Moral Antirealism, Internalism,and Sport

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Moral Antirealism,Internalism,and SportWilliam J. Morgan aa Sport and Excercise Humanities Program andCultural Studies , Ohio State University , Columbus ,OH , 43210-1284 E-mail:Published online: 19 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: William J. Morgan (2004) Moral Antirealism,Internalism,and Sport, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 31:2, 161-183, DOI:10.1080/00948705.2004.9714658

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JOURNAL OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPORT, 2004, XXXI, 161-183© 2004 by the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport

Morgan <[email protected]> is with the Sport and Excercise Humanities Program and Cultural Studies, the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1284.

Moral Antirealism, Internalism,and Sport

William J. MorganI set two modest aims for myself in this article: first, to sketch a coherent

antirealist moral account of sport, and second, and somewhat less modestly, to show that such an account is rationally and normatively superior to its realist moral rival. In order to stave off any initial suspicion of scholasticism in the analysis to follow, however, I first want to make clear why this consideration of moral antirealism contributes to an important ongoing debate in sport-philosophy circles about how best to morally evaluate practices like sport.

Formalism, Conventionalism, Subjectivism,and Broad Internalism

Moral and nonmoral debates concerning how to evaluate and judge sport have roughly taken one of the following four forms. The first is called formalism and argues simply that sport should be assessed by the formal rules that govern it (31). The second evaluative approach is commonly known as conventionalism and claims that judgments about appropriate actions in sport should be decided by the prevailing views of the relevant practice community (30). The third approach goes by the name of subjectivism and holds that judgments about sport should take their cue from the individual desires and aims of its participants as they vie with one another to define the contest in ways that privilege their particular talents and skills (6). The fourth normative approach Simon calls “broad internalism,” or more simply “interpretivism,” and argues that sport should be evaluated by reference to rational principles regarding the nature and purpose of sport, most especially the principle that success in sport should be mainly assessed in terms of the relative merits of the competitors’ performances (30). The basic idea behind interpretiv-ism, then, is that sport possesses its own internal morality and that by critically probing that morality one can come up with standards of appraisal that have the requisite normative force.

Now, all of these evaluative approaches have something going for them. That is to say, our intuitions tell us that judgments about sport should have something to do with its formal rules and conventions, the subjective aims of its participants, and the standards of excellence that define it. But saying this is faint praise at best, at least for the first three of these approaches, because formalism, conventionalism,

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MORGAN162 Moral Antirealism, Internalism, and Sport 163

and subjectivism suffer from fatal flaws that undermine their normative promise. The problems with formalism are that many of the ethical issues that arise in sport fall outside the scope of its formal rules—Simon’s example of whether to lend a set of clubs to the golfer Josie who through no fault of her own arrives at a championship match only to discover her clubs are missing is a case in point (30). Formalism also falls short normatively for the more worrying reason that it has no way to evaluate the rules it bases its judgments on, and, more standardly, because no rule can dictate the range of its application or even whether it will in certain situations be applied at all (for example, the common practice in hockey of not calling a foul on a player when one of her teammates is already in the penalty box unless it is an especially flagrant violation). Conventionalism hardly fares better normatively, despite its descriptive acumen in capturing the actual manner in which sport is played and conducted at any given time, because the dominant views of the practice community that are supposed to inform our evaluations of sport are themselves often suspect and at very least deserving of critical scrutiny. And subjectivism has perhaps the least going for it normatively, not only because the aims and desires its participants bring with them into the competition and put to use to define its character and outcome might be, and often are, normatively problematic (the corrupting influence of money is just one example of such) but also because its narrow construal of sport as a kind of private Hobbesian war of all against all misses more that it captures about sport.

Given the hard-to-miss shortcomings of the preceding evaluative positions on sport, it is easy to see why broad internalism is singled out by many as the more authoritative account—so much so that one would have to have one’s head buried, and buried deeply, in the sand not to see that interpretivism’s reliance on rational argument and critical inquiry enables it to do what none of its evaluative rivals is able to do, namely, to subject our collective and singular designs on the game, as well as the rules instituted to guide its conduct, to a thorough critical examination. In this way the blind spots specific to formalism (its uncritical reliance on rules), conventionalism (its uncritical dependence on dominant social conventions), and subjectivism (its uncritical appeal to subjective preferences) are handily overcome by interpretivism’s rationalist commitments.

Moral Realism

The normative terrain covered so far has been expertly surveyed by the likes of Russell (27) and Simon (30). But it is the next step in the argument that I want to spend the rest of my article analyzing. I am referring here to Dixon’s incisively argued essay “Canadian Figure Skaters, French Judges, and Realism in Sport” (4), which ingenuously introduces a realist wrinkle into Simon’s interpretivist approach. Dixon’s claim is that Simon’s appeal to rational argument, which as we have just seen is the linchpin of his internalist account of sport, itself signals a commitment, even if only an implicit one, to moral realism. That is in part because Dixon thinks moral realism is distinguishable from its rivals principally by its commitment to rational inquiry. But Dixon’s urging of realism on Simon is also owed to his con-viction that Simon’s internalism lacks the normative firepower needed to secure his important thesis regarding the morally autonomous character of sport, because the internalist claim that sport can be morally distinguished from the rest of life

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is compatible with at least one reading of conventionalism, as well, namely, and obviously, a reading in which the dominant view of the practice community sup-ports such a claim. But this obviously won’t do because what is required here is not simply a report that most members of the practice community think sport pos-sesses its own internal morality, which owing to its previously remarked evaluative defects is all conventionalism is able to deliver, but a rational vindication of any such claim—in other words, one backed up by persuasive arguments.1 It is with this very point in mind that Dixon offers a friendly amendment to Simon’s account, one that recommends that we sideline the whole internalism versus externalism debate and instead appeal directly to “the more fundamental autonomy of morality itself.” Doing so, he argues, will nudge the argument over sport’s moral credentials into the more promising debate between moral realism and moral antirealism and at the same time fortify Simon’s interpretivist outlook.

What more particularly, however, does Dixon think a commitment to moral realism entails? In a word, reason, or inquiry, or better yet, reasoned inquiry. For according to Dixon the central tenet of moral realism is that our moral and non-moral judgments about sport should take their measure from general principles regarding its basic character and purpose that are anchored in solid arguments. The key point here is that our appeal to and acceptance of these principles is to be based entirely on the strength of the arguments offered in their defense, rather than any subjective or collective affirmation or assertion of them. In other words, argu-ments go all the way down here, so much so that my subjective feelings regarding these judgments or the prevailing views of the groups I identify with are not to play, and should not play, any part in my acceptance or rejection of them. Reason, therefore, should be our chief guide as we chart the normative course of our lives in and outside of sports.

Now, Dixon makes no special claim regarding the role (moral) realism plays in our evaluative judgments of sports. Instead, he argues realism in sports merely “parallels” realism in other spheres of life (4: p. 110). In particular, it “parallels” realism in morality, in which the aim is to secure moral truth, just as it “parallels” realism in science, in which the aim is to describe the way “the world really is,” “to accurately represent it” (4: p. 110). But what makes his moral-realist approach to sport especially attractive has as much to do with what version of moral real-ism he rules out as with what version he rules in. Moral realism, just like every other well-worked-out philosophic position, comes in different varieties. And one variety Dixon studiously and wisely avoids is the moral realism Mackie famously lampooned. I am speaking of Mackie’s well-known argument that moral realism’s commitment to something called moral truth requires that moral inquiry be described as putting us in touch with a normative part of the world. That is to say, if there is such a thing as moral truth, argued Mackie, the job of moral reflection is to track it—better, to discover it—by carefully combing that “part of the fabric of the world” where moral values exist and can be encountered (as quoted in 12: p. 112). The complication this raises is easy to see, because the ontological status of such normative entities would have to be not only utterly unlike most other common, garden-variety objects we bump up against in the world but also utterly unlike everything else we encounter in the world. This is why Mackie thinks that moral realism requires a belief in “queer” entities, in strange things like Platonic forms or Moorean nonnatural normative entities.

