2. A preliminary objection

Before beginning in earnest, I must face a basic objection to the entire project of assimilating ethics to athletics, namely, a basic divergence in motivation between the two enterprises. The objection has three faces. First, athletics is built around competition, but ethics is not. Second, actions are ethical not because of the bodily accomplishments involved but because of the agent’s intention or motive. Even the champion Rescuer of Toddlers is not ethical if he saves toddlers to impress a girl or win a contest. Finally, ethics is compulsory, but sports are not. Other things equal, if we can’t be bothered to play today, no one has a complaint against us.

Note first that I have not said that ethics is a sport or even that it is analogous to a sport. My claim is that ethical achievement is fruitfully viewed as a kind of athletic achievement: the enactment of complex embodied skills. Whether sports themselves are like ethics itself does not impinge upon this claim. Even so, some rejoinders to the objection are possible.

Athletic achievement is not necessarily competitive in either the structure of the activity or the motivation of the participants. To the contrary; when we play competitive sports, most often we use competition as a subsidiary element in order to structure cooperative behavior and spur positive feedback loops, rather than for its own sake. For instance, suppose we decide to play pickup basketball for two hours, setting up a series of games to eleven. In between games, we switch teams around so as to ensure that we’re even and everyone is getting the playing time they want. This is fundamentally cooperative activity. Moreover, much athletic activity is not competitive at all. In particular, “outdoor” sports—hiking, camping, fishing—are skilled athletic endeavors, most often collaborative, bringing us in direct contact with the world, where the only “competition” is against the recalcitrance of nature or the limits of our capacities. That sounds like a description of ethics.

The problem of intention or motive may seem more difficult, but it is not. The essence of moral motivation is doing the right thing for its own sake, a matter of mental presence and focus. Acting “from the motive of duty” is not about observing an external standard and complying with its commands, as though ethics were a godhead or list of rules on a tablet; rather, to act from the motive of duty is to be wholehearted and fully present in the moment, embracing the right action and identifying with it, and not thinking of ulterior motives such as rewards or glory. But this is precisely what’s required of athletic action when successful. To take one’s eye off the ball or lose focus is a crucial error of execution. We identify with our performance and feel frustration or shame if we cannot carry it out. We may have any number of other motives, from glory to physical fitness to a professional’s salary. But so may the ethical agent: they may want to signal their commitment to a cause, or teach their children well, or make up for a previous error, or even make some money. What makes the action ethical is that these motives are all secondary and not necessary. The same is true in athletics.Footnote ⁴

Finally, I address the charge that athletics is optional whereas ethics is compulsory. If I stop wanting to go hiking on the weekend, I can just stop, and suddenly the norms of hiking would cease applying to me. I would no longer have any reason to own the right boots, wake up before the mosquitoes, carry water and a map, and so on. My friends would miss me, but not blame me. But if I stopped wanting to be ethical, the norms would continue to apply with equal force and, if anything, greater urgency. I would be blamed rather than simply missed.

This objection subtly shifts the basis of comparison. As long as I continue to call myself a hiker, the norms will still apply. If I am willingly included in trip plans yet cease showing up or bringing my part of the equipment, I would be blamed, not missed. Eventually, my continued claim to be a hiker would be scoffed at. So far, this looks like ethical noncompliance. Things change, though, when I decide not to be a hiker anymore. Now the objection seems on target. But now it does not accurately describe ethics. If I throw off a practical identity, I am impervious to the demands of morality.Footnote ⁵ Every ethical theory needs to explain the compulsoriness of moral duty and why the knave fails by his own lights; most often, theories need to explain these things in a way that is compatible with a vision of the agent as autonomous rather than heteronomous. Which means that, at bottom, the compulsory character of ethics is chosen or affirmed rather than externally imposed. I believe a theory that treats ethical achievement as a species of athletic achievement is in no worse shape than any other account of why knavery is self-defeating. I cannot, however, develop this account here.Footnote ⁶

I have argued that the objections from motivation do not sink this proposal before it even leaves the dock. I turn now to the positive account of ethical behavior as athletic achievement.

