Broad Internalism, Deep Conventions, Moral Entrepreneurs, and Sport

Abstract

My argument will proceed as follows. I will first sketch out the broad internalist case for pitching its normative account of sport in the abstract manner that following Dworkin’s lead in the philosophy of law its adherents insist upon. I will next show that the normative deficiencies in social conventions broad internalists uncover are indeed telling but misplaced since they hold only for what David Lewis famously called ‘coordinating’ conventions. I will then distinguish coordinating conventions from deep ones and make my case not only for the normative salience of deep conventions but for their normative superiority over the abstract normative principles broad internalists champion.

Keywords:

• interpretivism
• conventions
• principles
• rules
• norms

Notes

1. To say that these normative principles are internal to sports can mean one of two things, and broad internalists do not speak with one mind on this matter. On the one hand, Simon’s claim that these normative principles are internal to sport is meant both in the sense that they inform our understanding of what they are about from the inside, and, in addition, that they are unique to sport itself. For Simon, then, these principles are not to be found outside of sport, which is why he argues sport possesses its own distinctive internal morality. For Russell, on the other hand, to say these normative principles are internal means just that while they are found within sport they are not unique to sport (2007, p. 52). Rather, he treats these ‘internal’ principles as ‘extensions of values found elsewhere’, which is why he rejects Simon’s claim that sport has its own internal morality. However, because this intramural disagreement does not concern the specifics of my main argument, I will ignore it in the ensuing analysis.

2. It was Dixon who first explicitly introduced this realist wrinkle into broad internalism claiming that it was in fact implicit in both Simon’s (2007) and Russell’s (1999) accounts. He proved to be prescient in this regard since both Simon (2004) and Russell (2004) in later essays enthusiastically signed on to his realist interpretation of their broad internalist positions.

3. Dworkin thinks there is another reason to reject the idea that social conventions can be normative principles, that as far as I can tell Simon and Russell do not mention, and that is that many of our social conventions are, in fact, contested rather than uniformly accepted. He thinks this is particularly the case regarding our reigning social conventions about who should or should not receive medical care (1983, 4).

4. Simon goes on to distinguish ‘justificatory’ realism from what he calls ‘metaphysical’ realism, which holds that rationally grounded normative principles ‘reflect, correspond to, or are justifiable by appeal to moral facts or by the nature of the world’ (2004, 125). It is this latter version of ‘metaphysical’ realism that Russell opted for in his later essays (2011) (2004), because his already noted endorsement of Dixon’s realist interpretation of his earlier interpretivist accounts of sport (1999) (2007) made him vulnerable, he now supposed, to the criticism of having conflated justified belief with ‘notions of truth and fact’. In order to preempt such criticism, and to distinguish his position from Simon’s and Dixon’s non-natural, metaphysically minimalist, constructivist (Russell’s name for ‘justificatory’ realism) approach, Russell argued normative facts of the moral variety are indeed part of the furniture of the universe, that is, that ‘moral facts are natural facts about the world that supervene on and are constituted by more basic natural social, psychological, and biological properties’ (2004, 144). Whether or not this latter move to ethical naturalism was a wise one or not will not be the main focus of my analysis to come, which will instead limit itself to an analysis of justificatory realism. However, two points are worth noting here. The first is that my criticism of justificatory realism has important, even if indirect, implications for Russell’s ethical naturalism. The reason why is that while justificatory realism doesn’t entail metaphysical realism, metaphysical realism does entail justificatory realism. For only if reason can somehow break out of the confines of the conventional contexts in which it works, which I will argue that it manifestly can not, will it be able to adequately represent and thus determine what are the relevant moral facts about sport. This leads me to my second point, and that is I am at a loss about how to reconcile the coherentist methodology Russell employs in his account of ethical naturalism, which commits him, as he himself puts it, to ‘something akin to Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium, wherein theoretical commitments and considered judgments are traded off against each other to secure greater consistency’ (2004, 155), with his robust realist theory of ethical naturalism. Since according to that theory the justification of our normative conceptions of the point of sport rests ultimately on whether they correspond to the moral facts of the matter, to the relevant moral facts about sport. Unless I have misunderstood Russell, if our normative judgments are not supported by the moral facts that constitute grounds for rejecting our considered judgments not for trading them off against those facts, for trying to make them better cohere.