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But if Dixon’s realism is not one of independent, self-subsistent, occult values, what sort of realism is it? I believe the answer lies in his important claim that moral reasons possess a normative force that is independent of the endorsement of any individual or group. The idea that the veracity of our moral judgments and values, and of the moral principles from which they are derived, have nothing important to do with whether individuals or members of dominant groups (or, for that matter, members of subordinate groups or members of any sort of imaginable group) assent to them and everything to do with their argumentative strength and that never the twain should or do meet suggests that the sort of realism Dixon is peddling here is a realism about reasons themselves. In a nutshell, this means that (moral and nonmoral) reasons can and should stand on their own, that they can pull their own normative weight because they themselves are the bearers of that weight, and, so, that they are perfectly capable of leading us to the truth provided we reasoners put ourselves in the right position to grasp what they have to say to us.

If I have picked up Dixon by the right handle here, his realism about reasons furnishes us with a standard of objectivity and truth every bit as authoritative and robust as what Bernard Williams calls an “absolute conception” of the world. As Williams says of such a conception (which he limits to scientific inquiry),

There is no suggestion that we should try to describe a world without ourselves using any concepts, or without using concepts which we, human beings, can understand. The suggestion is that there are possible descriptions of the world using concepts which are not peculiarly ours . . . [and which are not] inde-pendent . . . of thought in general, but of all that is arbitrary and individual in thought. (my emphasis, as quoted in 12: p. 118)2

It is this idea that there are concepts that “are not peculiarly ours” that make it possible for us to get the world right, then, that cuts to the heart of Dixon’s real-ism and explains his unwavering faith in the normative power of reasons. And all we need to do to make it speak more directly to the moral realism he espouses is to transpose William’s words so that instead of trying to bring our concepts into accord with “what there is” in order to represent the world accurately, we try to bring our conduct into accord with concepts that “are not peculiarly ours” in order to discover a normative guide by which to lead our lives.

Williams remarks are further apposite in this regard because they instruct us as to what conceptual procedure we need to follow to divine reasons and arguments that pack this kind of normative force, to come up with reasons and arguments that trump anything and everything else we might see fit to put forward in defense of our actions. The trick, he says, and to reiterate, is to expunge from our thoughts and reasons any trace of the “arbitrary and individual.” This requires that we reflectively step back from our personal view of ourselves and the world and let reflection run its course until we reach an endpoint that is not ours, in other words, that takes us to an external, impersonal place in the space of reasons from which we can normatively survey our lives. And we will know when we have arrived at this impersonal point and place, because once we have we will no longer be thinking about what I or the group or culture I belong to should do but what anybody who finds themselves in this position should do. For the reasons and values that are vouchsafed to us from this abstract vantage point count as reasons and values for anyone and everyone who successfully manages to reflectively reach its summit, that is, who are able to

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see matters aright because they have reflectively transcended their first-personal starting points. Those of us incapable of or disinclined to carry reflection to these heady heights are thus condemned to live our lives in the darkness that enshrouds the subjective point of view, forced to rely on subjective simulacra of arguments (assertions, agreements, conventions, impenetrable jargon, ideological posturing) to do the work that only objective reasons are fitted to do, and blinded as to the way things really are because of our inability or unwillingness to go beyond the way they appear to us.

If I have interpreted Dixon correctly to this point, it seems that he is pushing an especially strong notion of moral realism on his readers to defeat the antirealist tendencies he detects in the work of sport philosophers who labor under Rortian and MacIntyrean conceptions of philosophic inquiry. But near the end of his essay he seems to soften his account in two ways: First, when he claims that moral realist accounts like his are far more adept than they are often depicted (caricatured?) in making their moral judgments conform to changing contexts, historical periods, and cultural situations and second, and perhaps more important, when he con-cedes that although sport realists always aim for the truth, they claim to have no “privileged access” to it. This is no small concession, because it means that even when we commit ourselves to rational inquiry, to what Habermas likes to call the unforced force of the better argument, we are fated neither to get the world nor our conduct right. Still, Dixon thinks we should proceed undeterred in our pursuit of the truth, not just because he thinks that one day we will get things right, that one day the truth will be ours, but because he further believes it is the best antidote we have against arrogance, against the hubris of those who, lacking the “courage of their convictions,” “retreat to [their] own incorrigible feelings (subjectivism) or the uncontestable prevailing view in [their] community or society (relativism)” (4: p. 114). If he is right about this, the truth will not only set us free but chasten us, as well.

A Second, Critical Look at Moral Realism

There is much to admire in Dixon’s closely argued account of and impas-sioned advocacy for moral realism and in his expression of its highest aspirations and hopes; after all, what’s not to like? Put otherwise, who among us would not in a nanosecond trade the sports world most of us presently know, where bluster seems to count for just about everything and argument hardly for anything, for a sports world that takes its marching orders from a moral realism like this one. For all that, however, I am not persuaded we should follow Dixon’s realist lead here. The problem, alas, is that it paints a picture of the moral life and of the role reflection plays in it that is too good to be true—I do not see any way to cash out its central claim that the (moral) truth can be ours if only we practical reasoners would make the appropriate reflective efforts and take the requisite conceptual steps to snatch it. So my critique to follow will consist of two parts: first, an argu-ment against the possibility of this sort of strong moral realism about reasons, what Nagel calls, appropriately enough, an “impossibility” argument (17: p. 144),3 which will further spill over into a critique of realism’s normative utility, and second, a defense of a different, nonconventionalist account of moral antirealism, one that, I believe, can meet Dixon’s completely persuasive objections to its conventionalist

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version. To put a more positive spin on it, what I hope to show is that Dixon was right to nudge the argument regarding moral judgments about sports in this realist–antirealist direction, and for that we certainly owe him a great debt, but wrong to align himself with the realist side of this debate.

But let me begin by making clear, if it is not already clear, that I completely agree with Dixon that reflection and deliberation are an indispensable part of any-thing that deserves to be called moral inquiry, or for that matter any kind of inquiry that rightly believes it has to justify whatever claims it makes. That also means that I agree with Dixon that a subjective view of what counts as a reason or a value, which reduces both to desires and preferences, is a nonstarter, especially when it comes to moral inquiry. Because as Williams forcefully notes, “to simply pursue what you want . . . is not the stuff of morality; if those are your only motives, then you are not within morality, and you do not have . . . any ethical life” (33: p. 77).4 So in what follows everything will turn on what kind of reflection and what sorts of reasons and values are crucial to moral inquiry properly so called.

