthetic merits/defects. This is a much-debated topic in the philosophy of art and aesthetics literature, in which recent critics have taken to task this interactionist take on how ethical evaluative properties interact with aesthetic ones. The critics’ main argument against this view is that far too many works of art than theorists of this strong interactionist kind care to admit either lack the evaluative ethical properties they claim for them, or their ethical properties do not appreciably affect their aesthetic properties. Sport, I argue, is a notable exception. That’s because in sport ethical flaws in athletic performances double as aesthetic flaws with very few exceptions, or so I will argue. Unlike artworks, therefore, the interactionist thesis holds mostly true across the entire athletic spectrum, which is why, in my view, it warrants far more serious attention and appreciation than it is commonly given in both the philosophy of art and aesthetics and philosophy of sport literature.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I lifted my title from Karen Hansen’s essay, ‘How Bad Can Good Art Be?’ (In Levinson, Citation1998).
2. I owe this example to Marcia Muelder Eaton (Citation1992), who relates she was ‘told’ an unnamed Canadian artist produces artworks in just this manner.
3. The kind of entertainment take on sport that welcomes unethical actions in sport precisely because fans find them entertaining is well expressed in Nick Hornby’s view that what makes for ‘a truly memorable’ soccer match is one that features, among other things, ‘Some kind of ‘disgraceful incident’. His main example are ‘brawls’ in matches, in which he provocatively contends, ‘there is nothing like a punch-up to enliven an otherwise dull game.’ He concedes that if he were a ‘representative of the football authorities,’ he would ‘insist that the transgressors be brought to justice,’ but as the fan that he is, he is under ‘no duty to toe the moral line whatsoever’ (Citation1996, 237, author’s emphasis). I regard what Hornby thinks is a good sport contest as a manifestly bad one for reasons that will become obvious in my subsequent remarks.
4. My criticisms of the EMM argument here target artistic genres in which its adherents claim exhibit strong e-a interaction. But EMM theorists do not claim that all artistic genres feature such interaction. Examples of artworks in which they acknowledge no such interaction holds include abstract paintings and pure orchestral music. That’s because artworks of the latter kind, they point out, don’t traffic in the ethical dimension at all, which plainly rules out any claim that they may suffer ethical defects that diminish their aesthetic value. That is why EMM theorists argue that only aesthetically relevant ethical defects in artworks negatively affect their aesthetic value.
5. The alert, informed reader will notice that my list of sports here includes both what Best calls purposive sports (track and field, and competitive sports such as football and baseball), and what he calls aesthetic sports (gymnastics, figure skating, diving, and the like). My conflation of Best’s two categories is deliberate because I reject his distinction between these two classes of sport. I do so because he wrongly argues that the ends and means of purposive sports are separable from one another, because these sports serve ‘independently specifiable purpose[s] which … largely define … the character of the activity’ (Citation1988, 380). Best here clearly confuses the prelusory goal of purposive sports with their lusory goal. This despite the fact he does correctly observe in this same essay that in purposive sports ‘the purpose can be specified independently of the manner of achieving it as long as it conforms to the rules’ (380). But because this latter mention of conformance to the rules does not figure in his argument for this distinction between purposive and aesthetic sports, it is more so an aside than a genuine qualification.
6. It may be objected that this direct connection of aesthetic play to winning that I am arguing for can only be claimed for what Best calls aesthetic sports (gymnastics, figure skating, diving, and the like), since it is only these sports in which plainly aesthetic judgments are determinative of what qualifies as play conducive to winning. But this is a misnomer. For there is a good aesthetic reason why we don’t rely on aesthetic judgments in sports such as track and field and football to evaluate winning performances. That’s because relying on such considered judgments would result in repeated breaks in the action that would disrupt the tempo, pace, flow, and rhythm of these sports – – the very aesthetic elements that account for their allure and attraction to the multitudes.
7. My claim that understanding and appreciating what qualifies as aesthetic game play enjoins us to consider how such play contributes to the accomplishment of the lusory goal is intended as a criticism of Vivias, who argued he was only able to appreciate the beauty of a hockey game when he watched it in slow motion and set aside any interest in who was winning. Screening out any consideration of what the hockey players were trying to accomplish in acting as they did, allowed him, he insisted, to take in ‘the beautiful rhythmic flow of the slow-moving men’ ((Citation1959, 228). Vivias’s narrow take on hockey is owed, no doubt, to Kant’s notion of ‘free’ beauty as the paradigm of aesthetic evaluation and appreciation, which, as Davies argues, sidelines ‘what kind of thing it is or its roles or purposes’ (Citation2006, 231).