5. In what may seem to be a concession to practice, Simon argues that normative principles can be rejected if they have unacceptable consequences for our actions (2007, 45). But Simon’s qualification here speaks, I think, to the application rather than the rational justification of normative principles. For on Simon’s account only impartial rational inquiry can certify that a principle of action is indeed a genuinely normative one. But when it comes to the application of such normative principles, their affect on practice must be taken into account both because social practices have features that distinguish them from one another – which is important because some actions that are appropriate in certain social practices, for example, physical contact in sport, addressing others in ways that aim to impeach their testimony in law, intimacy in families, are inappropriate outside of these practices, and because normative principles may conflict with one another thus requiring that we consider their impact on practice to sort out which should apply and which should not. This strategy of separating the justification of normative principles from their application is one that Habermas judiciously follows, and uses to explain why practice can’t be ignored when norms are applied. In his own words, ‘It is in light of concrete circumstances and particular constellations of interests that valid principles must be weighed against one another, and exceptions to [norms] justified. There is no other way to satisfy the principle that the like is to be treated in a like manner and unlike in an unlike manner’ (1993, 44).

6. Creating such optimal competitive conditions means in Simon’s hypothetical example lending Josie, an opponent in a championship golf match who shows up without her clubs not because of her own carelessness but because the airline lost them, one’s extra golf clubs that just so happen to be identical to her lost clubs (2007, 44). In Russell’s example, it means that if a worthy opponent is not available because of some technical restriction, say, a worthy contender that is not a member of the same boxing federation, then one should try one’s best to get the restriction waived so that the fight can occur (2007, 57).

7. An important felicitous feature of Russell’s external principle is that it clears up what has become a pressing but often confounding issue in sport, namely, when does a moral offense in sport constitute as well as a criminal one punishable by law. For if McSorley and company can no longer be considered genuine game-players by virtue of their violent actions, then this is sufficient reason in itself, argues Russell, rightly I think, to refer them to criminal authorities rather than to deal with them ‘in-house’ (2007, 59–60).

8. I should make clear here that broad internalists are not altogether normatively unforgiving regarding the purposes people might have to pursue sport in ways in which excellence is not the overriding concern. That is why they would readily give, I presume, a free pass to those who have only a casual interest in sport, say, to get fit or meet people. The same cannot be said for those who take their sports more seriously, that is, those for whom sports are an important part of their own self-identities.

9. That is not to say that we can’t thin out our initially thick normative vocabularies when needed to come up with wide-ranging, cross-cultural negative injunctions against, say, murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny. And there is usually enough overlap in our normative vocabularies to abet such thinning of them for special purposes, usually social crises and political confrontations. But when we turn to criticizing our local social practices, we can’t do without these thick normative vocabularies, not, at least, if we are serious about our critical efforts and no less serious about the social practices served by such efforts. I borrow this entire line of argument from Walzer (1994)

10. Aiming for justification among one’s peers is often given a bad rap by truth seekers, who think aiming for anything short of the truth, in other words, settling for justification, is a sign of an inquirer’s faint heartedness rather than a sign of the contextual limits of rational inquiry. I can think of no better reply to this accusation than to quote Rorty on this very point: ‘I cannot see a practical difference between aiming at beliefs justified to the relevant contemporary community of fellow-inquirers and aiming at getting a belief that will be justified to all future communities. If I aim at the first, what more can I do to aim at the second?’ (2010a, 44).

11. One of the many insightful features of Simon’s discourse ethics essay is that it suggests a fruitful way to individuate athletic practice communities, to mark them off from other kinds of practice communities. I am thinking specifically here of his important claim that it must be ‘the cogency of the argument or pertinence of the point being made [that should] be the focus of discourse ethics’ (2004, 128) rather than who it is that is making the point – say, a media commentator, or philosopher of sport, or a player, or a fan or observer of the game. Simon’s idea that restricting dialogue to certain discussants ‘does not sit easily with the idea of (rational) discourse itself’, when combined with my claim that such rational back and forth presupposes agreement on criteria of reflective appraisal, suggests that any member of a practice community who shares those criteria and has something intellectually compelling to say is a bona fide member of that community and, therefore, deserves to be given a fair hearing. This is a considerable improvement over my own previous clumsy effort to individuate athletic practice communities by restricting legitimate members who get to have a say only to those who have an understanding and appreciation of the internal goods of the sport in question (2004, 237). The problem with this approach is that it would indeed limit those who get to air their views to a select few, because if MacIntyre, who is best known for his rendering of the internal goods of practices, is to be believed, only those who have actual experience as participants in the practice are competent to judge what qualifies as a genuine internal good of that practice (1984, 188–9).

