Beyond Habermas, with Habermas: Adjudicating Ethical Issues in Sport through a Discourse Ethics-based Normative Theory of Sport

ABSTRACT

In this article, I revise the normative account of sport that I proposed in ‘William J. Morgan’s “conventionalist internalism” approach. Furthering internalism? A critical hermeneutical response.’ I first present Habermas’ discursive ethics, placing emphasis on his interpretation of the relationship between moral (Kantian) and ethical (Hegelian/hermeneutical) principles. Then, I provide a reformulation of my account by both drawing on Habermas and going beyond him—as I go beyond Habermas, I will refer to the account as ‘discourse-ethics based.’ To further explore the normative potential of the account, I connect its main tenets to the three main normative theories of sport (formalism, broad internalism, and deep conventionalism) and illustrate it with examples from anti-doping governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Deep conventionalism
• discourse ethics
• sport ethics
• normative
• theory of sport

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank William J. Morgan for his critical comments on my 2014 paper on Habermas, broad internalism, and deep conventionalism. Also, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the journal, Andrew Edgar, and Matija Mato Skerbic for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. To be clear, I employ the term ‘transcendental’ here to refer to a priori structures or formal qualifications (of a given human activity, such as rational thought or speech) (Cloete 2000).

2. Throughout his work, he uses different couples of concepts: ‘moral’ and ‘ethical,’ ‘justification’ and ‘application,’ ‘validity’ and ‘facticity,’ and ‘normative’ and ‘evaluative.’ On the one hand, the terms ‘moral,’ ‘justice,’ ‘justification,’ ‘validity,’ and ‘normative’ relate to transcendental moral principles aimed at meeting the rational ‘agreement of all those who might be concerned’ (Nielsen and Habermas 1990, 96). On the other hand, the terms ‘ethical,’ ‘good,’ application,” ‘facticity,’ and ‘evaluative’ have to do with how individuals ‘understand [them]selves and the world’ (Nielsen and Habermas 1990, 96), that is, with issues pertaining to the good life.

3. The ideal, therefore, is not something to be fully realized. Paraphrasing Kant, the ideal is the ‘a-priori of practical reason.’

4. Habermas argues: ‘Hegel was the first to argue that we misperceive the basic moral phenomenon if we isolate the two aspects, assigning opposite principles to each … The ethics of discourse pick up this basic Hegelian aspiration to redeem it with Kantian means’ (Nielsen and Habermas 1990, 201, my emphasis). In his interpretation of Habermas, Morgan downplays the interconnectedness of moral (Kantian) and ethical (Hegelian) aspects in discourse ethics.

5. In Kant’s ethics, the process by which what ought or ought not to be done consists in the monological universalization of the categorical imperative (Timmons 2017, 50). In discourse ethics, however, the procedure has a dialogical form, for it requires engaging in deliberative processes about norms and practices (Johnson 1991).

6. In ‘From Worldviews to the Lifeworld,’ Habermas differentiates between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘worldview’ (2017, 3–27). Both concepts refer to existential elements that serve as sources of orientation for individuals. The lifeworld is ‘the insurmountable, only intuitively accompanying horizon of experience [or] the uncircumventable, non-objectively present experiential background of a personal, historically situated, embodied and communicatively socialized everyday existence’ (Habermas 2017, 4). That is to say, the lifeworld is the pre-theoretical knowledge that we rely on to go about our everyday lives. In contrast, worldviews are interpretations of the world that provide humans with orientation in life. Worldviews, as opposed to the lifeworld, are the result of theoretical thinking and rational communicative processes.

7. In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, published in 1983, Habermas argues that discursive ethics demands that ‘moral judgment becomes dissociated from the local conventions and historical coloration of a particular form of life. It can no longer appeal to a naïve validity of the context of the lifeworld’ (Habermas, 1995b, 109). Furthermore, in his 1991 book, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, he posits: ‘moral practical discourses … require a break with all of the unquestioned truth of an established, concrete ethical life … distancing oneself from the contexts of life with which one’s identity is inextricably interwoven’ (Habermas 2001, 13).

8. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, Habermas argues, ‘today philosophical doctrines still fulfil the function of worldviews to the extent that they have preserved their reference to the world as a whole, to the cosmos, to world history and the history of salvation, and to a process of natural evolution that includes human beings and culture’ (Habermas 2017, 3). Thus, Habermas claims that philosophical theories are worldviews whose function is to provide orientation in life as a whole, becoming a form of ‘ethical self-interpretation’ (Habermas 2017, 3, my emphasis). This shows how closely tied moral principles and ethical principles are in Habermas’ ethics.

9. To identify these three types of normative principles at the core of discourse ethics, I draw on Juan Carlos Siurana’s (2012), Augusto Hortal’s (2017), and Matthias Kettner’s (2006) interpretation of Apel’s discourse ethics as comprising three parts (Part A, Part B, and Part C). Also, see Mendieta (1996).

10. As I argue in my 2014 paper, the most powerful and prestigious members of the community have a superior power on the decisions made within the community, which grants them a bigger influence on how other members within the community think and talk about themselves. That is to say, powerful individual have greater possibilities to shape deep conventions.

11. Relatedly, by drawing on Nicholas Agar’s work, I hypothesized that human’s bodily nature has a key role in the normative evaluation of achievement within sport (Lopez Frias 2018bb). These limitations have less to do with what sport really is and more with humans’ biological limitations.

12. As Morgan (2015) claims, it might well be that the protests against WADA are motivated by WADA officials’ lack of consistency in observing and implementing not only anti-doping regulations, but also their amateur-based normative framework.