8. The rogue figure skater in my example is actually the Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston, who, as Best observed, flouted the rules and norms of figure skating because to his mind they impinged upon his poetic license to skate in yet more aesthetically pleasing ways. He was, of course, docked points in figure skating competitions for doing so, and rightly, in Best’s estimation, for violating those rules and norms. (Best Citation1978, 121).
9. That the Maradona ‘hand of God’ example closely resembles my example of a handball violation in my introductory paragraph is, of course, no coincidence.
10. The German word the translator renders as loop-hole is Hinterturen, which can be variously translated as escape hatch or outlet. As we shall see, the English word loophole has a quite technical meaning in law and sport, that differs in meaning from the German word.
11. I think it is something very much like what Wittgenstein had in mind in when he urged we let the ‘practice speaks for itself’ that Brandom had in mind when he urged us to take our normative direction from ‘fundamental norms implicit in practices rather than norms explicit in principles’ (Citation1994, 23, author’s emphasis), and what Pippin had in mind when he reminded us ‘there is no original normless situation, only an on-going, continuous historical process of initiation or socialization into a community’s normative practices’ (Citation2008, 391).
12. That the purpose-setting work the ethical conventions of sport do complement the formal, ludic structure of sport is why any claim such conventions can support a strictly instrumental conception of the purpose of sport, for example, that the primary aim of sport is to sell tickets or merchandise, or to calm racial tensions, must be rejected. For these kinds of instrumental renderings of the aim of sport can at most qualify as secondary purposes that I discuss in the text, since in order to accomplish any one of them one must first play the game itself and thus pursue its lusory goal. To presume otherwise, to suppose that the primary purpose of sport is to sell tickets, or to calm racial tensions, which suggests in the absence of such purposes sport is an unintelligible, worthless affair, is to invite the self-defeating, and incoherent conception of sport that Suits calls ‘radical instrumentalism.’ Such a view is self-defeating, Suits tells us, because claiming sport has such instrumental goals ‘built into them,’ means tying to attain them would destroy the games in which they figure since it would override obedience to the rules. Such a view is further incoherent on its face, Suits tells us, because if sport is all about the achievement of such instrumental goals, it couldn’t be more unsuited to such purposes. That’s because the worst way to sell tickets, or calm racial tensions, or achieve any practical, instrumental goal, would be to turn them into a game, since that would require us to rule out the most efficient ways to achieve them (Suits Citation2018, 134). I want to thank the editor, Paul Gaffney, for pointing out this possible objection, not to mention these examples, and for pushing me to address it.
13. That’s not to say the ethical conventions of contemporary sport place no limits on the pursuit of victory, that they sanction a Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all in which almost anything goes. The conventions of present-day baseball are instructive in this regard. For example, when one team has a big lead over the other late in the game, the convention is that the team with the lead stop trying to steal bases, to stretch hits into extra bases, and to swing at 3–0 pitches (Turbo and Duca Citation2011, 166). Similarly, it is considered unethical for infielders to pretend a ball from the catcher is coming when a runner is trying to steal a base, commonly called ‘deking,’ because it leads to awkward slides that often result in injuries (Turbo and Duca, 88). So, while it is clear contemporary sport gives its moral stamp of approval to the wholehearted pursuit of winning, it is no less clear that it looks morally askance on such unrestrained striving if it comes at the excessive psychological and physical cost of opponents.
14. If it is objected that the conventions only give players normative license to break rules with penalties, but not its central constitutive rules, I hasten to point out that even though Suits does distinguish rules with penalties from constitutive rules, he crucially adds that ‘these rules [with fixed penalties] and the lusory consequences of their violation are established by the constitutive rules, and are simply extensions of them’ ((Citation2018, 35).
15. I want to thank Sigmund Loland for his insightful comments on previous drafts of this essay. I especially want to thank the editor, Paul Gaffney, for his many helpful suggested revisions that greatly improved the paper. Finally, I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and criticisms.