Conclusiones

55 William Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 132.

56 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 190.

57 Ibid., 190.

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At this point in the discussion most sports ethicists skip straight to MacIntyre’s treatment of the three virtues required of any practice.⁵⁸ In doing so they neglect a highly important feature of practices which MacIntyre is attuned to. My understanding of MacIntyre on this point is that there is much more to being part of a particular practice’s community than merely beginning to participate. ‘It belongs to the concept of a practice as I have outlined it…that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners.’⁵⁹ He goes on to state,

We have to learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts. In other words we have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage and honesty.⁶⁰

These three virtues comprise the core of all practices since without them practices are essentially meaningless. ‘For not to accept these… so far bars us from achieving the standards of excellence or the goods internal to the practice that it renders the practice pointless except as a device for achieving external goods.’⁶¹

One does not become a member of the baseball community because one suddenly decides to take up baseball. The language MacIntyre uses throughout, particularly the idea of learning and striving for the internal goods implies a progression toward a bond with that community rather than an instantaneous assimilation. In fact, he goes on to describe it in this way. ‘Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it.’⁶² It is on the basis of this interpersonal relationship that these three virtues of justice, courage and honesty are required since they are foundational to any healthy relationship.

We can summarize MacIntyre’s thought here by saying that the virtues enable us to achieve the goods internal to a practice while the virtues are acquired, at least in part, through developing relationships inside the community of a given practice. This does not mean, however, that one must be an expert in all matters pertaining to a particular

58 Randolph Feezell might be considered one of the few exceptions to this. He states that ‘Certain things immediately follow from this’ and outlines MacIntyre’s thoughts but he does not satisfactorily emphasize the point I believe MacIntyre wishes to make. See, Feezell, Sport, Play & Ethical Reflection, 128.

59 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 191.

60 Ibid., 191.

61 Ibid., 191.

62 Ibid., 191.

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practice before becoming part of that community. Instead it suggests that what is required is an attitude reflective of the desire for the goods internal to the practice and recognition of our dependence upon others to achieve the standards of excellence specific to that practice. One does not need to be a professional athlete to be part of the baseball community but simply show a willingness to be a part of the game and join others in the pursuit of the goods appropriate to baseball.

Becoming part of a community, we have noted, requires accepting the history and traditions of that community. Every practice has a narrative that informs all who are involved. This is critical to MacIntyre’s account of a practice. ‘To enter into a practice is to enter into a relationship not only with its contemporary practitioners, but also with those who have preceded us in the practice, particularly those whose achievements extended the reach of the practice to its present point.’⁶³

This idea of tradition is captured well by Michael Mandelbaum as he recounts the significance of baseball in American culture. Having its genesis in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries baseball today serves as a reminder of the past more so than any other American sport. The lack of a time clock and consequent leisurely pace stands in contrast to the highly efficient, materialistic and machine-like nature of Western society today.⁶⁴ ‘Baseball returns the spectator, for a few hours, to an earlier, simpler, happier time. It offers a brief sojourn in a lost paradise, a sip from the fountain of youth.’⁶⁵ He goes on to describe baseball as a ‘time machine, transporting spectators back into the past’ and defines this as ‘the heart of its status in American culture.’⁶⁶

Not only does baseball return the spectator to earlier times, it also invokes memories of some of the sport’s greatest players who are responsible for changing aspects of the game forever. George Herman Ruth is one of the greatest examples of someone who revolutionized the game. With debts to Whitehead’s famous statement about Plato and European philosophy Mandelbaum suggests ‘the modern history of the

63 Ibid., 194.

64 I am not saying that baseball avoids the problems of materialism and mechanistic efficiency. If anything, baseball is a game of statistics and precision, making it at times a very mechanical sport.

However, it is less rigid and precise in terms of time, being one of the few major sports without a game clock.

65 Michael Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 52.

66 Ibid., 53.

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game of baseball consists in some ways of a series of footnotes to Babe Ruth.’⁶⁷ Ruth shifted the emphasis in baseball from the defence to the offence with his uniquely successful way of swinging the bat.

During his day the batter gripped higher on the bat in an attempt to gain better control over where the ball would be hit to. The ability to place the ball away from the fielders allowed the batter to make it safely to the base. Ruth chose to hold the bat at its base and swing as forcefully as he could in order to hit the ball as far as possible. When he retired he had more than five times the number of career home runs (714) than did the previous record holder. Even though it is no longer the record, is still seen by many as a point of reference by which to compare contemporary professional baseball players.