12. That doesn’t mean, of course, they are foreordained to fail such challenges, since if they were their normative status would be entirely suspect. One important way they are able successfully to fend off such critical challenges is by exposing the shortcomings of such attacks that emanate from dominant interpretations of the sort I discussed in the text with respect to D’Agostino’s ethos account of games. Walzer provides an instructive example from outside the world of sport in his discussion of how the feudal practice of service that required local lords to defend the poor had fallen into such disrepair that lords actually and routinely exploited rather than protected the poor. Social critics of the time who deplored such exploitation were able to appeal to the ideal of aristocratic service itself to criticize this now dominant practice, and to good effect (1994, 44). This same sort of immanent criticism of dominant interpretations of sport informs Russell’s acute analysis of the code of retaliation observed by so called hockey enforcers like McSorley, whose main role is supposedly to prevent wholesale violence in the game from breaking out by retaliating against opponents who assault their players. As Russell himself skillfully shows, such dominant practices in hockey can be critically defused by appealing to the purpose of the game, which undermines the claim enforcers in hockey are justified, are a necessary part of the game. Russell’s critical success in demolishing such dominant interpretations of a sport like hockey, as I hope to show in my ensuing discussion, is, however, owed to his ignoring his own advice to shun conventional, context-sensitive norms in favor of abstract, philosophical ones.

13. Sport has been the scene of several revolutionary normative breakthroughs in the past century when the moral entrepreneurs in its midst found it necessary to break the crust of convention because our old ways of thinking and talking about its purpose and value proved to be more trouble than they were worth. One of the most recent and sweeping of such normative transformations was part of a large scale social movement that transformed the face of American society itself. I am referring here to the efforts by feminists like the late Iris Marion Young (1988) to overturn what they rightly saw to be the heretofore conceptual and practical exclusion of women from sport. Young and her likeminded critics argued persuasively that such exclusion diminishes the full humanist potential of sport itself. In order to unleash that potential, and pry open the logical and practical space of sport to accommodate both female and male athletes, they took to redescribing sports in non-masculinist ways that decoupled athletic excellence from masculinist talk of the ‘gentleman’ athlete and the manly (strenuous) striving for athletic glory. In short, they created a brand new vocabulary of sport with the aim of creating a brand new form of sport the likes of which had never been seen before, not at least on this scale or at this level of articulateness. As a consequence, they were able to put in question the privileging of masculine bodies and ways of doing sport, which because they no longer enjoyed the normative protection of the conventions from which our notions of amateur and professional sport were formulated could no longer block normative inquiry along these lines. But what should not be lost sight of in this regard is that the success of morally entrepreneurial efforts like this one to break the crust of past conventions by redescribing the point of athletic competition ultimately depend on whether these at first counter-intuitive, unconventional, non-masculinist ways of talking about and pursuing sport, become as intuitive and conventional as their predecessors.

14. That is not just because these sports were forced upon them by their richer and more powerful European and American counterparts, for as Guttmann has astutely noted, while ‘Culturally dominated groups have often had sports imposed upon them; they have also – perhaps just as often – forced their unwelcome way into sports from which the dominant group desired to exclude them (1994, 179). Rather, the issue is not coercion but what counts as a justifiable reason to regard such athletic changes as indeed rational ones. My claim is that in such cases there can be no grounds for claiming one form or way of doing of sport is rationally superior to another when no shared criteria of reflective appraisal are available to make such comparative normative judgments.

15. On the importance of not running together matters of translation with those of commensuration, see Rorty (1979, 302).

