The Fragility of Fairness

Proponents and critics alike tend to adjudicate the ethics of sex segregation against the criterion of fairness. In general, fairness supports sex segregation so that women athletes can excel, but there is not yet consensus on who counts as a “woman.” Recent philosophical debates about sex segregation have unfolded as attempts to maximize the fairness of sports policies in light of concerns about biological categorization and social discrimination. We argue that fairness, while an important ideal, is an incomplete framework for organizing competitors and defers vexing questions about gender and justice. This is because, first, fairness can yield contradictory intuitions about the justice of sex-segregated competition; second, it can be overruled by more important values external to sport; third, it threatens to drain sport of its non-competitive virtues; and finally, it effectively masks unjust reasons for grouping athletes in particular ways.

How to Play Well with Others

Many games are essentially social, yet dominant theories of games struggle to accommodate this. This chapter argues that Bernard Suits’s rightly influential theory lacks a plausible explanation of what it is for two or more people to play a game with one another. It then develops an alternative approach which takes a more interpersonal approach, emphasizing the role of commitment in its account of multi-player games. It argues that this approach has several advantages over rival approaches. It concluded by extending this approach to deal with single-player games. The chapter argues that “game” and cognates are, in one useful sense, family resemblance terms, but in a way that can accommodate what is insightful in Suits’s approach, thus getting the best of both worlds.

Introduction

In one sense philosophers of the last sixty or so years have written a lot about games and sports, since they’ve used analogies with them to illuminate claims on many other philosophical topics. Perhaps best known is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of “language-game” to refer to specific portions of our linguistic practice (1953) and the continued use of that term by later philosophers of language (e.g., ...

The Metaphor of a “Level Playing Field” in Games and Sports

In sports, the concept of a “level playing field” is much praised but not well understood. One way to construct the idea is in terms of the rules of the game: if the rules are public, consistently enforced, and respected by players, the game is fair. Another approach to construction is in terms of justice: some rules of the game are unfair and thus the field is not level. Interestingly, although the “rules of the game” metaphor is drawn from games to sports, the corresponding idea of a level playing field is not incorporated into the design of games. This chapter explores the relationship between ideas of a level playing field and rules of games. It argues that how games are constructed sheds light on constructivist accounts of level playing fields in sports. Games take many forms and are fluid rather than static; rules develop and change over time. Sports do so as well, responding to pressures for inclusion and fairness. There is no one perfectly level field; there are fields that are more or less level, in different directions and dimensions.

Suits on Games

This chapter proposes that Suits be seen as analyzing a concept close to that expressed by the English word “game” but different and more useful, because it’s internally unified—its elements fit together—and explanatory, especially of the value of playing games. It slightly revises his account of the lusory attitude, so it involves accepting a game’s rules for the specific reason that they make it more challenging and difficult; this answers many objections to his analysis but requires adding a social dimension to it. And it slightly restricts his analysis by conceding that it doesn’t fit as many things called “games” as Suits himself thought. This doesn’t, however, detract from the value, beauty, and explanatory power of his analysis.

Return of the Grasshopper

Suits ended The Grasshopper with a doubt about his main normative thesis; he worried that if people in his utopia knew they were only playing games, they’d find their lives not worth living. This abridgement of a previously unpublished sequel withdraws the doubt and gives a more robust defence of the value of playing games. The contrary view says a valuable activity must have an independently valuable goal, as game-playing doesn’t—you need to be curing real diseases or discovering otherwise unknown truths. Suits now replies that to want there to be real disease or ignorance in the world is to want there to be real obstacles, so the activity of overcoming them can be possible. But that’s precisely to have the lusory attitude to the obstacles and so to be playing a game whether or not you realize you’re doing so.

The Grasshopper, Aristotle, Bob Adams, and Me

In this paper, I explore the nature of the ideal human life, by asking what we will do in Utopia. I take issue with Suits’s suggestion in The Grasshopper that all we will do is play games. I argue, instead, that there will also be a place for understanding fundamental truths and admiring beauty. Nor must it be the case that our “productive” behavior is limited to playing games: there will still be room for acts of creativity and for engaging in meaningful relationships with others.

Sport as a Thick Cluster Concept

The dominant view in the philosophy of sport maintains that sports constitute a true subset of games—in particular, that sports are competitive games that involve a physical component, such as physical exertion or the exercise of gross motor skills. This chapter argues that the dominant view is mistaken and proposes in its stead an account of sport as a thick cluster concept. Sport is a thick concept because it requires the application of what this chapter terms “warranted seriousness.” And it is a cluster concept because such features as game-ness (or contrivance), physicality, and competitiveness bear constitutively on whether an activity is a sport, but none of these factors is individually necessary. The chapter concludes by sketching possible implications of the thick cluster account of sport for normative questions regarding the virtue of sportsmanship and the proper interpretation of sport rules.

The Nature and Value of Sport

Suits is good on games, but bad on sports. Because he views sports as games, he has trouble accommodating the many sports that aren’t really games at all, like running, swimming, and rowing. More importantly, he mistakes the value of sport, suggesting that it derives from the challenges posed by the arbitrary rules that constitute games, when in truth it lies in the development and exercise of physical abilities. This paper argues that sport includes any activity whose central purpose is the exercise of physical skills, whether or not it is also a game, and that the value of sport derives from the intrinsic worth of such exercises.

The Forms and Fluidity of Game-Play

There are multiple forms of play. There is make-believe play—the play of imagination and pretend; there is also striving play, the play of competition, challenge, and overcoming obstacles. This chapter draws on Kendall Walton’s analysis of make-believe and Bernard Suits’s analysis of games to develop these two forms of play. It argues that the two are conceptually distinct and irreducible to one another. It rejects several forms of reductionism, including Suits’s argument that make-believe play is a kind of competitive acting challenge and a Waltonian argument that game-playing is a special kind of make-believe. The two forms of play break down in different ways: striving play is broken by cheating and make-believe play by spoiling the illusion. Reductionist accounts can’t explain this, nor can they explain certain frictions between the forms of play.