![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
I call the trait that makes for a good or great competitor, the trait that makes its possessor compete well, ‘competitive excellence’. We seem to be of two minds about this trait: on the one hand, we often admire great competitors, but on the other hand, we sometimes identify their competitive drive as ‘pathological’, recognizing something unhealthy in it. Why are we so ambivalent? The answer I will defend is that there are at least three distinct traits, each of which satisfies the definition of competitive excellence and so has something of a claim to be the trait we admire in great competitors. One of these traits is a virtue, one a vice, and one can be either a virtue or a vice depending on what other traits accompany it. This accounts for our deep ambivalence about great competitors and implies that we should only seek to be great competitors in a qualified sense.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This is why Adams (Citation2009, 56) thinks competitiveness is not a virtue.
2. Because competitiveness and competitive excellence are distinct, I will say little about how to define competitiveness; see Gilbertson (Citation2016) and Jones (Citation2015).
3. Especially Simon, Torres, and Hager (Citation2015) and Kretchmar (Citation2012).
4. All page numbers refer to Simon, Torres, and Hager (Citation2015). I ascribe these views to Simon in particular because he was the sole author of previous editions of the book to which I am referring.
5. Roberts (Citation2009) discusses this type of pride. This is not the sort of thing called ‘pride’ in the capital vices tradition.
6. Robert Adams (Citation2009) defines competitiveness ‘as normally understood’ as ‘a matter of wanting to do better than others’ (p. 56).
7. Regarding pride: Roberts (Citation2009) is talking about precisely this form of pride in the following passage: ‘A kind of pleasure in superiority that is contrary to humility is what we might call “invidious” pleasure, a pleasure that focuses not on the substance of her superiority … but on the superiority as superiority’ (p. 125).
8. Aquinas (Citation2003, Question 10, Article 1, p. 351–354). For example, he says ‘Envy in this way consists of chagrin at the good of another, namely, insofar as the good of another is an impediment to one’s own excellence’ (Question X, Article 1, reply to objection 6, p. 353); and also ‘There is envy when persons are saddened at the fact that their neighbor has good things that they themselves do not’ (Question X, Article 1, reply to objection 11, p. 354).
9. This is the sort of competitiveness that DeYoung (Citation2009, 50) identifies as a type of envy. She is right to do so.
10. Aquinas (Citation2003, Question X, Article 1, reply to objection 7, p. 354) notes: ‘Chagrin about the good of the neighbor prevents actions that strive for the neighbor’s good and moves a person to contrary activities that hinder the neighbor’s good’.
11. Thanks especially to Cody Lewis for helping me see that this non-comparative way of looking at victory is possible.
12. Thanks to Jonathan Sands Wise for pointing this out to me.
13. Simon, Torres, and Hager (Citation2015), 38.
14. This, by the way, is why it isn’t automatically vicious to evaluate oneself by comparison to a reference class of other competitors, as described in Simon, Torres, and Hager (Citation2015), 49–50. Often in such a case it isn’t the comparison that one cares about for its own sake, but what information the comparison gives one about a comparison-independent standard of excellence.
15. Thanks to Sabrina Little (in correspondence) for helping me to see this.
16. Thanks to Jonathan Sands Wise for pointing out the connection with pride. See also Roberts (Citation2009).
17. I owe this observation to Adam Pelser in correspondence.
18. So far I am in agreement with the account of Butcher and Schneider (Citation1998), with one difference: they offer their account as an account of fair play rather than as an account of sportsmanship. I think this is a mistake, because there are ways to disrespect the game (say, disparaging an opponent after a match) which do not give one a competitive advantage and so do not constitute playing unfairly, but which do constitute a failure of sportsmanship. I think Butcher and Schneider ought to have offered their account as an account of sportsmanship more generally, and then defined playing unfairly in terms of sportsmanship, as unsportsmanlike conduct which is aimed at gaining a competitive advantage.
19. This general account is broadly compatible with the accounts of the value of sport given by Butcher and Schneider (Citation1998) and Hurka (Citation2006), and presupposed by R. Scott Kretchmar’s assessments of the comparative value of games in terms of the skillful interchanges they enable, in, for example, Kretchmar (Citation2005).
20. This is a somewhat imprecise statement of the definition of a game famously given by Suits (Citation2005).
21. Thanks to an anonymous referee for making this point.
22. Simon, Torres, and Hager (Citation2015), 47.
23. Kretchmar (Citation2012), 106.
24. Kretchmar (Citation2012), 104.
25. Kretchmar (Citation2012), 104; see also 109–110.