Betterness, injustice and failed athletic contests

Abstract

In this paper, I provide an account of failed athletic contests which consists of two ideals, the Athletic Superiority Ideal and the Just Results Ideal. Related to this, I argue that a sports contest can fail in terms of the Athletic Superiority Ideal without failing in terms of the Just Results Ideal and vice versa. In the process of doing the former, I argue that besides adjudicating errors, cheating, gamesmanship and (bad) luck, there are two other types of reasons because of which a sports contest can fail in terms of the Athletic Superiority Ideal. Finally, I argue that my account of failed athletic contests is more plausible than Mika Hämäläinen’s three-standard model of athletic superiority.

Keywords:

• Betterness
• desert
• injustice
• ranking systems
• rule violations

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for many very interesting and valuable comments, some of which I was not able to address in this paper. I am also grateful to Mika Hämäläinen, J.S. Russell and Paul L. Gaffney for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Arvi Pakaslahti's current research interests include philosophy of sport and applied ethics. Pakaslahti has previously published for example in Fair Play. Journal of Philosophy, Ethics and Sports Law.

Notes

1. By athletic excellence I refer, roughly speaking, to such abilities and skills that the contest has been designed or is supposed to test. I will come back to the concepts of a skill and an ability, and their interrelationship with athletic excellence, in Section 4.

2. See e.g. Berman (2011) and Dixon (2003, 116) who think along these lines. See also Pakaslahti (2014, 97–98).

3. Meta sports contests consist of individual sports contests and include series, knockout contests and contests which are a mixture of a series and a knockout contest (see Loland 2002, 99–102). For example, the 2013–2014 La Liga season, the men’s singles event in the 2002 French Open and the women’s 200-m event at the 2012 Olympic Games were meta contests, whereas each of the 380 matches in the 2013–2014 La Liga season, each of the 127 matches in the men’s singles event in the 2002 French Open and each of the 10 races (six heats in the first round, three semi-finals and the final) in the women’s 200-m event at the 2012 Olympic Games was an individual contest.

4. We could make a further distinction between moderately failed athletic contests and severely failed athletic contests. If a sports contest between A and B resulted in A’s victory, the contest failed severely in terms of the Athletic Superiority Ideal if and only if B was better than A in that contest. If a sports contest between A and B resulted in A’s victory, the contest failed moderately in terms of the Athletic Superiority Ideal if and only if A and B were equally good in that contest. And if a sports contest between A and B resulted in a draw, the contest could not fail severely in terms of the Athletic Superiority Ideal but failed moderately in terms of the Athletic Superiority Ideal if and only if A and B were not equally good in that contest.

5. The official result of a sports contest between A and B may be unjust to some extent even if the contest resulted in A’s victory and A deserved to win and B deserved to lose. I believe that in the first football example the official result is somewhat unjust, but not so unjust that it would make sense to consider the match a failed athletic contest. The result is somewhat unjust because Team A would have deserved to win by a wider margin than it did. But since Team A deserved to win and in fact won, the official result is not so unjust that it would make sense to consider the match a failure in terms of the Just Results Ideal.

6. It could be claimed that in a contest that involved two athletes or teams, both athletes or teams were the best athletes or teams if they were equally good. This might be true, but I use the word ‘best’ so that an athlete or team was the best athlete or team in some contest if and only if he or it was better than some other athlete(s) or team(s) in that contest and he or it was not worse than some other athlete or team in that contest.

7. It could be argued that at least in some sports all intelligent or rational strategic fouls are part of athletic excellence. This is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.

8. Besides watching the fight, see Boxrec Boxing Encyclopaedia (2012) and Goldstein (1996, 1997). It is unclear to me why Golota delivered the low blows in the ninth round. There seem to be four possibilities. It is possible (though perhaps very unlikely) that the low blows were unintentional. It is also possible that Golota delivered the low blows intentionally in order to gain an advantage. In that case Golota either tried to cheat or committed a strategic foul. If Golota committed a strategic foul, he must have thought that he would get only a point deduction. It is also possible that the low blows were intentional without Golota trying to gain an advantage. Perhaps the low blows were expressions of some kind of frustration or anger.

9. The refereeing rules of professional boxing leave a lot of discretion to a referee, which might mean that there are many situations in professional boxing fights in which two very different kinds of refereeing decisions are both correct decisions. Here, we do not have to worry about whether giving merely a point deduction to Golota in the ninth round would have also been a correct decision by the referee. In other words, Golota deserved to be disqualified even if disqualifying him was not the only possible right decision by the referee. Golota deserved to be disqualified because at least one plausible interpretation (and perhaps all plausible interpretations) of the relevant rules required the referee to disqualify Golota.

10. One might argue that since the ranking system of a football match rewards each team for scoring, and since creating a scoring chance enables scoring, the ranking system of a football match also rewards each team for creating a scoring chance when it leads to scoring. However, whenever creating a scoring chance does not lead to a goal, the ranking system of a football match does not reward a team for creating a scoring chance. Thus the value of creating a scoring chance in a football match is purely instrumental, which means that the ranking system of a football match does not, at least directly, reward a team for creating a scoring chance. But it may make sense to say that the ranking system of a football match can indirectly reward a team for creating a scoring chance.

11. Hämäläinen (2015) has later formulated a three-standard model of athletic superiority according to which the standards of athletic superiority are the demonstration of superior athletic skill, the achievement of a superior ideally adjudicated result and the achievement of a superior official result. The achievement of a superior official result is apparently the same thing as the achievement of a superior formal result, but I believe that there is a substantial difference between the models regarding the second standard, the meeting of prelusory goals using lusory means in Hämäläinen’s original model and the achievement of a superior ideally adjudicated result in Hämäläinen’s later model. That is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.

I concentrate in this section on Hämäläinen’s original model, because I think it is more plausible (or less implausible) than his later model. On the one hand, I think the standard of the achievement of a superior ideally adjudicated result faces certain problems which the standard of the meeting of prelusory goals using lusory means does not face. On the other hand, Hämäläinen’s later model also faces the same two problems which his original model faces and which I will discuss in this section.