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ABSTRACT
Given Bernard Suits’ stature in the philosophy of sport, his take on strategic fouling, surprisingly, hasn’t been given much attention in the literature. Rather than relying on a purely empirical or ‘ethos’ approach to justify the Strategic Foul he provides a mixed justification. Suits’ account combines a priori and a posteriori elements. He introduces a third kind of rule, which appears to be unlike rules of skill or constitutive rules, into his conceptual scheme. Suits claims that it is sometimes tactically correct to break such a rule to gain an advantage. I will argue that the a priori element in his justification of strategic fouling is unconvincing because there is nothing special about ‘third type’ rule-violations, which incur a ‘fixed penalty’. Furthermore, the a posteriori element ultimately reduces to a rule of skill, and it is doubtful whether it has sufficient normative force to warrant breaking a rule. But, most importantly, the a posteriori element degrades the power of the a priori element.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Patrick Riordan for helpful comments and Timothy Endicott for explaining some of the ice hockey rules to me.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Imbrišević 2019: Compensation, Restitution and the Strategic Foul (forthcoming).
2. For criticism see Tasioulas (Citation2006, 238f.)
3. For a contrary view see Moore (Citation2017).
4. Exceptions are Deborah Vossen (Citation2014) and Eric Moore (Citation2017)—via a discussion of Vossen’s paper. Dellatre (Citation1975, 137) refers to the relevant passage but his focus is on avoiding a penalty: ‘to commit an act which merits a penalty, to do so knowingly and not to incur the penalty is to cease to play the game.’ Allan Bäck (Citation2008, 159) mentions third type of rule violations briefly, without providing any analysis, instead he gives us a distorted paraphrase: ‘Now Suits waffles a bit on this. He does maintain that when you cheat, you are no longer playing. (40: p. 33) However, he goes on to admit that cheating (“whose violation results in a fixed penalty”) to some extent is a strategy within the rules.’ Bäck’s paraphrase is problematic because Suits does not use the term ‘cheating’ in the relevant passage. This results in a misrepresentation of Suits position and nicely illustrates that the passage has stumped some readers—it therefore requires a through interpretation.
5. Note that Suits’ (Citation2005, 51) example for a rule of skill is ‘to keep your eye on the ball’.
6. Suits cites very little literature in The Grasshopper but he does discuss Aurel Kolnai’s (Citation1965) paper ‘Games and Aims’.
7. One commentator (Shafer Citation2016, 209) gets confused and equates Suits’ rules of skill with ‘regulative rules’.
8. Steenbergen et al. (Citation2001, 140) subsequently misquotes Suits by relying on Morgan’s rendition of the passage.
9. For Searle the constitutive rules also regulate. I take these to be my element B).
10. Similarly Meier (Citation1985, 69): ‘Constitutive Rules, in addition to defining the specific enterprise at hand, also impose rigorous limitations on the permissible actions and procedures that a player may employ in seeking the attainment of the goals of the sport. [FN] In other words, constitutive rules also prescribe limited means of goal achievement by specifying what is condoned and what is proscribed or, more simply, what attracts penalties and what does not.’ Note that for Kretchmar (Citation2001, 167) penalty-invoking rules are ‘constitutive in nature.’ For a critical discussion of Searle’s distinction see Imbrišević (Citation2018).
11. Morgan (Citation1987) believes that breaking (penalty-invoking) regulative rules, unlike breaking constitutive rules, is still to play the game.
12. I came to this realisation after reading Elizabeth Fricker’s recent paper on norms (Citation2017, 406); similarly Lewandowski (Citation2007, 30).
13. Note that according to Kretchmar’s (Citation2001) interpretation, Suits’ rules of skill would fall under Searle’s regulative rules. It seems that confusion reigns in the philosophy of sport when it comes to Searle’s distinction. For this reason I have suggested (Citation2018) to abandon Searle’s framework and to distinguish ‘playing rules’ from ‘penalty rules’..
14. See also Schwyzer (Citation1969, 463).
15. Miller and Coffey (Citation2009, 133), in a book aimed at young female basketball players, write: ‘A smart foul is when the score is close and an opponent is going up for a lay-up and you’re the only one who can stop her. If you foul her, so what? She gets two free throws, but chances are she would’ve had a sure two points anyway if you’d just let her go.’
16. See D’Agostino Citation1981) and Vossen (Citation2014); with regard to strategic fouling in basketball Russell (Citation1999, 37, 48) also takes the empirical approach, although he sees it as an ‘imperfection in that game’.
17. For a fuller account of this problem see Imbrišević (Citation2018)..
18. Hart (Citation1997, 27) agrees that a criminal statute is not a conditional proposal; see also Rawls (Citation1999, 276f.) and Migotti Citation2015, 389). .
19. For a wider discussion of this issue see Imbrišević (Citation2018).