On not being alone in lonely places: preferences, goods, and aesthetic-ethical conflict in nature sports

ABSTRACT

Ethical questions normally arise in sport because its participants are human moral agents and because its practice community entails the observance of rules and responsibilities that humans generally owe one another in a social practice of voluntary competition. Since nature sports are not defined by this kind of inter-agential activity, it would appear that there are no comparable ethical constraints on their pursuit. This paper considers conflicts of preference versus right between humans, how these are resolved, and whether these rights are relevant in assessment of nature sport activity vis-à-vis nonhuman creatures. Relying on a goods perspective instead of a rights framework, via Korsgaard, I argue against an assumption that human preference is sufficient to override consideration of nonhuman animals’ functional goods.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature sport
• animals
• rights
• values
• goods
• preferences
• Korsgaard

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These might include things like noise, environmental degradation that effects a loss of enjoyment for other humans, or costs incurred on the public purse.

2. I am not here relying on any specific distinctions between types of ‘nature sport’, i.e. Nature Instrumental, Nature Specific, or Nature Oriented Sports; the discussion here could apply to any broadly Nature Based Sport. See Howe (2012).

3. I am broadly influenced in this ideal division of the aesthetic and ethical by Søren Kierkegaard. Note that Kierkegaard classes the intellectual within the aesthetic.

4. It might be thought that one person’s preferences are in some respect more worthy than another’s, because they are better able to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the experience than is the other, or because the experience itself is of a superior quality in some regard, e.g. the musician’s loss of hearing is worse that the tin-eared, the parfumier’s olfactory loss, etc. But is poetry really better than push-pin? (See Bentham (1825), Book 3, Ch. 1, 206–207 for this observation; also Mill (1969) II, 211–212, re: higher and lower pleasures.) Both are aesthetic pursuits and a preference for one over the other is an aesthetic preference. Perhaps appreciation of Bach requires a more developed intellect than appreciation of trip-hop or Morris dancing, but this intellectual component is also aesthetic – it allows us greater pleasure or it doesn’t. Who hasn’t been informed by some earnest and condescending individual that the reason they find some art form unbearable is that they ‘just don’t understand it’? The claim here is not that there is no difference between pleasures but, rather, that even the most earnestly pursued explanation of why one ‘ought’ to find something pleasurable is an intellectual defence of: pleasure. Hence, any justification of pleasure, whether ‘low’ or ‘elevated’ that involves pain or exploitation of others does not succeed so long as we regard those so used as of comparable moral standing to ourselves.

5. E.g., if a particular skill was tied to social status, such as weapons training in a warrior society, etc. But there might be better solutions to this situation.

6. These issues are discussed in Howe (2021), and in Pike, Hilton, Howe (2021), 26–29. ‘Without further qualification’ because there would need to be a justification for refusal to serve me in a public establishment where others are served, just as my meeting eligibility and performance requirements ought to grant me a place in the relevant competition – unless some other reason consistent with the aims of (the) sport, subject to rational justification, could be adduced for excluding me.

7. Others may think they are affected when they aren’t; that doesn’t affect the current discussion as any complainant has to make a case for infringement.

8. Cf. Frankfurt (1971) on the importance of having not just second-order desires, but second-order wills, to having a self (as opposed to being a wanton who is blown hither and yon by whatever desire is dominant).

9. See Mary Midgley (1995): if we hadn’t evolved a capacity for reason, and from thence, morality, which gives us a way to negotiate between our conflicting impulses (especially aggression and nurturance) we quite possibly would not have survived as a species.

10. ‘In the first instance’ because, for moral agents, the good of a being can become an explicit object of ethical action, i.e. acted for because of its status as a good. Thus, we can have as a moral project the provision of clean water for others besides ourselves because we judge it to be a moral duty to provide this good. But first, clean water either is or is not a material good for those individuals, i.e. their health.

11. ‘I do not want in general to identify final good with what actually appears good to us, because I want to say we, and all animals, can get it wrong. It happens all the time.’ (Korsgaard, 28).

12. Paul Taylor (1986), Ch. 3, especially 129–156, makes a similar point. See also Korsgaard (2018), Ch. 4.4.

13. See de Beauvoir (1976), The Ethics of Ambiguity, especially 114–145.

14. See Howe, ‘Fame, Narrative, and the (Im)Permanence of Memory’, forthcoming.