3. Ethics as work

According to Sarah Stroud (Reference Stroud and Timmons2013, 203), “anyone who has stuck more than a toe into moral theory” must be familiar with the problem of moral saints or excessive demand. This debate assumes that we roughly know what morality demands of us and are motivated to do it, but are either doubtful that ethics could demand that much sacrifice, or have difficulty bringing ourselves to make that sacrifice. The challenge is either excess demand or akrasia.

A puzzling feature of this debate is how physically and ethically easy it would be to do the right thing if only we could make ourselves: add three zeroes before clicking “donate,” grab a toddler from a wading pool, literally just lift a finger. We can do the right thing just like that; so why don’t we? It takes virtually no time, attention, or embodied performance. We have difficulty articulating why morality should be unable to demand this of us, supposing that moral demand must have an upper bound; or we accept that it demands so much but confront the ineffable problem of akrasia: “I just can’t make myself do it.”

Demand so understood then becomes a problem of mere quantity. Stroud (Reference Stroud and Timmons2013, 204) evocatively portrays moral requirements as kudzu, a plant that overgrows everything with an undifferentiated green blanket, killing the biodiversity underneath. Vanessa Carbonell (Reference Carbonell2012, 228) speaks in terms of “the level of moral obligation” we bear, and the role of moral saints in “ratcheting up” this level.Footnote ⁷ Effective altruists remind us how much more good we could be doing if we simply gave more or more efficiently (Cooney Reference Cooney2015). More recently, Marcel van Ackeren has defended a sophisticated account of demandingness that includes an analysis of the phenomenology of being unable to “make myself do it.” But even here, van Ackeren understands difficulty quantitatively, in terms of cost, albeit a broader conception of cost that includes “psychic resources.”Footnote ⁸ Moral demand thus continues to be about quantity, and the decisive difficulty is still ineffably psychological: just making myself do what I know I must, an action I could do if only I willed it. The quality of the action demanded of us is irrelevant or undifferentiated. As “anyone who has stuck more than a toe” in this debate knows, the paradigmatic moral act is donating money; moral agency is literally alienating.

In real life, by contrast, moral agency is qualitatively rich, and we often must act wholeheartedly and with focus and skill. What is missing from the quantitative model, then, is demand in an embodied sense: the sense that requires preparation, attention, bodily performance of difficult tasks, managing exhaustion, controlling emotions, adaptability, sociability, and so on. It is understandable that ethicists want to isolate one aspect of moral demand in order to bring it into focus. The problem is that isolating this aspect of quotidian moral demand distorts the whole. Consider the following case.

I want to put aside cases—likely the majority of real cases of sexual harassment—where men exploit and foster hostile environments or norms that reinforce male privilege, and all the male coworkers benefit while conveniently managing to fail to see anything amiss. In Sexual Harassment, S (who may be of any gender) comes upon an egregious case—say, an attempt at unwanted touching or a quid pro quo. In this case, B’s actions exploit both a power imbalance with C and a power imbalance with S, albeit in different ways. S wants to help C escape B’s aggression but, if things go wrong, S’s intervention might make matters worse, now or in future. An effective response requires S to try to determine instantaneously what C wants and, to the extent possible, to do that. S must also avoid giving the wrong facial expressions and making the wrong eye movements. S’s body might have to become a physical barrier between B and C, and S will need to maintain a position even when, as seems likely, B will respond by minimizing and teasing S for (supposedly) overreacting.

In short, doing the right thing is physically, intellectually, and socially demanding all at once. It involves quick thinking and physical grace: coordination among eyes, brain, feet, and hands to recognize what situation we are in and respond in time and with the right attitude; to work together with others if possible; to know our limits and see ourselves from others’ perspective; to navigate relative vulnerabilities and defer to the unstated wishes of victims.