As I have already said, the kind of reasons and values I want to cast doubt on here are the strong realist kind Dixon champions on the grounds that they are beyond the reflective capacity and scope of us mere mortals, those of us who, by virtue of our very existence, find ourselves pressed into making sense, chiefly moral, of our lives. And the impossibility argument I want to invoke in this regard is a standard-issue one used by many antirealist types, which I want to put in play again because I remain convinced that realists do not have any good answers for it. Simon Blackburn’s following rendition of the argument is, I think, an especially good one: “There is no way in which any mind can step back from its own system of belief, survey without its benefit a reality the system aims to depict, and discover whether it is doing well or badly” (2: p. 236). The point of Blackburn’s impos-sibility rejoinder is plain to see from both a descriptive and a normative vantage point. Descriptively speaking, the simple message is that there is no way to test whether our descriptions of the world are more or less adequate to the world and accurately describe it, because there is no way we can climb out of our descriptive vocabularies to get to the other side, the world’s side, to assess how they are faring. Normatively speaking, the same is true, because once again there is no way to test whether our normative vocabularies are on the mark, because there is no way we can climb out of those vocabularies to get to the other side, to the “not peculiarly ours” concept and value side, to assess how they are faring. The long and short of it then, to focus for the moment just on the value part of the equation, is that it is futile to try to bring our conduct into accord with impersonal reasons and values, because there are no such reasons and values to be had, and there no such reasons and values to be had because there is no elevated stage we can reflectively scale to divine them and then apply them from on high to our particular lives.

Now, the force of impossibility arguments like Blackburn’s has everything to do with the normatively independent status that realists claim for the reasons and values they trade in, to the airy heights they believe reflection must go; if those reasons and values are to carry the rational and normative weight they must to lead us to the truth, to the way things really are. After all, it is not for nothing that part-time antirealists like Hilary Putnam and full-time antirealists like Richard Rorty insist that the impersonal standpoint that realists aspire to can best be described as a God’s-eye view of the world; nor is it an accident that paradigmatic realists

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like Thomas Nagel cheerfully concur in such descriptions of their work and gladly offer their own no less colorful renditions of it: in Nagel’s case, the “view from nowhere,” in Williams’s the already noted “absolute conception of the world” (which he later reminds us is not to be confused with any sort of “cosmic United Nations resolution”; 12: p. 122), and, in Jonathan Bennett’s case, the accounting of the philosopher’s task as taking “warm, familiar aspects of the human condition and look[ing] at them coldly and with the eye of the stranger” (as quoted in 24: p. 22). Although Dixon’s prose is much more restrained and careful, his message is, I believe, much the same, namely, that we should settle in our queries for nothing less than the truth, for the fact of the matter that settles the matter in question, and that the only reasons and arguments capable of getting us there must be “indepen-dent of whether any particular group of persons happens to endorse them” (4: p. 112). In spite, then, of his fallibilistic qualification of rational judgments, he is as enthusiastic a proponent as they are of the truth, of knockdown arguments whose intellectual force is such that (if “the same general moral principles” they incorpo-rate are suitably applied) any rational agent, no matter her particular circumstance, historical context, or cultural station, would and should be moved by them.

Of course, the point of Blackburn’s impossibility rejoinder is to undermine whatever confidence we might have had in such knockdown arguments and of the intrinsically authoritative reasons and arguments that supposedly underpin them. The onus is thus on the realist about reasons to show that Blackburn’s argument misses the mark.

But as I have indicated there is a further problem with realism about reasons that more directly puts in question its normative credentials. Lets suppose for the moment, per impossible, that somehow we succeeded in reflectively exorcizing from our moral outlook all traces of the first personal. What we would discover as a result is not what the realist claimed we would, a class of heretofore unknown impersonal values ready at our beck and call to be enlisted to morally order our lives, but rather the complete absence of values. And the reason we would come up normatively empty handed is that from this reflectively distant standpoint, noth-ing would have any value or significance anymore because nothing would matter anymore. So the prize waiting for those of us emboldened enough to take reflec-tion this far is not the morally rich life promised us but its altogether forbidding opposite, namely, a morally nihilistic life.

Now, realists like Nagel are not unaware of this reflective complication. In fact, he is keen to show why his own brand of impersonal reflection is immune to this nihilistic result. Because he thinks that such a result rests on a mistaken assumption that objective moral judgments of this sort issue from a reflectively detached standpoint alone. As he puts it,

It is true that with nothing to go on but a conception of the world from nowhere, one would have no way of telling whether anything had value. But an objective view has more to go on, for its data include the appearance of value to individuals with particular perspectives.” (17: p. 147)

He then concludes, cryptically to my mind, “to find out what the world is like from outside we have to approach it from within: it is no wonder that the same is true for ethics” (17: p. 147). This reflective complication is not lost on Williams, either, who detects in it a dilemma of sorts. He realizes that if an absolute conception of

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the world suggests, not implausibly, a completely indeterminate picture of the world—one from which all appearances have been reflectively expunged—the only thing truly absolute about it is its reflective uselessness as a standard by which to assess those appearances. On the other hand, if an absolute conception of the world suggests a determinate conception of the world as it really is, as it is in itself, then the worry is that such a conception is not absolute at all but just another particular point of view and, so, not an authoritative view (12: pp. 126–127)

We can ignore for now Williams’s gloss, because rather than making a critical point it simply describes, and describes well I should say, what the nihilistic predica-ment comes to here and manages to express, as well, the fear of realist types who, try as they might to attain an impersonal take on the world, really only succeed in churning out one particular take on the world after another. But Nagel does need to be answered, because he does make a critical point, but not, I think, a persuasive one. Now, although Nagel is right to say that an objective view has something rather than nothing to go on—namely, that it begins with our first-personal perspective on the world and on what is of value to us from that perspective—the whole point of trying to view the world from no particular point within it is to reflectively free ourselves from the grip of that perspective so that we can penetrate the appear-ances it throws up to us that prevent us from seeing things as they really are. In other words, the point of reflection for realists like Nagel is not to reflectively redeem whatever descriptive or evaluative insights the first-personal perspective might contain but just the opposite, to reflectively disengage that perspective and all that it shows and tells us, precisely because what it shows and tells us is not to be trusted—it falls short of the truth. After all, if the point were to recover rather than displace the first personal, there would be no point in trying to get outside of the world in the first place, in trying to reflectively distance ourselves from it. So the nihilistic complication induced by this reflective urge to transcend the first personal is in no way averted by beginning with the first personal, as Nagel would have us believe, but only by ending with it—by not averting our eyes at any point in our reflections from what it discloses to us. Hence, the moral of this story is the opposite of the one Nagel draws, not that “to find out what the world is like from outside we have to approach it from within,” but rather that to cash in on what it is that gives meaning and value to our lives there is no need to find out what the world is like from outside, whatever that now means, and every need to find out as much as we reflectively can what it is like from the inside.

Of course, if Blackburn’s impossibility argument goes through, it should already be apparent that there is no way the world looks or our value-filled lives look from nowhere. The closest we get, I suppose, is the paradigmatic hypothetical example of an alien visitor from space who finds itself, at least in Searle’s version of the story, trying to make heads and tails out of a game of American football. The best our alien visitor can do is come up with descriptions like “circular clustering” to describe the huddle, “linear clustering” to describe the team coming to the line of scrimmage, and “linear interpenetration” to describe the execution of a running play (29: p. 52). We need not get so exotic in our examples, however, because to a cultural outsider unfamiliar with American football the descriptions I provide fol-lowing Searle’s are no more intelligible than his and maybe even less intelligible. Surely the point here is not, as Nagel might want to put it, whether our normative judgments can keep pace with our abstract descriptions but rather that at a certain

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abstract level neither our descriptions nor our normative judgments can make intel-ligible sense of what they are looking at anymore. And this is precisely what Feezell shows in his Nagelian-friendly analysis of sport when he observes, quite correctly I think, that when viewed objectively—that is, from outside the world—sports, just as the rest of our lives, come off as thoroughly absurd enterprises (5: p. 9).