16. This is why I disagree with Simon’s claim that because his dialogical account of justificatory realism is based on actual, historically embedded discourse, rather than the kind of hypothetical, idealized discourse peddled by theorists like Habermas, it doesn’t have to go transcendent to certify that the principles it generates in this pro and con way are universally valid ones, that is, justified on their intellectual merits alone (2004, 130). As I see it, by contrast, the only way one can hope to show that one’s normative principles are universally valid is that they have defeated all potentially rival principles on exclusively rational grounds, which means that one can’t avoid going transcendent, reaching for a context-independent and perspective-independent vantage point from which to adjudicate all such claims. The problem with such an approach, as I have been arguing, is that different normative accounts of the purpose of sport come with different standards of rational justification. That does not exclude the possibility, as Simon duly notes, that a particular normative take on sport might gain universal acceptance, what Rawls calls universal ‘in reach’, which means not that it has, per impossible, defeated all comers on strictly intellectual grounds and thus ‘appl[ies] to all rational beings everywhere’ (1999, 86), but that it is an conception of sport that for a variety of factors enjoys wide franchise the world over. The previously noted triumph of modern sports over traditional indigenous sports is a good example, because that triumph was not owed to the intrinsic intellectual merits of modern sports, but, among other things, to political expedience. For it is no secret that in order to be recognized as a nation to be reckoned with on the international stage today, becoming an official member nation of the Olympic family of nations is an indispensable first and even, perhaps, last step. And since the only way a sport can become an Olympic sport, short of a nation hosting the Games and getting an opportunity to feature one of its national pastimes as a one-time, ‘experimental’ sport, is if it is played by a significant number of member countries, which, of course, would exclude the indigenous sports of most nations save those of England and the United States.

17. That the transition from ancient, to traditional, to modern sport cannot be regarded as transcultural evidence of normative progress does not mean that it cannot be viewed as historical evidence of normative progress from a particular perspective, for example, according to contemporary people like us for whom fairness in athletic matters is a necessary criterion of what counts as morally and aesthetically praiseworthy athletic accomplishment. For as Rorty notes, why should the fact that our judgments of normative progress in sport, like our judgments about anything, appeal to ‘criteria of our time and place . . . cast doubt on that judgment’ (2007, 920). After all, what can progress mean other than rationally acceptable to us at our best given that neither our own community nor those of our predecessors’ or successors’ can claim to be one with a God’s-eye perspective. What goes for sport here obviously goes as well for all other social practices. For we contemporary Westerners would be no less rationally puzzled, our conventional intuitions having utterly but understandably failed us, when apprised that the ancient Greeks provided free public dramas for their citizens because of a social need they alone, on their view, met, but let the poor among them fend for themselves, and fend very badly indeed given their desperate situation (Walzer 1994, 70); or that medieval Christians used public funds (tithes) to ensure a priest for every parish so as to make repentance and salvation universally available (Walzer 1994, 28), but left the ‘cure of bodies’ in private hands (which, of course, resulted only in the rich getting any medical care at all) because bodily health was not deemed nearly as important as salvation; or that Rousseau and his eighteenth-century peers thought holidays were important only because of the opportunities they afforded citizens to celebrate their lives together in public festivals (whereas we moderns view official holidays as essentially private opportunities to escape our daily lives) (1960, 126–7). As in the case of sport, however, our normative puzzlement in these matters does not entail normative agnosticism regarding what we, according to our own lights, view as the progress we’ve made in these different sectors of our lives.

18. As Marmor rightly notes, it is possible to claim some ‘vague and highly general coordination problem’, such as a desire to play some kind of physical game that involves throwing and catching, that inventing baseball could be said to resolve. But as he aptly responds, ‘The obvious difficulty is that such a coordination problem would be too abstract and underspecified’, so much so, that we would have to claim, quite implausibly, that all are ‘social interactions are solutions to coordination problems’ (2009, 22)

19. Bourdieu might have had something like this in mind when he boldly claimed that, ‘Tennis played in Bermuda shorts and a tee shirt, in a track suit, . . . and Adidas running shoes is indeed another tennis [than tennis played with strict standards of dress], both in the way it is played and in the satisfaction it gives’ (1984, 212) Of course, if he is right about this that means that, unlike my example of what constitutes appropriate tennis apparel discussed in the text, the change in the surface conventions of appropriate tennis dress signals as well a change in the deep conventions regarding the aim of the game.

20. His mention of owners in this example, suggests that it is not enough for a convention to qualify as a normatively binding one that a sufficiently large number of people treat it as such (this is why I put the word exclusively in scarce quotes in the beginning of this paragraph in the text). For he also seems to be saying that only if the right sort of people (the owners) support the convention can it appropriately function as a normative constraint on the behavior of players. So if the owners believe that allowing such rules to go uncalled promotes their economic stake in the game, I’m not at all sure D’Agostino thinks that spectators, or anyone else for that matter, no matter their numbers, can make up the normative difference. In which case, Marx’s putdown of the social meanings packed into conventions and the like would be apropos, namely, that the social conventions and reigning ideas of a culture are nothing more that the ‘ideas of the ruling class. . . the dominant material relations grasped as ideas’ (1976, 59).