It is worth dwelling on—what philosophers typically ignore—the sheer weirdness, for most of us, of situations where people unexpectedly act badly. The challenge of overcoming the shock of it all tends to be more powerful than any temptation to join in doing wrong. This shock yields to a kind of panic which causes us to freeze up as the mind races down one dead end after another, and the body does things only semivoluntarily—facial expressions, gesticulations, stammering, eye-darting. We lack the muscle memory required to do the right thing. This panic is likely to cause the wrong actions, but not because defending a coworker without making things worse is quantitatively too much to ask of S, or still less because S is somehow tempted to join in and suffers from akrasia. The problem is that a proper response demands skills that S doesn’t have. Overcoming this failure is demanding in an embodied sense.

Call the kind of demand made on S by Sexual Harassment “clutch performance” demand: S has to get this particular thing done with a lot on the line. Clutch performance involves not panicking, deciding upon an efficacious course of action, maintaining focus, sticking to our guns when wrongdoers deny and belittle while remaining flexible as the situation and the needs of victims change.

Clutch performance is not, however, the only way we may have to respond to moral demands. Consider:

G does not need a clutch performance. Rather, G is trying to figure out how to live given a multiplicity of commitments and the broader structure of social and professional life whose demands G is committed to and endorses each in its own right, but which exercise powerful pressure to live in an environmentally destructive way. G does not have only one task here—going green—but a variety of incongruent tasks no one of which can be easily sacrificed. To be meaningfully pursued, a greener life would pervade these other requirements and potentially transform them, but it’s hard to see how to do that when each is at least to some degree nonnegotiable.

Compared to Sexual Harassment, Stepping Lightly more closely resembles the kinds of cases that animate the demandingness debate. There, the quantitative picture distorts moral demand first by abolishing the variety of moral demand. Cases like Stepping Lightly are cast as conflicts between impartial altruistic morality on the one hand, and self-interested projects or pursuits on the other. But there is morality in each zone or sphere of performance. We have to figure out how to weave moral requirement through all aspects of our life. Impartial altruism has an essential role in moral life, but so do things like loving and caring for family, being a valued and collegial coworker, egalitarianism in quotidian relationships, being open to new experiences and nonjudgmental about matters of taste, and so on. Morality pervades each of these zones of life without abolishing them. Figuring out how to live well therefore requires not dropping everything to save drowning toddlers, but rising to meet the variegated demands of the moral life.

Clutch performance is an embodied capacity to respond to instantaneous demands, but variegated demand calls upon metaskills like planning, sociability, delegation, and organization as well as more directly physical skills such as being able to hide frustration, learn from and inspire others, and so on.

My proposal in the next two sections is that by thinking about the way athletic performance makes demands on us, we can capture both clutch performance and variegated demand, the kinds of demands reflected in Sexual Harassment and Stepping Lightly, respectively. So I begin with athletic analogues of these cases and then turn to the question of what features of sport make it demanding in these ways and enable us to rise to its challenges. Athletic performance is demanding in an embodied sense wherein we can be strongly and effectively motivated towards performance improvement while wholeheartedly engaged in the activity, even as we understand that we are not yet, and never will be, as good at this activity as we would like to be. Athletic performance has this character because of the rule structure of sports—a structure that ethics shares.

4. Sports

Consider:

Every topspin backhand is a clutch performance. What T has to do is will her body into a highly specific conformation, unifying a number of unnatural motions into one graceful act. If she has not done this before, or has not repeated it enough times, it is highly likely she will do it incorrectly—at least one of the motions will be off and she will mess up the shot. If she overthinks it, she is likely to do worse, and in a high-stakes context she might choke. As she practices, muscle memory takes over and she needs to think less. She can then move on to improving the shot—power, placement, variation, etc.

LeBron, of course, also needs clutch performance. But King James needs not just to make his own body perform in a single episode. Rather, he needs to find a way to captain his team to victory three times in a row over an intimidating opponent. This requires working offense and defense; taking shots, but also not taking them; seeing the placement and trajectory of each of his teammates and the players who are defending them; it requires getting enough sleep and managing his teammates’ emotions; studying video and devising plays; thinking through likely scenarios; and an intimate knowledge of the tells and weaknesses of each of the Warriors’ players.