But here is where Williams’s point about the indeterminacy–determinacy conundrum that dogs absolute, objective conceptions of the world kicks in, and with it the relevance of the obvious intelligibility of Dixon’s general principle that success in sport should have something important to do with excellence in performance. The gist of Williams’s point, to reiterate, is that if our account of the world reflectively strips away all determinate content, all appearances, there is no doubting that it is an absolute conception, but, and here is the downside, there is also no doubting that it has nothing intelligible to tell us about our lives in the world (hence Feezell’s thesis regarding the absurdity of sport). On the other hand, if our account of the world contains some determinate content, there is every reason to suppose that it is not an absolute, objective conception at all, in which case it will have something to tell us about our lives that is intelligible and, depending how much determinate conduct its general principles manage to soak up, more or less substantive. Now, it is, I think, no coincidence that most realist pictures of the world and of values have something intelligible and variously substantive to say to us. For instance, it was hardly an accident that one of the intrinsically norma-tive entities that Moore singled out for praise—the appreciation of beauty—was a value cherished by his cherished Bloomsbury friends. What this should imme-diately tell us is that Moore’s account of it could not have been an objective one in the relevant sense—that it was not a hard-won because absolutely conceived philosophic discovery but much more likely a product of an aesthetic temperament he shared with his friends and they with their friends, one owed to their common socialization or, if you prefer, their shared aesthetic upbringing. The same can be said, I think, for Dixon’s general normative principle concerning athletic success; the fact that it resonates with us modern-day commentators and observers of sport suggests that it, too, is a product not of any objective conception of the world but of a reflective effort much closer to home and, therefore, one much more at home with our contemporary intuitions concerning sport conduct.

However, this is not the impression one gets in reading Dixon’s own account of his general principle of athletic success. He consistently keeps his presentation of it at a fairly general level, continues to insist that it was generated and vindicated by reasons and arguments that stand on their own—that is, independent of any individual’s or group’s endorsement of them—and remains steadfast in his convic-tion that moral inquiry in sport should aim for the truth even if it is not likely to get it. In short, Dixon shows no signs of easing up on his realism about reasons, and the reason, I conjecture, is that he cast his lot with realism in the belief that antirealism was incompatible with his reflective project.

What I want to show next, however, is that any supposed incompatibil-ity between Dixon’s project to rehabilitate internalism and antirealism is more imagined than real, at least for the version of antirealism I want to defend. More strongly, I want to argue that the normative promise of Dixon’s own account of sport—whose determinate content, I have argued, betrays its philosophically objec-tive pretensions—not only is better fitted to an antirealist rendering but also implies

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such a rendering. If I am right about this, by dropping a realist for an antirealist approach, which means at very least an outsider for an insider view, and substituting justification for truth as the goal of inquiry, we will be in a better position to draw out reflectively Dixon’s considerable insights into the moral workings of sport on display in the present essay and in his other no less impressive writings.

Moral Antirealism and SportTo recap, I have argued that strong realist accounts of rationality and argument

are self-defeating ones because they cannot deliver what they claim to deliver—impersonal standards of appraisal that by allowing us to look at the world and our lives from the outside can tell us which of our views and values on the inside are true ones. I argued further that an outside-in take on the world and our lives is not only impossible but normatively fruitless, because even our closest approxima-tions of it (the alien visitor from space, the cultural outsider) cannot make sense out of social practices like sport or of any other feature of our embodied lives. This prompted my claim that Dixon’s realism about reasons, his promotion of their intrinsic (self-contained) argumentative and normative force, needed to be relaxed and that antirealism was just what the doctor ordered to do the trick.

But what sort of antirealism about sports do I have in mind here? And how precisely does it promise to remedy the hyperrationalism and concomitant norma-tive underperformance of moral-realist accounts of sport? I think the best way to answer the first question is to begin with trying to answer the second. The answer to that latter question is the rather simple one of cutting reasons and the argu-ments that string them together down to their rightful size. The sort of conceptual downsizing it favors should already be apparent: Drop any pretense that there is some dividing line that has to be philosophically divined and then crossed if we ever hope to leave behind our notoriously unreliable first-person reflective efforts for our far more reliable impersonal ones, and let our reflective endeavors do the social and historical work they were meant to do and do best. In a word, historicize and socialize our rational and normative judgments.

Now, cutting reasons and arguments down to size does not entail some wild-eyed idealistic gesture that cuts the world out, that is, that implausibly denies any influence of extramental, nonlinguistic reality over our conceptual apparatus and language games. Rather, it insists on the influence of nonlinguistic reality on our language games but construes it in causal rather than representational terms. That is to say, there is no question that, to borrow an example from Rorty, “the move-ment of a tennis ball causes the referee to cry ‘Out!’” (22: p. 5), but it is ludicrous to say that representation plays any role here, that there are wayward “balls” out there that have been hit in such a way that they caused themselves to be represented accurately by words like “out.” The first, causal sense is intelligible whereas the second, representational one is not, and that is all any antirealist needs to insist on in accounting for the utility of our judgments.

So in calling for us to scale back our judgments the antirealist is not insist-ing on some wholesale idealist retreat from the world but only a retreat from any effort to make sense of our lives from the outside in. And because I am on record in claiming that Dixon’s principle that success in sport should be adjudged primarily by the qualitative worth of the performance of its participants is not itself a general

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principle in the relevant impersonal sense—otherwise it would have nothing sensible or interesting to tell us—but a historically rooted, contextualized one, I feel comfort-able in saying that his commitment to it already implies a commitment to antirealism rather than realism. If I am right about this, the normative point and salience of this principle very much depends on the reflective endorsement of his contemporaries rather than on the reflective endorsement of any rational agent that considered the principle aright (impersonally). In other words, Dixon’s standard of what counts as athletic success is best seen not as some sort of transcendental deduction from pure (impersonal) reason but rather as a historically qualified, socially dependent thesis. And it is this point that I want now to further comment on.

When I say that the principle of success in sport should correlate directly with excellence in performance is a socially contingent rather than a transcendentally backed universal claim, I mean that it speaks to a standard of evaluation that exists only because contemporary folks like us exist. To put it more baldly, we have such standards and the values they sponsor and oversee only because people like us go in for sports that feature this kind of excellence. Joseph Raz, in his recent book The Practice of Value, calls this what I have already called it above, the “social dependence thesis”. Raz offers two versions of the thesis: first, the “special social dependence thesis,” which holds “that some values exist only if there are (or were) social practices sustaining them,” and second, the “general social dependence thesis,” which holds “that, with some exceptions, all values depend on social practices either by being subject to the special thesis or through their dependence on values that are subject to the special thesis” (21: p. 19). Sport clearly falls under the first version, and so, too, therefore, or so I claim, does Dixon’s principle of athletic success. And in urging him to drop his realist approach for an antirealist one in his articulation of it, I am, in effect, claiming that to further unpack what this standard means and what sort of appraisal, moral and otherwise, it augurs for sport, we need to know more, not less as realists are wont to believe, about what the people who make up the relevant practice communities of contemporary sports and wield principles just like this one had, and have, in mind when using them.

But I am already getting ahead of myself and need to back up and specify why I think his evaluative principle is indeed a socially dependent one. For one, it bespeaks a 19th-century, Western perspective on sport, at first mostly an English one, soon after an unmistakably American one, as well, and relatively soon after that, at least by traditional historical standards, a remarkable global one,5 which put the accent on competition and a particular way of understanding what counts as athletic excellence and how it is ethically to be attained. The dominant Anglo-American character of these sports was owed, in particular, to the triumph of its distinctive model of physical culture over the German turnen (gymnastic) model, which stressed, among other things, regimented group physical exercise and frowned on competition undertaken for material or symbolic awards—in fact, its proponents regarded competitive sport as a threat to Germany’s national aspirations and sardonically referred to its country of origin (England) as that “land without music or metaphysics” (7: p. 144).

