Broad Internalism, Deep Conventions, Moral Entrepreneurs, and Sport

Abstract

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: interpretivismconventionsprinciplesrulesnorms 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 SIMON, R. 2007. "Internalism and internal values in sport". In Ethics in sport, 2nd ed., Edited by: Morgan, W.J. 35–50. Champaign, Urbana, IL: Human Kinetics. [Google Scholar]) and Russell's (1999 russell, j. 1999. Are rules all an umpire has to work with? Journal of the Philosophy of Sport XXVI: 27–49. [Google Scholar]) accounts. He proved to be prescient in this regard since both Simon (2004 simon, r. 2004. From ethnocentrism to realism: Can discourse ethics bridge the gap. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 31: 122–41 [Google Scholar]) and Russell (2004 russell, j. 2004. Moral realism in sport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 31, no. 2: 142–60. [Google Scholar]) 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 Walzer, M. 1994. Thick and thin: Moral argument at home and abroad, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) 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 RORTY, R. 2010a. "Reply to Cheryl Misak". In The philosophy of Richard Rorty, Edited by: Auxier, R. and Hahn, L. 8–9. Chicago: Open Court. [Google Scholar], 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 – just as often – forced their way into sports from which the dominant to them (1994, Rather, the issue is not but what as a justifiable reason to regard such athletic as indeed rational ones. My claim is that in such there can be no grounds for claiming one form or way of doing of sport is rationally to another when no criteria of reflective are available to make such normative On the of not of with those of see Rorty Rorty, R. Philosophy and the of University Press. [Google Scholar], This is why I with Simon's claim that because his account of justificatory realism is on rather than the of discourse by like it doesn't have to to certify that the principles it in this and way are valid that is, justified on their (2004, As I see it, by the only way one can hope to show that one's normative principles are valid is that they have all principles on rational which means that one can't for a and point from which to all such The problem with such an approach, as I have been is that normative accounts of the purpose of sport come with of rational That does not the as Simon that a particular normative take on sport might what calls which means not that it all on grounds and thus to all rational but that it is an of sport that for a variety of the world The noted of sports over sports is a good example, because that was not owed to the of among other things, to political For it is no that in order to be as a to be with on the an member of the of is an first and And since the only way a sport can become an sport, short of a the and getting an to feature one of its as a sport, is if it is by a of member of course, would the sports of most those of and the That the from to to sport cannot be as of normative does not mean that it cannot be as of normative from a particular for example, according to contemporary people like for whom in athletic is a necessary of what as morally and athletic For as Rorty why should the fact that our judgments of normative in sport, like our judgments about appeal to of our time and on that (2007, what can mean other than rationally to at our best given that our own community those of our or can claim to be one with a goes for sport here goes as well for all other social For we contemporary would be no less rationally our conventional having but when that the free for their because of a social they on their but the poor among them fend for and fend very indeed given their Walzer, M. 1994. Thick and thin: Moral argument at home and abroad, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], or that to a for so as to make and available Walzer, M. 1994. Thick and thin: Moral argument at home and abroad, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], but the of in of course, only in the getting any medical care at because was not as important as or that and his peers were important only because of the they to their in we as to our As in the case of sport, however, our normative in these does not entail normative regarding what according to our own as the made in these of our As rightly it is to claim some and such as a to some of physical game that and that could be said to But as he is that such a problem would be abstract and so that we would have to that all are are to might have had something like this in mind when he in and a in a and is indeed another with of both in the way it is and in the it (1984, course, if he is about this that means unlike my example of what appropriate discussed in the the in the conventions of appropriate as well a in the deep conventions regarding the aim of the game. of in this example, suggests that it is not enough for a convention to as a normatively one that a large of people it as such is why I put the in in the of this in the For he to be that only if the sort of people the convention can it as a normative on the of players. if the that such rules to their in the game, not at all thinks that or for that matter, no their can make up the normative In which of the social into conventions and the like would be namely, that the social conventions and reigning of a are more that the of the the dominant as I am not being entirely fair here to Dworkin or I am being to Dworkin because it that he has his views on this at least according to Russell himself who more about his views than I As Russell the moral principles of a are not the most just they are the principles that in the best interpretation of a I am not being entirely fair to Russell, since he the same about the of sport as Dworkin here does about the of namely, that is to making the best of a practice, account of what before, and that in its best This from making wholesale to a do not with a but must try to show the practice as it has in a particular point in in its best This take on the of sport, of course, like the conventional normative case I have been trying to But the problem here is that I how to this of Dworkin on with Russell's realist of Dworkin on the of normative principles, the metaphysical he in his later essays (2011) Russell himself the between Dworkin's account of and his own account of sport, which leads him to that Dworkin's account is a genuine moral and, therefore, in important from a more realist version of that Russell As far as I can Russell and his realist commitments Dixon's and Simon's metaphysically 'justificatory' better Dworkin's abstract of in the course, it could be that Russell and company do indeed both a of athletic to one's physical and a of such the 'internal' and principles, from which criteria of what as such a can be The problem with this however, as I see it, is that the latter principles are of the of athletic and, therefore, as abstract as the itself. That would them, to my as conventional, grounded conceptions of sport that concrete criteria of reflective get in this as I will is that when one on the actual work on sport out by broad rather than their realist the often and of that work or so I to an to to conventional conceptions of athletic excellence – at least as to contemporary sport as to the amateur version it I think that their to cannot be as a of their application of these principles, as they have principles to fit happen to be the Rather, I think that the principles they astutely in of this work are, in fact, conventional ones that their abstract counterparts, more that were with the athletic scene in If we in them principles, then, we to think of these principles rather than of r. to In The philosophy of Richard Rorty, R. and L. Hahn, Chicago: Open Court. [Google Scholar], As r. The amateur and the and in Sport in no. 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