A critical note on a purported disanalogy between cycling and mixed martial arts

ABSTRACT

Nicholas Dixon’s Kantian argument for why mixed martial arts (MMA) is intrinsically immoral has received several critical responses. We offer an additional critical response. Unlike previous responses, ours does not rely on an interpretation of the categorical imperative that Dixon would find tendentious. Instead, we grant that Dixon’s views about what makes other sports consistent with the categorical imperative are correct and argue from this assumption that MMA is also consistent with the categorical imperative. Our argument focuses on Dixon’s claims about certain cycling tactics, which we call ‘pain-leveraging cycling tactics’. We argue that MMA is consistent with the categorical imperative for the same sort of reasons that Dixon claims make pain-leveraging cycling tactics consistent with the categorical imperative.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed martial arts
• MMA
• categorical imperative
• violence

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Paul Gaffney and two anonymous referees for the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport for very helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Their feedback enabled us to make major improvements during the revision process.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. As those who regularly follow competitive MMA know, not all MMA bouts take place in a cage–for example, some take place in traditional boxing rings. Hence our insertion here.

2. The other sports Dixon considers are football and amateur wrestling (2015, 377–378).

3. Those who follow MMA will be familiar with the opprobrium reserved for MMA participants who do attempt to continue to damage an opponent after a knockout and the conversations around the role of referees in minimizing the damage competitors are exposed to.

4. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this objection.

5. See also Lewandowski (2021, 66–74) for additional discussion about the cooperative value of sparring.

6. For an illustration of a self-effacing end, consider Henry Sidgwick’s famous ‘paradox of hedonism’ (1907, 136–137). According to that paradox, direct pursuit of experiencing pleasure self-defeatingly leads to a displeasurable fixation on experiencing pleasure, and so one must aim at some other end, such as winning a game, to have any chance of experiencing pleasure.