Ruth altered the game of baseball by popularizing the home run and ‘the new emphasis on it made the game more dramatic and exciting.’⁶⁸

For MacIntyre then, it is ‘the achievement, and a fortiori the authority, of a tradition which I then confront and from which I have to learn.’⁶⁹ At this point MacIntyre introduces what he calls institutions. He is careful to distinguish institutions from practices by pointing out that where practices are concerned with the goods internal to an activity institutions are ‘characteristically and necessarily concerned with’

external goods.⁷⁰ This must be the case since practices are focused on internal goods, immaterial goods which can only be gained through participating in the practice.

External goods such as money, power and status are awarded to the practitioners by the institutions that govern and sustain the practices.

Despite their distinct differences practices and institutions ‘characteristically form a single causal order in which the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competiveness of the institution.’⁷¹ This is why the virtues are of such importance to practices, for without them they ‘could not resist the corrupting power of institutions.’⁷²

It is for this distinction that many sports ethicists rely most heavily on MacIntyre. Much has been written about the commercialization of sport and the

67 Ibid., 68. Alfred North Whitehead stated that ‘the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.’ See Whitehead’s, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 39.

68 Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports, 69.

69 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 194.

70 Ibid., 194.

71 Ibid., 194.

72 Ibid., 194.

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internal/external goods distinction. Many philosophers lament the current state of sports and find MacIntyre’s institutions a fitting agent of blame. Feezell comments, ‘in the context of sports little needs to be said to interpret this point [sc. institutions corrupting power]. MacIntyre’s distinction…provides an enlightening way to view this much-talked about and much criticized phenomenon.’⁷³

By way of example we can see that golf is a practice while the Professional Golfers’ Association is an institution which governs and facilitates the external goods of golf. The external goods cannot be gained by way of the practice itself. Playing golf will not result in goods like prize money. Those types of goods are gained only through the institutions. Similarly, institutions are unable to provide the internal goods which are only to be found in the practice.

It is also worth noting that external goods are, in fact, goods and should not be discounted merely because they are not internal goods. Simply because they are external to the practice does not mean they lack moral value, though often it is the case that the influence of the external goods corrupts the pursuit of internal goods. This corrupting power is kept at bay by the three specific virtues mentioned above that are required of every practice.

It seems as though sports clearly are practices. William Morgan agrees when he states that sports are ‘associations founded on common, substantive conceptions of the good that inform the collective aims, values, and standards of judgment of their members, of the practice communities formed in their name.’⁷⁴ At first glance there is little to suggest otherwise. In fact, as was just demonstrated, sports make for some of the most illustrative examples when defining practices. It does not follow, however, that just because certain examples help clarify what is meant by a practice that all sports are, in fact, practices. Not surprisingly, the thesis MacIntyre proposes in After Virtue is not without criticism.⁷⁵ Two critics working directly in the philosophy of sport have

73 Feezell, Sport, Play and Ethical Reflection, 132.

74 Morgan, ‘Are Sports More So Private or Public Practices?’, 24.

75 Many of the objections to MacIntyre’s framework digress too far from the present task of determining the applicability of practices to sports and will not be mentioned further here. For detailed discussions on problems with MacIntyre’s theory more generally see John Horton, After MacIntyre: Critical

Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1994); Kelvin Knight, The MacIntyre Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Christopher Stephen Lutz, Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000);

Nancey Murphy, Brad Kallenberg and Mark Nation, Virtues & Practices in the Christian Tradition:

Christian Ethics After MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Thomas D.

D’Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue: The Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre (Burlington, VT:

Ashgate Publishing, 2006).

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challenged the unqualified acceptance of sports as practices. The first criticism wholly rejects applying MacIntyre’s notion of practices to sports on the grounds of normativity.

Graham McFee suggests that there must be some justification for following the rules of a particular sport. He disagrees with those who would attempt to use practices as this justification because, in his view, the concept of a practice lacks normative value. The second objection sees promise for the structure of MacIntyrean practices but rejects MacIntyre’s insistence on using an Aristotelian theory of the virtues. Instead, John Gibson argues, those virtues can be replaced with a Nietzschean system of value. Let us first turn to McFee’s reasons for why he believes sports are not practices.