Idleness would be preferred over game playing as an ideal in Suits’ Utopia

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that idleness as play and leisure would be recognised as an ideal over game playing in Bernard Suits’ Utopia. Idleness is unaccountably overlooked as an ideal by Suits, as is the problem that his description of game playing is an anachronism, pushing his Utopians into a pre-Utopian condition. There is room for playing games in an idle Utopia but in a less prominent and more restricted role. Idleness as play and leisure is not defended as the sole ideal of Utopian existence though it is possibly that. Rather, it is presented as a compelling and preferable ideal for Suits’ Utopians, thus refuting his claim that game playing is ‘the only possible’ ideal of human existence in Utopia.

KEY WORDS:

• Idleness
• game playing
• Utopia
• play
• leisure

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Suits does not give a page reference and I cannot find this claim specifically expressed in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, though it is perhaps implied in Nozick’s general critique of conflicts between liberty and traditional Utopian visions. See in particular Nozick 1974, chapter 10, especially around 310–311.

2. In my essay on striving as a virtue, I mentioned ‘idleness or laziness’ as a vice in passing (Russell 2020, 433). This was a regrettable slip. ‘Laziness or sloth’ would have been better and more traditional terms.

3. I am indebted to David Kilpatrick and Danny Rosenberg for suggesting this idea, and to Paul Gaffney for suggesting a similar example.

4. I am indebted to anonymous reviewers, the editor of this journal, David Kilpatrick, William Morgan, Danny Rosenberg, and Christopher Yorke, and to an audience at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the International Association of the Philosophy of Sport at Pennsylvania State University for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.