There should be no serious dispute, then, regarding the decidedly Western pedigree of this principle of athletic success, and one more historical illustration of this fact should suffice to help me make my antirealist case. Those of you old enough to remember what arguably was one of the best movies ever made about

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sports, Chariots of Fire, will also no doubt remember one of its main characters, Harold Abrahams, who, like his fellow Oxford chums, was an aspiring Olympian. One of the many riveting scenes in the movie centered on a scandal that erupted when it was discovered that Abrahams had hired a professional coach to improve his chances of winning a gold medal in the 1924 Olympic Games—among the more effective techniques his coach taught him was the importance of finishing a race by lunging headfirst at the tape rather than breasting it with one’s body in an upright position as was the customary practice. Now, by our contemporary lights this seem-ingly innocuous decision by Abrahams, and the seemingly no less innocuous things he learned from his coach, was hardly innocuous by their lights, because they col-lided headlong with at least two important features of the prevailing moral athletic code of Victorian and Edwardian gentleman athletes. The first was a sense of fair play that decreed, among other things, that any ratcheting up—for instance, of the seriousness with which competition in sport is taken by its participants—required some prior notice, some alerting of one’s competitors that the stakes of the game had changed (presumably it also included deliberation about whether it was mor-ally and otherwise appropriate to raise the stakes of the game in this manner). This idea spoke, of course, to the Victorian notion that although it was appropriate to train for sport and to strive to win, neither should be overdone if we are to keep our morally healthy fascination with sport from devolving into a morally unhealthy compulsion to win no matter what. Because Abrahams had not seen fit to disclose to his peers his heightened commitment to winning, his decision was greeted with widespread moral derision as soon as it was found out. The second moral maxim that Abrahams newfound devotion to winning came into conflict with, which even if he had communicated to his peers his intention to take sport more seriously than they would not have absolved him of moral blame, cut yet closer to the heart of the conception of athletic excellence characteristic of this period. According to that conception, sport was at bottom considered a battle of will, character, and physi-cality. By incorporating techniques like the aforementioned head lunge, Abrahams was accused by his peers of having desecrated sport by introducing an element of trickery and cunning into competition, an element that was widely thought to be at odds with the moral purpose of sport as they understood it.

Now, as I said, there are several useful antirealist moral lessons that can be gleaned from these historical anecdotes. First, and foremost, is the point that our moral conceptions of sport take their cue and draw whatever normative force they possess not from the level of generality in which they were reflectively formulated and pitched but rather from the way they historically resonate with the relevant practice communities that envelop these sports. Dixon’s principle of athletic excel-lence is no exception, because it, too, as I previously remarked, chimes with us contemporary enthusiasts, theorists, and critics of sport, in a way it obviously would not with Abrahams’s crowd, because it articulates so well our present intuitions concerning sport. Hence, the reflective pursuit of as much generality we can get in our moral judgments gets us nowhere, rationally and normatively speaking, when it looses sight, as it often seems hell bent on doing, of our historically colored intuitions and contextual experiences of sport. So when antirealists are accused by their realist critics of having no use for objective conceptions of sport, they should readily admit their aversion to objective reasons of the impersonal kind but quickly point out their fondness for historically and socially freighted conceptions of sport.

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When all is said and done it is conceptions of the latter kind that do the best job of capturing our moral experiences of sport and that, in fact, if I am right, do most of the heavy lifting in Dixon’s own account of sport.

The second point I want to make is merely a corollary of the first. And that point is that the varying historical interpretations of what counts as a morally, not to mention aesthetically, good athletic contest apparent in the above historical exam-ples reflect substantively different conceptions of sport, which, again, is in keeping with antirealist moral thought. In other words, the relevant standard of appraisal that informed the Victorian and Edwardian conception of athletic excellence is not the same standard that informs our present conception of athletic excellence. What we have here, then, is not the same general moral principle distinguished only by its different application conditions but two different conceptions of sport itself. This accounts for why any effort to apply the Victorian standard to our current situation or our present standard to the Victorian situation is condemned to failure, because each effort will meet with stiff resistance from the no less disparate intu-itions underwritten by each standard (the Victorian effort to equate the use of, say, sport scientists to boost performance in contemporary sports as a form of trickery unbecoming to sport rightly understood is one such example of a normative failure just waiting to happen).

The third, and last, point I want to draw from these examples is also a corollary of the other two points and is primarily a methodological one that again speaks to the antirealist moral case I am trying to build here. That point is that just as moral reflection can miss the mark by not ranging far enough, by refusing to entertain any consideration that is larger in scope than the self-interests of individual agents (subjectivism), moral reflection can also go awry when it ranges too far, when it loses touch with our common moral intuitions of sport (objectivism). The reflec-tive vantage point needed, then, to grasp moral phenomena as moral phenomena in sport, and, of course, outside it, is neither the first-person-singular “I” nor the impersonal “humanity” but rather the first-person-plural “we.”6 This is the same point Annette Baier tried to drive home when she quipped, “the secular equivalent of faith in God, which we need in morality . . . is faith in the community and its evolving procedures” (1: p. 293); Richard Rorty tried to make when he suggested, “we cease to think of morality as the voice of the divine part of ourselves and instead think of it as the voice of ourselves as members of a community, speakers of a common language” (23: p. 59); Wifred Sellars intended when he said moral-ity has to do with “we-intentions” (quoted in 23: p. 59); and Korsgaard meant when she exclaimed that “the subject matter of morality is . . . how we should relate to one another . . . [and] find . . . reasons [we] can share” (9: p. 275). The common theme that runs through all these claims is that when it comes to moral inquiry we should set our reflective sights no lower or higher than the relevant community necessary to answer our questions, which means that in most cases we should invoke as inclusive a community as possible depending, of course, on what specifically it is that we are training our sights on. So antirealism is receptive not only to reasons historically understood but also to objective moral judgments intersubjectively understood.

Dixon might justly complain at this juncture that I have left something out of my account, namely, the importance of arguments and, more generally, critical inquiry in validating the moral claims we author, and for which there appears to be

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no room in my version of antirealism or any other such version. It is one thing to say that reflection should take its bearings from our historically moored intuitions and experiences and another thing to say that reflection should take it upon itself to validate those intuitions and experiences. After all, what if our intuitions are wrong, or—what comes to much the same thing—what if we focus on the wrong ones? And if there is no more to be said for my account of antirealism other than that reflection should chime with our experience as we presently know it, leaving aside any further thought that reflection should also correct our experience, then my account has nothing more going for it than the conventionalist one Dixon has so ably disposed of. He might further retort that my claim that objectivity in our moral judgments of sport has something important to do with intersubjective consensus clinches the case against me—it suggests that social agreement can do the work that, on realist views like his, can only be done by argument. Finally, he might object that my mention of intersubjective agreement in this context raises the ugly specter of moral relativism, the idea that each of us is firmly cosseted in the ethnocentric clans we identify with, and we are thereby unable, unwilling, or simply indifferent to take note of what else might be going around us on the outside, let alone be critical of such goings on. What makes this such an ugly prospect, at least for moral inquiry, is that it amounts to normative suicide.

These are important points, and in the space remaining I am not sure I can give them the full consideration they deserve. Nevertheless, I can at least make a start in responding to them. Perhaps the best place to begin is with this idea that social agreement takes the place of argument in antirealist accounts.

