Ludic Constructivism: Or, Individual Life and the Fate of Humankind

Abstract

In The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits argues that the best life is the one whose essence is game-play. In fact, only through the concept of game-play can we understand how anything at all is worth doing. Yet this seems implausible: morality makes things worth doing independently of any game, and games are themselves subject to moral evaluation. So games must be logically posterior to morality. The current paper responds to these objections by developing the theory of Ludic Constructivism.

Constructivist theories such as Kant’s explain normativity in a way that is both objective and cognitivist but also mind-dependent. Roughly, constructivists ground normative structures in rational procedures. But rational agency is diverse: it is realized in different ways and to different degrees by different agents. Yet Kantian Constructivism requires a strong identity of rational procedures across rational agents.

Ludic Constructivism avoids this challenge by rejecting this strong identity of agency, instead building a normative framework out of the ingredients of Suits’s definition of game-play. We want to play the best games we can. In order to do so we must play games with a certain structure: they must be nested multiplayer games in which everyone who is capable of self-originating activity is engaged as a fellow player rather than a plaything. Nested games – games that are constructed out of other games – go best when each game contributes to the value of each other game in the nest. Such game nests are “reciprocating value-maximization structures”. Our lives go best when we design, play, and revise the game of our Individual Life and we also embed that game within the highest-order nested game of Fate of Humankind.

In this way, Ludic Constructivism delivers a normative system that expands Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, and a life that meets Aristotle’s conception of pleasure.

Keywords:

• Suits
• Bernard Constructivism Kant
• Immanuel Practical Reason Ethics

Acknowledgments

I am particularly grateful to Mark LeBar—both his written work and his generous comments on a previous draft—for help in developing and clarifying the argument of this paper. I am also grateful to the anonymous referees for helpful suggestions on the previous draft.

Notes

1. Suits confronts this challenge somewhat more directly in Suits (1967), but never fully resolves it.

2. I defend it in Kolers (2015).

3. Suits 2014, 43. Throughout this paper, I use goal differently from end. ‘Goal’ is used only in the sense of prelusory or lusory goals, that is, things one pursues. ‘End’ is used in the practical sense of the value that one hopes (thereby) to achieve. Thus, to play a game is to set yourself a lusory goal in order to achieve the end of engaging in the activity made possible thereby.

4. For further discussion, see Korsgaard (1983).

5. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this objection.

6. On current point values of tournaments and the method for calculating points and rankings, see ITF (n.d.).

7. As this example shows, there are more than two levels. WTR is constructed not (only) out of matches but out of tournaments, which are themselves games constructed out of matches, which are constructed out of sets and games, which are constructed out of points and rallies. The nesting relationship thus encompasses, but is not exhausted by, Kretchmar’s (1975) structure of ‘tests’ and ‘contests’, which is only one mode of nesting. His revised (Kretchmar and Elcombe 2007) ‘pragmatic-tending reconceptualization’ adds diversity to the test/contest distinction but makes it orthogonal to the nesting relation. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this issue.

8. This ambiguity causes Suits’s difficulties with ‘professionals’. See Suits (2014, 155).

9. This is the move from the Formula of Universal Law to the Formula of Humanity. See Kant (2005, Ak. 428–9).

10. Michael Bratman (1999, 269) explicitly distinguishes between valuing x and believing x to be valuable. The latter may be motivationally inert whereas valuing is ‘a policy about one’s motivationally effective practical deliberation’. What Kantian Constructivism here explains is valuing x, which entails orienting one’s actions around x.

11. I am grateful to Mark LeBar for this way of putting it.

12. For a valuable overview of Expressivism, see van Roojen (2016).

13. See LeBar 2008; Lenman 2010.

14. See Ronzoni and Valentini (2008). As they note (2008, 404), Rawls always denied that Constructivism went ‘all the way down’, and part of its attraction for him was precisely that it abjured meta-ethics and metaphysics more generally.

15. Rawls (1999, 382) describes this process and characterizes it as the ‘Aristotelian Condition’ of humanity.

16. Though inasmuch as game conception and design is a maieutic end, we will not occurrently conceive ourselves as designing games.

17. Naches is Yiddish for ‘the bursting pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds’. See McGonigal (2011, 87). McGonigal continues, ‘players … frequently described a kind of vicarious pride from playing over someone else’s shoulder, and giving advice and encouragement…. We don’t describe ourselves as “bursting with pride” over our own success, but we do for others’.

18. This point is parallel to David Schmidtz’s (1995, chap. 5) argument that even the egoist is best served by coming to value others, and others’ ends, for their own sake.

19. Hockey great Darryl Sittler (1979) writes of getting out of a scoring slump by drawing an eye on the blade of his stick so it could see where to direct the puck.

20. For an interesting counterpoint see Marie Kondō’s (2014, 60; 190) discussion of household objects.

21. More accurately, there could be such a Platonic Ideal, and we could even generate an enjoyable game by setting ourselves the boss level challenge of climbing out of a cave to discover it. But inasmuch as the current theory is constructivist, it is committed to the possibility that we can build normativity without reference to that independent Ideal, even if it does exist.

22. McGonigal (2011, 33) refers to this sense of pride and accomplishment as fiero—an essential part of enjoying a game.

23. Cynthia Willett (2014; see also Massumi 2014) suggests that the origins of morality are found in animal play.