Agent-regret and sporting glory

ABSTRACT

When sporting agents fail through wrongful or faulty behaviour, they should feel guilty; when they fail because of a deficiency in their abilities, they should feel shame. But sometimes we fail without being deficient and without being at fault. I illustrate this with two examples of players, Moacir Barbosa and Roberto Baggio, who failed in World Cup finals and cost their teams the greatest prize in sport. Although both players failed, I suggest that neither was at fault and neither was deficient. I argue that we can fail through no fault of our own because our abilities are always fallible. This fallibility means that to succeed – to achieve sporting glory – we must run the risk of failure. The appropriate emotion to feel over such failures is agent-regret. Sporting agents and observers should not take up what I call the ‘critical position’: the idea that someone who fails must be deficient or must have been at fault. This allows for a softer, but also more accurate, attitude towards our own failures and the failures of others. I end by suggesting that the fallibility of our abilities is made clear through playing or watching sport, and this can illuminate life more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Agent-regret
• failure
• shame
• guilt
• Bernard Williams
• Joseph Raz

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Francis George for discussing this paper with me and offering several helpful examples, to Joseph Walsh, Emily Ryall, and Alfred Archer for insightful and constructive written comments, and to Massimo Renzo and David Owens for discussing the issues of action and agent-regret more broadly. Special thanks go to Chris McMullan for countless discussions of sports and philosophy and for helping me find numerous cases of agent-regret in sport.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The tone of the regret we feel can be altered by our relations to a particular event (Wallace 2013, 37–42). A fan will feel a deeper regret than a mildly interested party; I just mean to bring out the fact that ordinary regret does not presuppose any close involvement.

2. Even if there are forms of guilt that do not involve wrongdoing or fault, such as survivor guilt (H. Morris 1988; Velleman 2005), there is a recognisable form of guilt that does involve something like fault and this is the relevant notion for this paper.

3. Ori Herstein offers the dunk example at (Herstein 2013, 176–77).

4. Thanks to Alfred Archer for offering this position as a contrast.

5. For brief accounts of this event see (Bellos 2000; Caple 2017; Wilson 2013, 136–39; Yousif 2012).

6. The way in which one fails might matter to agent-regret (Williams 1981, 25–26, 36). I discuss this, as well as some developments to the attitude we should take towards our failures, in (Wojtowicz 2018).

7. [A] and [B] are my labels.

8. This uses a general notion of ‘can’ that doesn’t imply that on this very occasion I could have succeeded. See (Perry 2001, 103 note 51; Raz 2011, 246–47; Honoré 1999a).

9. Simon develops this as a thesis about desert: a player who hits a fluke does not deserve praise, whereas someone who gets lucky due to skill might.

10. It won’t always be clear whether something is down to skill or luck, and there will clearly be degrees of luck and skill involved. The distinction is ‘soft’ (Raz 2011, 237).

11. I put this in terms of making a decision and then utilising a skill. This is simplified for ease of discussion, but I intend my arguments also to apply to a more complicated picture. For a discussion of the ways in which we might consciously, or not, control our actions in the context of sports see (Papineau 2017, pt. I).

12. We can add that scoring must be guided by his abilities, see (Perry 2001, 82–83).

13. I do not set out what sporting glory is, but in linking it to the successful exercise of certain skills I hope to avoid the idea that glory must be equated with winning. Arsenal in the late-Wenger years achieved some glorious moments of sublime skill but won little.

14. Although the following sketch is brief and underdeveloped, I hope that it is a plausible outline of responsibility for failures.

15. Emily Ryall asked whether this is causal responsibility. In short, yes. But I prefer to see this responsibility as thicker than merely causal and as akin to what Tony Honoré calls ‘outcome responsibility’, see (Honoré 1999b). I cannot here explore the ways that this differs from certain understandings of causal responsibility.

16. Stephen Perry (2001) offers a similar account, stressing our abilities to avoid certain outcomes.

17. Not to mention the undercurrent of racism, see the discussions above in note 5.

18. For an account of how damaging shame can be, see (Ryall 2019).

19. Thanks to Alfred Archer for encouraging this idea.