There is, of course, as I have already conceded, a conventionalist version of antirealism that does at least imply that agreement can and perhaps should usurp argument in rational inquiry.7 As I have further intimated, this brand of antirealism has no more going for it than the realism of occult entities that Mackie skewered. With respect to the antirealism I am peddling, however, the charge is nothing more than a red herring, because it fails to consider the role that intersubjective agree-ment plays in any argument or reflective inquiry rightly understood. That role is not that agreement should take the place of argument, as if crudely tallying what most people think about some issue can somehow substitute for careful delibera-tion about it, but instead should set out the relevant logical space and boundaries in which arguments can do their critical bidding. This enframing role is very much akin to Wittgenstein’s point that to imagine a form of life is to imagine agreement in judgments, meanings, and values; unless agreements of this sort were in place, unless there were a network of reasons and beliefs I could plug my reasons and beliefs into, I would have no way of knowing whether anything I said or claimed was intelligible, let alone persuasive.8 And I would certainly be clueless as to how my utterances, either singly or strung together, would be accounted by others, that is, whether they would regard them as an argument of some sort, a rhetorical flour-ish, or the ramblings of a madman. Where the realist goes wrong, here, then, is in presuming that agreement and argument stand, and can only stand, in opposition to one another, when in fact if Wittgenstein is right, these kinds of agreements are both complementary to and constitutive of argument. That means that when I am swayed by the intellectual considerations in favor of an argument I cannot help but also be swayed by the social agreement that, however implicitly, underwrites these considerations, that tell me that it is considerations just like these rather than

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considerations of another kind that give me a reason to believe or do something.9

What, though, of the correcting role that reflection is supposed to play in moral and other forms of inquiry? Even if agreements of the sort Wittgenstein had in mind, and I am maintaining antirealists also had and have in mind, are not only compatible with but a necessary condition of argument, the intuitions that inform them and which they spit out surely deserve some critical looking into. Unless, of course, what antirealists really intend, after all, is to hamstring reflection by forcing it to do all its work within these intuitive confines.

This realist-inspired retort admits a number of possible responses. One response, which Bernard Williams offers, is to remind the critic that it is our ethi-cal life, after all, that we are trying to explain. As he writes, “the point is not that the intuitions should be in some ultimate sense correct, but that they should be ours” (32: p. 102). Because there is no way to accomplish this by reflectively bypassing our intuitions, it would be foolish even to try to do so.

This response is, I think, a good one as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough in accounting for the radically first-person character of practical reason and its implications for moral inquiry. The point earlier made and not to be forgotten here is that when absolute conceptions of the world and value go, so, too, does the idea that there are indubitable starting points that can yield up the truth rather than justificatory approximations of it. That means that our moral queries have to start from somewhere rather than nowhere and that somewhere is neither indubitable nor pure but contingent and impure because inquiry has no choice but to take its bearings from the moral traditions we are socialized into and that mold us into the particular moral agents we are.

From what has been said thus far, I think it is safe to say further that it is a mistake to think that intuitions hem in our reflective aspirations or that they stand in the way of truth, because to suppose such is to delude ourselves once again into thinking that reflection can go its own merry way unencumbered by the social con-texts in which it finds itself, that shape the forms it takes and has taken, and, finally, that provoke it in the first place to sort out the conflicts thrown up to us—conflicts that, it should not be left unsaid, make it abundantly clear just how indispensable reflection is to our lives. But it is no mistake to claim that this feature of our embod-ied moral life means that our moral inquiries will always have a certain circular quality about them. That is because if we have no other normative resources to go on save those that form the social background of our present forms of life, then whatever intuitively backed norms can be extracted from that background will carry a certain undeniable normative weight in our moral inquiries. And because there is no way to reflectively vindicate these norms except by appealing to them, practical reason turns out to be an inescapably circular affair. I think it would be a mistake, however, to treat it as either vicious or the unfortunately steep price that has to be paid once we admit that practical reason lacks what it takes to divine its own standards of appraisal. Rather, because there is no way the world or our lives look from the outside, it would be better, I believe, to think of the circularity of practical reason in a more positive light as that which makes moral inquiry relevant to our lives in the first place.

The last critical piece that needs to be added to this antirealist sketch of reflec-tion and moral argument is to underscore the fact that although all such inquiry begins where our intuitive lights lead us, it does not end with such intuitions in

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the sense of leaving them untouched by reflection. On the contrary, reflection does indeed exercise a correcting function here in precisely the way Rawls envis-aged in his notion of reflective equilibrium. The idea is the fairly simple one that we endeavor to bring our common moral intuitions of sport into accord with our reflective articulation of them and our reflective articulation of them into accord with our moral intuitions. By meshing our intuitions and reflections in this reflec-tive, back-and-forth fashion, some of our intuitions will drop out because they cannot withstand critical scrutiny, and some will be modified because of this same scrutiny (either by being given more prominence or downplayed),10 and some of our reflective efforts at articulation will be jettisoned because they take us too far afield of our intuitions, and others will be modified to better accommodate our moral intuitions. And because the only test of adequacy available to us here is coherence, it is by finding the right balance between our judgments and intuitions that we are able to justify our moral conceptions of sport.11 To paraphrase Rawls himself, what justifies a moral conception of sport is not its being true to an order antecedent and given to us but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and of social practices like sport and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our sports life, it is the most rational conception for us (19: pp. 306–307).

Asking, then, at least outside the ambit of reflective equilibrium, whether our intuitive starting points might themselves be wrong and, therefore, lead us morally astray is asking the wrong question. This is so not only because they are the only normative resources we have to work with in practical reason but also because intuitions are not to be understood here as Kant understood them as blind forms of sensibility but rather as Williams characterizes them, as “moderately reflective,” “spontaneous convictions” (32: p. 94). The “moderately reflective” feature of intuitions has in part to do with the fact that they themselves are often the products of previous efforts at reflective equilibrium—more generally, of moral inquiry—which, having initially passed reflective muster, subsequently became part of the moral background of our sports traditions. It is in this postreflective form that they are typically passed on to future practitioners and enthusiasts of sport as part of their habituation and socialization into its practice. But it is the moral know-how they convey to practitioners in this regard that is paramount, because without the prereflective orientation in moral space they provide, practitioners could not make their moral way away around in sport practices. In this respect, intuitions share a feature with what Scanlon calls “judgment-sensitive attitudes,” by which he means the capacity to see certain considerations, in this case moral ones, as reasons for action (28: p. 507). It is not as if, therefore, as Kant famously supposed, “intuitions without concepts are blind” (8: p. 76) but rather that intuitions absent the articulation provided by reflection would not be as perspicacious and palpable as they might otherwise be.

I’ll make one final empirical point concerning our common moral intuitions of sports. Moral philosophers and theorists of every stripe are famous, perhaps even notorious, for not taking people’s intuitions and conceptions of their moral lives very seriously. One obvious reason is that ordinary folks seldom think twice about the moral views they hold but, in spite of their own moral slothfulness and inarticulateness, are only too eager to lay down the moral law to others who do things they instinctively dislike. Of course, Marx and Nietzsche had their own

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special reasons for writing off their reflectively challenged peers, in Marx’s case because he thought the ruling moral ideas of a society were manipulatively imposed by its dominant class and in Nietzsche’s case because he suspected that the guiding moral ideas of a society were no less manipulatively hatched by their weaker members to control their stronger ones. The evidence suggests, however, that people’s views about moral matters like, for instance, distributive justice are far more nuanced and complex than most theorists give them credit for and show a rather remarkable cross-class consensus. So although we might expect people at the top of the economic and social scale to favor inegalitarian conceptions of justice and those at the bottom to favor more egalitarian ones, the evidence sug-gests a rather strong, across-the-board support for egalitarian distribution schemes (14: pp. 39–40). Notably, an important part of that evidence comes from the world of sport—to be more specific, team sports. For example, researchers have found that the group solidarity forged by team sports like soccer, unlike the instrumental relations with others fostered by individualist pursuits, encourages participants to favor egalitarian systems for allocating rewards (as cited in 14: pp. 64, 84). This might explain, and further strengthen, Lasch’s seemingly audacious claim that

the anguished outcry of the true fan who brings to sports a proper sense of awe only to find them corrupted from within by the spread of the “entertain-ment ethic,” sheds more light on the degradation of sport than the strictures of left-wing critics. (11: pp. 215–216)

It would not be stretching Lasch’s point too far, I think, to throw most moral theo-rists into this “left-wing” mix, at least when it concerns people’s general ethical views about sports and the rest of their lives.

