Toward a shallow interpretivist model of sport

Abstract

Deep ethical interpretivism has been the standard view of the nature of sport in the philosophy of sport for the past seventeen years or so. On this account excellence assumes the role of the foundational, ethical goal that justice assumes in Ronald Dworkin’s interpretivist model of law. However, since excellence in sports is not an ethical value, and since it should not be regarded as an ultimate goal, the case for the traditional account fails. It should be replaced by the shallow interpretivist model that I begin to sketch out and defend here.

Keywords:

• Interpretivism
• axiology
• normativity
• broad internalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank J.S. Russell and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Eldon Soifer for helpful comments on an even earlier partial draft that I presented at the Western Canadian Philosophical Association’s Annual Conference in Edmonton in October, 2016. Thanks also to the audience members at this talk for their thoughtful discussion. The remaining errors and shortcomings in this version are, of course, mine.

Notes

1. More precisely following Sumner (1996) authentic happiness should be the ultimate goal.

2. See McFall (1987).

3. See especially Dworkin (1977, 1985, and 1986). For some discussion of why I characterize this as only ‘roughly’ Dworkin’s view see note #5.

4. More recently Russell has moved away from this view and begun to endorse one similar to the shallow interpretivist account that I defend below. In his recent work on strategic fouling and the role of play in sport (e.g. 2017a, 2017b) he raises a number of interesting points regarding the balancing of various values in sport and the normative implications of this, and he begins to explore the notion that ethical values, although important, should not be regarded as foundational.

5. See Russell (1999, 39). Russell explains his thinking on this topic in greater detail in his 2011 paper (255, 261, and 263). Later in his discussion of Dworkin’s interpretivist view of law (267, 268) he notes that the idealized version of deep interpretivism in the law of the sort that I am roughly attributing to Dworkin here is compromised by the fact that since Dworkin endorses his ‘chain of law’ metaphor, according to which successive judges in a legal system should make the best sense of past legal decisions, it follows that if the system in question begins from some non-just principles or practices, then even as the law works itself pure over time, that system will not be perfectly just. As I explained earlier I am not concerned here with defending my interpretation of what I am calling my rough account of Dworkin’s view (if it is incorrect, then so much the worse for the prospects of deep ethical interpretivism). Rather I am interested in drawing out the implications for the philosophy of sport if we start from the assumption that we can at least provisionally imagine what a defensible version of deep ethical interpretivism in the law might look like.

6. In fairness since the distinction between shallow and deep interpretivism had not been drawn those who were sympathetic to an interpretivist view of sports just endorsed the standard view which has been deep interpretivist. Morgan (2004) also follows the standard practice of identifying interpretivism in sports with deep interpretivism.

7. Contrast sport with a simpler practice that has both a normative and an evaluative dimension: baking a cake. Although the norms that guide this practice may be considered instructions rather than rules, they direct us to a single goal generated from a single value. Thus, with respect to a theory about the nature of simple culinary recipes, I am a formalist.

8. For more on this matter see Hardman (2009).

9. For a similar criticism see Jones (2010, 94).

10. This notion that sport can be regarded as having various purposes is defended by Kretchmar (2015, 2016) in his argument for what he refers to as ‘pluralistic internalism’.