Where Topspin involves clutch performance, LeBron shows us someone rising, through a series of clutch performances and by coaxing similar accomplishments from others, to meet variegated demand. Thus these two cases, which are obviously not randomly selected but are utterly familiar and not uncommon in athletics, show that sport generates the two kinds of embodied demand that we discern in the ethical challenges of Sexual Harassment and Stepping Lightly. What I want to show now is that sport generates these kinds of demands because of the structure of sporting endeavor, a structure that ethics shares. So the first question is: What is the structure of sport such that it generates these embodied demands?

Philosophers have not agreed on a definition of “sport.”Footnote ⁹ Fortunately, a definition is unnecessary for characterizing the way athletics makes demands on us, and we make demands on ourselves in contexts of athletic performance. What is crucial to athletic performance is that sports are rule-structured and -governed activities, setting a goal but restricting the means through which we can pursue it, thus ensuring that pursuit of the goal requires demanding physical exertion and the honing of embodied skills. Footnote ¹⁰

For example, in playing tennis we adopt the goal of getting a ball back to another person at least one more time than they get it back to us, but we accept restrictions on how we may do so. By adopting this goal and accepting these restrictions, we enable ourselves to engage in a demanding physical activity. As we improve, we develop a technique that is partly “textbook”—the two-handed backhand, the serve, etc.—but is increasingly our own idiosyncratic way of doing things. Idiosyncrasy might also reflect adaptation to particular features of our bodies and dis/abilities; we can revise rules and mechanics to optimize difficulty—that is, to make the game continuously challenging but never impossible.

To elaborate and clarify, I need to distinguish five different but connected concepts that help us see athletic performance in its elements.

1. 1. Constitutive rules define the activity: they set the goal and restrict the means for achieving it; they describe the field of play and make it possible to keep score.Footnote ¹¹

2. 2. Core competencies are actions that persons must be able to perform in order to play the game at all: e.g., to hold and swing a racquet, move around the court. People who lack any core competency cannot play unless they modify the rules.Footnote ¹²

3. 3. Mechanics or technique encompasses imperatives that are not rules but are essential for playing well given the rules: the kinds of things coaches tell their players as imperatives, but which it is not a violation of any rule to fail to do. For instance, keeping one’s eye on the ball or bending at the knees.Footnote ¹³

4. 4. Skills or excellences. Skills are to mechanics as core competencies are to constitutive rules. Skills are capacities that are needed not to play the game, but to play it well. For instance, putting topspin on the ball or hitting with more power.Footnote ¹⁴

5. 5. Positions or roles. To play a sport, one performs the core competencies determined by the constitutive rules. But not all at once. Which specific skills to deploy, how and when, depends on one’s own and others’ positions. Positions may but need not be specified in the rules. Role differentiation requires and generates metaskills of timing and adaptability, as well as advanced mechanics regarding how best to perform in each context.

Whereas rules—by restricting the means we may use to pursue our goal—point to inefficiency, mechanics point to efficiency. The rules require a net even though it would be more efficient not to have it, but given that those are the rules, mechanics guide us to maximize efficiency in complying with them. The mechanics constitute norms to which players must conform their bodies and minds. Skill levels are the players’ relative capacities to do this. Maximal efficiency given constraints is an objective fact, not a subjective decision. Hence whereas rules are invented and rewritten, mechanics are discovered and revised: they are, in effect, our best current theory of the game. Rules set the challenge that mechanics solve.

Why, though, would we accept inefficiency as a fundamental principle, if our aim within the rules is to maximize efficiency? And, contrariwise, why would we be determined to perform as efficiently as possible if inefficiency is built into the structure of the pursuit from the beginning? According to Bernard Suits (Reference Suits2014, 41), one reason to do this is just to be able to engage in the activity made possible thereby. Suits calls this motivation “lusory attitude”; it is the motivation whereby the activity becomes intrinsically valuable. We set the goal and restrict the means so that we can engage in the activity that this rule structure makes possible; then, given that it is our goal, we pursue it as efficiently as we can. We can think of lusory attitude as wholeheartedness: whatever else is at stake, engaging in the activity is sufficient motivation for the agent to comply with the rules.