If, as I have argued, there is no good reason to suppose that moral antirealists are allergic to reason giving and argument—at least in their first-person, historically chastened forms when we can be sure there is widespread agreement on what counts as both a good reason and a good (persuasive) argument, which describes most established language games—what of the relativist charge that when interlocutors from different cultures who do not play the same language games square off against one another, antirealists are forced to concede they can have nothing sensible or morally insightful to say to one another? Indeed, if, as antirealists claim, there is nowhere to stand outside of the language games we play, we certainly would not be in a position to say that any one language game is better than any other, mor-ally or otherwise.

I have two replies to this relativist objection. First, it can scarcely be denied that there are very few cultures left in the world today that are truly self-contained, that is, that share beliefs, reasons, and values so out of line with what other peoples in the world hold as to make them morally inscrutable. That means that there should be more than enough overlap in the moral vocabularies of most of these cultures to make them not only intelligible to everyone else, presuming reasonable efforts to understand one another are undertaken, but also partners in a conversation in which reason giving of some recognizable form can, and most likely, will occur. Hence, with just enough shared reasons and values to get a conversation going, and a little imagination thrown in for good measure so that everyone is able to glimpse what it might be like to see the world as everyone else does, it is not far-fetched in the least to suppose that genuine moral dialogue, as well as moral learning, can

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occur. Nor is it far-fetched to suppose that a moral vocabulary might well emerge from this dialogue, whose composition would depend entirely on the conversational outcome of these various efforts to explain and justify themselves to each other, that is considered better than its rivals.12 Of course, better here means not closer to the way things really are morally speaking but rather better in the sense of having a more perspicacious guide as to how to live a good life.

The mistake the relativist critic makes in this instance, then, is to assume that because antirealists hold that there is no way to get outside of the language games we play, and the forms of life they envelop, none of us has any choice but to play the language game we were ethnocentrically dealt, which leads to the rela-tivistic stalemate just described. What is mistaken about this assumption is that it supposes, as realists are wont to suppose, that we need a skyhook to lift us out of our ethnocentric crannies in order to understand and judge the language games that different cultures play, when in fact all we need is a foothold. And gaining a foothold is not a transcendental matter at all but an interpretive matter of getting better acquainted with the cultures that surround us—something, again, that is made possible by our moral proximity to one another despite the sometimes great geographical distances that separate us.

I will make one further point about this first point. Even in those rare instances in which we encounter cultures so alien to ours that, at least on first inspection, they really do come off as morally inscrutable, it would be wrong to suppose that antirealists have only defeatist things to say concerning such encounters. But let me begin with Wittgenstein’s nonmoral example, when he asks us to consider a people who do not believe in the propositions of physics to guide their actions but instead consult an oracle. “Is it wrong,” muses Wittgenstein, “for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our lan-guage-game as a base from which to combat theirs?” (34: p. 609). The question is, should we or should we not combat this latter language game, and if so, how should we combat it? Now, one way this combating often occurs, which, as we shall shortly see, makes the antirealist look a little less foolish, is as Wittgenstein describes it: “Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic” (34: p. 610). To this, however, it will surely be rejoined that although declaring the other here a fool and heretic is a bit over the top, it is not over the top to want to combat the oracle, given what we know about the laws of physics and the impressive body of scientific evidence that backs them up. So, again, should we combat the oracle or not? Wittgenstein’s answer is an unsurprising yes, but the manner in which he suggests we do it might well surprise. In his own words, “I said I would combat the other man [the oracle],—but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far would they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion” (34: p. 612).

What are we to make of Wittgenstein’s reply, and what light, if any, does it shed on moral antirealism? To begin with the latter question, we need to change Wittgenstein’s example to a moral one, and even better a moral one that touches on sport. Lets take as our example, then, the remarkable true story of Algerian woman middle-distance runner, Hassiba Boulmerka, who achieved international acclaim in the 1992 Olympic Games by winning the gold medal in the 1,500 meters and who, shortly after having returned to Algeria, was officially censured by the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), the leading Muslim political party in Algeria, for, among other

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things, violating purdah by running in public in shorts.13 Now, imagine a liberal feminist woman from North America confronting a fundamentalist male cleric of the ISF over this matter. The former speaks the liberal language of rights and equality and applies them straightaway to support Boulmerka’s right to pursue her highly successful athletic career, and the latter speaks the language of the Muslim faithful and insists Boulmerka should not under any circumstances appear in public with any part of her body exposed. If there is any overlap in their moral vocabularies, it is hard to detect and surely provides no foothold in the other’s language game. So the question is, should the liberal feminist combat the Muslim cleric?

As posed by our realist provocateur to the antirealist, the very asking of this question is supposed to show that the latter only has one answer open to her, and, of course, it is the manifestly wrong answer. For how can the antirealist say anything other, on pain of contradiction, than that the liberal feminist should not combat the cleric’s language game because she has nothing in her rational arsenal that he will find persuasive in the least and vice versa. In other words, argument is powerless to change anyone’s mind in such cases, and we might as well ignore one another or trade insults (male chauvinist, Western infidel) and be done with it.

But I think our hypothetical realist is simply wrong about this because there is no reason that antirealists could not or should not follow Wittgenstein’s counsel and exhort the liberal feminist to combat the male cleric. At first she will, no doubt, reach for (liberal) reasons to try to persuade him. When these fail, however, as they are destined to in cases like this—that is, when she is unable to find a reason that he regards as a reason—she can do as Wittgenstein suggests and instead of ignoring or insulting him try to persuade him by goading him to consider Boulmerka’s case in a different light. And this might well include a whole repertoire of persuasive tactics from detailing her own struggles to overcome male prejudice in her home culture to documenting how women in her and other cultures are capable of quite a lot when given educational opportunities and the like, to accounting how women athletes from different religious persuasions reconcile their religious beliefs with their athletic careers. Of course, these efforts at persuasion are, like arguments themselves, not fated to succeed, but they are likely to get us much further than ignoring or insulting one another. In any event, there is no good reason, as our realist agitator would have us believe, that antirealists need to skulk off with their moral tails between their legs when they confront moral adversaries this set in their ways, because there is no reason to believe that there is really any such thing as a closed language game.

My second and final point is simply to remind my hypothetical realist critic just how cavernous many of our established language games are and, so, just how far and wide the reasons and arguments they sponsor and circulate reach. This is doubly true of the liberal democratic language game we Westerners are so familiar with—first, in the sense that this language game is played all over the world today, and second, in the sense that liberalism so prides itself on its inclusiveness, on its openness to new beliefs and ideas no matter from what quarter they might come, that it makes such inclusiveness part of its own self-image (of course, it goes without saying that this ideal is more often than not honored in the breach). What is true of liberalism here is even more so of the world of sport, because its reach exceeds even that of liberalism. It is not saying too much, therefore, to claim that sport is a world phenomenon, an important part of the global culture, rather than

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merely a Western one. Who can say with a straight face anymore, for instance, that cricket is an English game and not a West Indian one or that football (not the American version) is a Western cultural artifact and not an Eastern one. I was reminded of just how cavernous this athletic language game is when I was reading The New Yorker one day and happened across an account of a discussion of the World Cup soccer tournament by diplomats at the United Nations. The passage that caught my eye, which was a direct quotation of one of the diplomats, was the following one:

You are sitting next to people of enormously different cultures, and you have to take that into account whenever you open your mouth. And soccer is truly a common language. You can turn to an Iranian and say, “That was such crap, that should have been a penalty,” and he will understand exactly what you mean. Whereas in any other conversation with him you will have to find two dozen different ways of explaining the same point to make sure he has understood it. (13: p. 26)

There is obviously something to be said, then, for a language game this large and transparent, which allows its players to converse with one another with such ease and without the benefit of translation manuals or the need for labored explanations. And part of that something has more than a little relevance to the antirealist case I am pleading here.

