Test 5 Flashcards
Central values of sport take a back seat to commercialization.
Mass marketing of sport leads to idol worship instead of participation.
Rule changes are made for TV or mass appeal.
Competition itself harmed.
Season/Play-offs get longer and longer.
Many fans can’t afford tickets anymore.
Players seen as meat, animosity between players and fans increase.
Sport Corrupted by Marketplace
‘the commercialization of sport, the transformation of sport into a product that can be bought and sold, corrupts sport.”
Sport becomes a means to securing external goods.
What sells is what matters.
Corruption Thesis
Basic benefits of sport
Better Health
Joy of Competition
Fun
Scarce benefits of sport
Fame
Wealth
Power
Goods that cannot be achieved apart from their sport/sporting communities.
Home run not achievable outside of baseball, not checkmate apart from chess.
These goods are shared by performer and spectator alike.
Internal Goods
Players more about contract than the good of the team/game.
Sport is warped by need for popularity and mass appeal.
Still not the whole story; has made sport more accessible, and some rule changes have been improvements.
Yet players do seem to have been commodified.
So some harm appears to be real, but it may be overstated.
Commercialization Undermines Internal Goods
Rather than do a purely utilitarian calculus of the goods/harms produced by commercialization, perhaps there are some virtues upon which professional sport should rest.
Assessing the Corruption Thesis
Is a threat but it also produces goods.
Commercialization
An externalist position.
The value/morals of sport are merely reflections of the values of the larger society.
Reductionism
Play by the rules: Despite some cheating occurring, respect for the rules is the standard, and cheaters do not openly endorse their behavior.
Excellence: Even when corrupted by “win-at-all-cost,” the implicit reason to win is that it suggests superior performance.
Can be congruent/conflict with the larger social norms.
Internal Morality of Sport
The problems sport runs into when used as a tool for character education in schools
Partisanship
Indoctrination
Whose morality is taught?
If you’re “conservative” and schools teach “liberal” morality you’ll be upset.
However, we don’t have a choice, there are very few if any value neutral positions.
A commitment to fairness, and tolerance of dissent is a committed rather neutral position.
Problem of Partisanship
Sport building Character in Education
Kids should make decisions for themselves. Therefore we should wait till the age of consent and let them think for themselves.
Problem of Indoctrination
Sport Building Character in Education
Sport at its best is a deep, meaningful, dramatic experience.
One might even say “spiritual” or “religious”
Is sport’s integrity destroyed by its own phenomenal popularity?
Money, power, prestige all driven by the popularity of the activities.
The Sporting Paradox
Conflicting demands? Win or teach?
Recruit, succeed, keep eligible; demands that may conflict with internal morality of sport and mission of a university.
Winning within ethical constraints of a mutual quest for excellence seems an ethical position.
Moral Coaching
Learning about ourselves and others (both teammates and opponents).
Clarification of strategy and games principles.
Guidelines of commitment and responsibility (this can include the classroom).
What Coaches Should Facilitate
Skill development, understanding, and love of the game.
Will require significant participation by all players.
All of which is more important than winning.
What Youth Coaches Should Emphasize
“the use of physical force designed to harm others… [force with] the intent to harm.”
Intent is the key term for Simon
Definition of Violence
Violates a respect for persons implicit in the ‘mutual quest’
Person just a ‘toy’ for perpetrators gratification.
Violence
Strategic, no intent to harm.
Brushback pitch, hard post up, etc.
Injury a risk but not an intent.
Force
“For the use of force against an opponent in an athletic contest to be ethically defensible, the opponent must be in a position and condition such that a strategic response is possible and it is unlikely that injury will ensue.”
Blocking a shot is ok.
Undercutting him while in the air is not.
Vulnerability Principle
“there are two arts which I would say god gave to mankind, music and gymnastics for…the love of knowledge in them-not for the soul or body incidentally, but for their harmonious adjustment.”
Plato
“Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness of discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.”
James
More concerned about being proper than about exploration or finding what is right.
We could be more than we are.
Respectability
Ideas matter (philosophy has a direct impact on daily life).
Standards matter
The Goal: Wake up, improve self and the world through habits and self-control.
Take Home Points from James
We’re being over/under civilized to the point that we’re losing touch with part of out humanity.
“I want to pursue the suggestion that movement and sport…can help us recover an inner wildness that is condition of our humanity - our freedom, agency, and creativity.”
Built on the transcendentalist thinking of Emerson and Thoreau.
Anderson’s Contention
The goal is to live between under-civilization and over-civilization.
“Civilization insofar as it becomes merely habitual, has the tendency to eliminate our spontaneity and make us automata.”
A Border Life
A animal existence
Under-Civilized
A mechanized existence
Over-Civilized
The ‘busyness’ of civilization can put us to sleep, make us machines.
Duty, schedules, and electronics not bad in themselves, but we seem to over do it.
We’ve become over-civilized.
Sport being a realm of freedom, agency, and creativity can be one of the ways to reawaken our own humanity.
Automata
Anderson believes sport is one of the things that can “wake” us.
“the aim is to reawaken in each of us an inner wildness that can bring to life the sportive, spontaneous, and creative dimensions of our being, so that we might recover our humanity and regard ourselves as a ‘part an parcel of nature’ and merely as a ‘member of society.’”
Similar to James
“The importance of nature, wilderness, and the risk they bear for our sportive actions is that they bring us home toward that borderland where our own wild dimension can again come to life.”
Anderson
Wake up to something beyond your self.
Find a transcendent cause.
Singer
Control the will through habit and discipline.
You can accomplish more than you think.
Moving beyond scientific materialism seams like a prerequisite.
James
Sport seams like a particular way to wake us up to our own humanity.
The possibility, creativity, and self-definition available in movement, wake us up to the borderland of humanity that exists between animal and sedated.
Anderson
Threats of commercialization of sport
Internal goods sacrificed to money
Teams buy success (Yankees)
Rules change
Goods of commercialization of sports
Mass access
Fans also receive internal goods
Mutual quest shared and facilitated
Ethical responsibility by players, teams, league offices towards the game(s) they play and the society in which they live.
Proper Governance is Key
Believes we can do better.
James like Singer
We need to get involved, to wake up and see there are transcendent meaningful causes in the world.
Liberal or conservative there are things that need to be done, things to believe in, things to be passionate about.
Our society encourages us to be “half-awake.”
We can go weeks on auto-pilot.
Singer
Concerned that propriety, especially empirical propriety (science) often breeds our slumber.
“Conscience makes cowards of us all. Social conventions prevent us from telling the truth… Our scientific respectability keeps us from exercising the mystical portions of our nature freely.”
Not an enemy of science (though the scientists thought he was). Rather he is concerned with relying on “the measurable” limits are large chunk of our experience.
Wants to interrogate all our experience. Limiting our experience limits our “energies.”
James
If we push ourselves past our initial fatigue we find a reservoir of energy/capability.
“There may be more layer after layer of this experience.”
“sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.”
With practice, we can push past our limits achieve a new equilibrium and do more work.
Second Wind
Sport is generally an enterprise conducted in the borderland.
“risk in context”
“spontaneity within constraint”
“It is just this tension between the tame and the wild that Thoreau saw as necessary for our remaining awake and human.”
Humanizing Sport
May appear trivial but is not:
A function of both the expert and the novice.
Creativity
We can “taste” the potential.
Possibility
Encourages the humanizing effects.
Nature