This union of efficiency and inefficiency is crucial to generating wholeheartedness. To strive for maximum efficiency, without restriction on means, would make the task into work and the activity a process; failures to finish or to win would be nothing more than failures. On the other hand, to accept inefficiency without then pursuing efficiency given those constraints would be to repudiate the value of the goal altogether: pointless difficulty. Either of these “pure” strategies—unalloyed efficiency or inefficiency—alienates us from the activity. Only if we unify efficiency and inefficiency do we affirm that our activity is worth engaging in for its own sake—a goal that is worth working hard for but the pursuit of which is also valuable in itself.

Although rules and mechanics both take the form of imperatives, they nonetheless underscore another feature of athletic performance, namely, its fundamental autonomy. When we play sports, we engage in a process of accepting or affirming a body of rules that we occasionally collaboratively revise as we go. The rules are autonomous in the sense that we freely affirm and write them ourselves. Having adopted a body of rules, the mechanics are discovered, not invented. Yet they remain autonomous because the process of discovery engages our practical reasoning and deliberation through working hypotheses that we propose, test, and revise. Thus, through its imperatives, sport unifies the autonomy of authorship with the autonomy of practical reasoning.

Rules and mechanics are binary and discrete: any directive that is a rule is not an aspect of technique, and vice versa. Not so competencies and skills; these are on a continuum since skills are merely developed competencies. This is because, whereas rules and mechanics are directives, competencies and skills are performances. Consequently, skills are asymptotic. No one ever completely masters a skill such that further improvement is impossible. Skills are always aspirational.

Yet skills have a very different phenomenology before and after one masters them. Looking backward at what we have already mastered, they seem easy and unified, such that it would be embarrassing or worse to fail to do what they call for. Hence LeBron James might breezily describe a layup with a ball fake and left-handed dunk. It is harder to do wrong than right.Footnote ¹⁵ Looking forward, however, skills are hard: first because they are both asymptotic and aspirational, and hence one can always get a glimpse of what one should be doing better before one is able to make one’s body do it and, second, because mastering the mechanics requires doing many things at once. When T focuses on angling her racquet right for the topspin backhand, she neglects to shift her weight; when she sets her mind on that, she bends at the waist; when she sets her mind on that, she takes her eye off the ball. Forward-looking mechanics is not hard simply because it is demanding, but because it demands a complicated convergence of unnatural bodily movements, realizing each without neglecting any.

By contrast, once mastered, skills become second nature, ceasing to be the object of planning and critical reflection. In prospect, mechanics require focus, and they are not simply bodily motions. As LeBron shows, mechanics occur at multiple levels: the individual move or shot; the larger game element of which it is a part; the strategic level of designing plays, points, and a larger game plan given everyone’s strengths and weaknesses.

Finally, a word about positions or roles. The metaskills of position involve self-awareness relative to the positioning and capacities of others. Soccer players learn to space themselves out by learning to trust their teammates and recognizing where it would be useful to be, given what others are doing. These are skills of planning and sociability, of understanding one’s own and others’ capacities and limitations.

In sum, athletic performance requires that we pursue a goal inefficiently by setting our mind and body to develop competencies into skills and by mastering the mechanics that constitute our best current theory of how to be efficient in this inefficiency given our role or position and those of other participants. Whereas compliance with rules is binary, mastery of mechanics is asymptotic and can be a lifelong struggle. Yet it is precisely this combination of rules and mechanics that demands bodily conformity and engages our autonomy in both authorship and deliberation.

5. The sporting life

Understanding moral performance as athletic performance, I shall argue, avoids the quantitative model of moral demand and improves our picture of what makes morality hard in the ways it is. On an athletic model, moral demand is not uniform or alienating, and portrays moral performance as embodied skill development rather than merely overcoming akrasia to click “donate” enough times.