21. I am not being entirely fair here either to Dworkin or Russell. I am being unfair to Dworkin because it appears that he has changed his views on this issue, at least according to Russell himself who knows much more about his views than I do. As Russell avers, ‘For Dworkin, the moral principles of a legal system are not necessarily the most just principles; they are the principles that reside in the best interpretation of a community’s legal practice’ (2011, 267). I am not being entirely fair to Russell, since he sometimes says much the same thing about safeguarding the integrity of sport as Dworkin here does about safeguarding the integrity of justice, namely, that ‘Integrity is committed to making the best of a practice, taking account of what went before, and showing that in its best light. This prevents adjudicators from making wholesale revisions to a practice. They do not start with a clean slate but must try to show the practice as it has emerged in a particular point in history, in its best light’ (1999, 38–9). This Dworkian take on the integrity of sport, of course, looks suspiciously like the conventional normative case I have been trying to make. But the problem here is that I don’t know how to square this historical reading of Dworkin on adjudication with Russell’s realist reading of Dworkin on the derivation of normative principles, especially the muscular metaphysical reading he adopts in his later essays (2011) (2004). Russell himself recognizes the gap between Dworkin’s practice-based account of justice and his own realist-based account of sport, which leads him to concede that Dworkin’s account is ‘not a genuine moral realist’ one, and, therefore, ‘is in important respects different from a more traditionally realist version of interpretivism’ that Russell defends (35, 267). As far as I can see, Russell and his fellow interpretivists’ realist commitments (even Dixon’s and Simon’s metaphysically stripped down ‘justificatory’ version) better fits Dworkin’s abstract notion of justice featured in the text.

22. Of course, it could be objected that Russell and company do indeed provide both a concept of athletic purpose, to test one’s physical mettle, and a conception of such purpose, the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ principles, from which criteria of what counts as such a perfectionist test can be derived. The problem with this objection, however, as I see it, is that the latter principles are simply restatements of the concept of athletic excellence, and, therefore, as abstract as the concept itself. That would disqualify them, to my mind, as conventional, historically grounded conceptions of sport that furnish concrete criteria of reflective assessment. Where things get tricky in this regard, as I will mention later, is that when one focuses on the actual interpretive work on sport turned out by broad internalists, rather than their realist methodological pronouncements, the often fine-grained and nuanced quality of that work reflects, or so I want to claim, an attention to historical detail, to conventional conceptions of athletic excellence – at least as applied to contemporary sport as opposed to the amateur version it largely replaced. I think further that their attention to historical detail cannot be explained away as a product simply of their application of these principles, which, as they have consistently argued, requires molding principles to fit whatever happen to be the current historical circumstances. Rather, I think that the principles they astutely wield in much of this work are, in fact, conventional ones that scarcely resemble their abstract counterparts, more specifically, that were developed with the present athletic scene in mind. If we persist in calling them principles, then, we need to think of these principles ‘as summaries, rather than foundations, of [present athletic] practices’ (Rorty 2010b, 508).

23. As Holt (2006, 366) rightly points out in this regard, it was because this new growing and affluent middle class of administrators and professionals embraced amateur sport with open arms that public schools sports (in England these were actually private schools for the rich), which were the institutional seedbed of amateur sport, spread beyond these public schools to the national arena and in short order to international venues like the Olympic Games.

24. This hedonistic understanding of sport explains Trollope’s warning against ‘a desire to follow too well a pursuit which to be pleasurable, should be a pleasure’ (As quoted in La-Vaque-Manty, 99).

25. As one commentator of the period poignantly put it, ‘what sportsmanlike opponent cares to make his point against a helpless antagonist’ (Collier 1898, 886).

26. That is not to say this ascendant professional view of sport rejected amateurism out of hand. For at least when it came to paying athletes for their athletic exploits, these professionals shared with their amateur predecessors a suspicion of the profit motive in social practices like sport. As Rader astutely put it, both athletic camps subscribed to the view that there were ‘higher purposes than merely making or spending money’ (2004, 131).

27. I want to thank John Russell and Bob Simon, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions. But I owe a special debt to Russell and Simon for their especially acute, detailed, and incisive criticisms, which saved me from many embarrassing mistakes. Though I’m sure they will sharply disagree with much of what I have to say here, I have learned far more from their own always first-rate work than I know how adequately to put in words.