Of course, the language games of liberalism and sport are also no strangers to one another, which brings me back to my earlier example of Hassiba Boulmerka and reveals just how stereotypical my hypothetical encounter between the liberal feminist and mullah was. Stereotypical because it assumed that the encounter had to be manufactured, imported from the outside, and that it would most likely have involved an unbowed North American woman feminist and a Muslim holy man rather than an unbowed Algerian woman athlete and her peers, especially her young Algerian peers not yet enamored with or intimidated by holy men. In fact, however, it turns out that Boulmerka was waging her own battle, one self-consciously laced with liberal shibboleths like individual rights, for a more secular and democratic Islam that would, as she herself put it, expose “the fascists who hide behind the veil of Islam in order to impose their own political will” (15: p. 53). I might add that her own athletic campaign to put a different face on Islam—to be more exact, a liberal, physically dynamic, woman’s face—dovetailed nicely with Salman Rushdie’s simi-lar campaign, waged at about the same time, to loosen the grip of “Actually Existing Islam” by installing in its place a “progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid” Islam (26: p. 22). So there was no need, after all, for me to stage this hypothetical encounter to get across my antirealist point, because that point was already being ably made by Boulmerka and Rushdie themselves on soil not thought to be conducive to either modern sports notions or liberal ones. And that antirealist point, to reiterate, is that argument can proceed apace here without worrying about whether relativism is going to rear its ugly head.

ConclusionTo sum up, I have tried to build on Dixon’s effort to generalize Simon’s

account of “broad internalism” by agreeing with him on two pivotal points and disagreeing with him on one equally, I think, pivotal point. The two things we agree

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on are that, first, Simon’s interpretivism is clearly a better moral and nonmoral account of sport than its main rivals (formalism, conventionalism, and subjectiv-ism) and that, second, the rational and normative force of Simon’s position can be strengthened even further by making his account responsive to the larger debate between realism and antirealism. Where we disagree, however, is on which side of that debate Simon’s internalism should be aligned. Dixon gives the nod to real-ism, whereas I think the antirealist side is the better fit. I have argued for the latter because I believe realism is plagued by too many problems, the primary one of which is that it is unrealistic in what it thinks abstract reason can achieve on its own accord, to be helpful to Simon’s internalist cause, whereas antirealism’s more circumspect account of practical reason is just the right remedy to make that cause more robust than it already is. It is for these reasons, then, that I would like close my article with Baier’s following prescient words: “There is no room for moral theory as something which is more philosophical and less committed than moral delibera-tion, and which is not simply an account of our customs and styles of justification, criticism, protest, revolt, conversion, and resolution” (1: p. 232).14

Notes1The other reason Dixon thinks Simon should jettison his internalist rendering of

sport is because of its conceptual vagueness, which explains, among other things, why the line between internalism and externalism cannot be drawn as precisely as it needs to be. One can read conventionalism without contradiction, Dixon claims, as either an internalist or an externalist account.

2In order to avoid any possible confusion, I should note that although Williams is a realist in matters scientific, he is a steadfast antirealist regarding everything else, especially moral inquiry.

3I should also say that I am following Nagel’s lead in my forthcoming critique of moral realism, because I agree with him “that there is no way to prove the possibility of realism; one can only refute impossibility arguments, and the more often one does this the more confidence one may have in the realist alternative” (17: p. 114). Of course, where I differ from Nagel is in his belief that realism can defeat impossibility arguments.

4My disenchantment with subjectivist conceptions of reason and value extends also to their ethical variants and, in particular, to ethical egoism. I do not much care for these either, because, as Williams forcefully remarks, they are of little help in determining what an ethical consideration comes to because their only counsel is that we “ought to act on nonethical considerations” (32: p. 12).

5This point will come into play later when I try to show that a certain view of moral universalism is compatible with moral antirealism.

6The idea that a special reflective standpoint is required to see moral phenomena as moral phenomena is a commonplace in moral theory. Of course, what precise standpoint that is varies with the theory in question. For Nagel the requisite standpoint is the view from nowhere, for Habermas the role of a participant in discourse, and for the antirealist account I am pushing, as mentioned, forms of life (10).

7As noted, it is just such a view that Dixon attributes to antirealists working in sport circles who have been influenced by Rorty and MacIntyre. The harder question here, I think, is whether Rorty and MacIntyre are themselves conventionalist antirealists. In the case of Rorty, there are passages in his writings where he sounds like one, but there are also many more passages where he does not (3). MacIntyre is a different case— I think it is fairly clear

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that he is not a conventionalist antirealist.8For more along these lines see 25: pp. 15–16.9This is my antirealist response to Simon’s claim that “we agree to [principles] because

of the intellectual considerations in their favor rather than find them intellectually favored because we agree. The alternative is simply to privilege the belief of existing communities because they are believed” (30: p. 14).

10The emphasis on “some” in this sentence is mine because on the antirealist, holistic picture I am sketching here what William James called an outré explanation, one that rules out all of our preconceptions and could never pass as a justified one, let alone a perspicacious one (18: p. 15). Williams makes the same point when he claims that we can question and justify some of our beliefs only by holding constant most of our other beliefs (32: p. 113).

11As Rawls point out, this reflective modification of our moral intuitions is what indemnifies reflective equilibrium against the accusation of conservatism, that it “limits [moral] investigation to what people . . . now hold” (19: p. 288). As Rorty further points out, because reflective equilibrium also makes room for idealizations, for playing up or playing down certain features of our practices in the effort to make them more coherent, it makes it even more difficult to dismiss it on these supposedly conservative grounds (24: p. 333). This latter point also speaks to the worry about whether we have gotten hold of the “right” intuitions to get our moral inquiry off the ground successfully.

12A further point should be mentioned here. As this example shows, antirealism and moral universalism are not mutually exclusive, at least not on one reading of moral universal-ism. The moral universalism I have in mind here is what Rawls called universal in “reach,” in which, in the course of trying to persuade others and through a series of modifications that flow from these efforts, judgments are arrived at that apply to all those who have reflectively endorsed them. The moral universalism that is at odds with moral antirealism is what Rawls calls universal in “authority,” in which inquiry begins with universal principles of rationality already in hand that are held to “apply to all reasonable beings everywhere” even if they had no say in their formulation” (20: pp. 86–87). Of course, the hypothetical example I have given in the text is only potentially a universal one in the former sense, because its universal scope would depend on the outcome of the justificatory efforts of the parties in question.

13It should be said that this censure was not simply a public denunciation but led to physical assaults on her person by male members of ISF that forced her to train for a time in exile. I featured this story extensively in my essay “Multinational Sport and Literary Practices and Their Communities” (16: pp. 184–204).

14I want to thank John Russell and Bob Simon for their many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. I only wish I had better answers for the perceptive criti-cisms they raised.

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Documents

Moral Antirealism, Internalism,and Sport