If morality has a parallel structure to sports, then it must, first, have constitutive rules that (i) set a goal and (ii) restrict the means through which we may pursue that goal. Our principal ethical theories take precisely this form. Most obviously, contemporary two-level or Harean Act Consequentialisms (i) set the goal of maximizing the good, but (ii) require that we do so without ever acting on first-order good-maximizing intentions.Footnote ¹⁶ Rule Consequentialism by definition has a similar structure.Footnote ¹⁷ Kant, for his part, gives us the daunting task of (i) cultivating a “Good Will,” one that unifies the two compulsory ends of one’s own perfection and others’ happiness, yet requires that we do this (ii) without using humanity as a mere means, and while acting only on maxims that could at the same time be universal laws.Footnote ¹⁸ And virtue theories typically distinguish between the questions of why something is a virtue, e.g., because of its connection to flourishing,Footnote ¹⁹ and what it calls upon us to do, which implies that virtuous action subserves values without exhorting us directly to promote them. In short, each theory sets a goal but restricts the means we may use to pursue it.

I do not claim that these theories must be seen this way, or still less that every ethical theory has this structure. But our main theories plainly do have this structure, and I am suggesting that this structure is a clue not just to their theoretic attractiveness but to how we can live by them and why we would want to. In fact, it is precisely Classical (Act-)Utilitarianism’s lack of such a structure that is the basis of all the most fatal objections to it, since those come down to the pathologies of unalloyed efficiency rules.Footnote ²⁰ The same holds in reverse for the (now widely rejected) strictly deontological Kantianism that focuses only on constraint while ignoring the compulsory ends and the agency that becomes possible by pursuing them subject to constraints.Footnote ²¹ Yet although our principal ethical theories unify efficiency and inefficiency in this way, the philosophers who apply and develop these theories typically neglect it, largely because they focus on akrasia and quantitative demand rather than embodied skill as our principal motivational problems. As a result, we get moral imperatives without any understanding of their placement on a skills progression and often without seeing their point. We are often told that we participate in oppression or are standing idly by as millions die, but receive no counsel on what steps we can take to turn ourselves into the kinds of people who could help to efficiently alleviate these wrongs over time. A right action is posited whether or not we have the skill set to perform it; failure is chalked up to mere akrasia, which leads us to blame ourselves rather than devise a mechanics.

By contrast, athletic demand supports a better understanding of moral agency and of our ability to enhance moral performance over the medium- to long-term because athletic demand is about discovering and building our embodied capacities to perform. We become better not by just deciding to finally hit the ball with topspin, as if we’d been holding out all this time or no one had told us it was required, but by practicing. Navigating Sexual Harassment requires S to display a kind of gracefulness, communicating unacceptability in a way that does not spur B to lash out at C, while deferring to how C wants to handle this. There is no amount of money S can donate or button S can click to make the problem go away.

When we face situations like Sexual Harassment, we cannot—literally cannot, except perhaps by sheer luck—succeed without having practiced conforming our body to the component demands over time. Day in and day out we need to have been practicing a kind of nonservile deference toward the boss, such that directives are followed but the bounds of the boss’s authority are mutually acknowledged, and our moral and legal equality gently and regularly reaffirmed. At least sometimes, we need to have made this explicit, articulated a rough mechanics, so that our daily practice remained more or less on target. With respect to coworkers, we defer to their expertise and role but not in the sense of accepting directives as if from authority. We look them in the eye during conversations, avoid sexualizing or overly personalizing daily interactions, and try to refrain from smiling or laughing along with coworkers who breach these constraints. These can be hard things to do while we are learning them. Occasionally people offer coaching in the form of correction—itself a learned skill—and if we are able to accept this coaching, we incorporate it into our mechanics so that we perform better over time. We play a position or role at work, though the mechanics of each workplace will differ based on the nature of the work and other features. Different office cultures may provide distinct but equally good paths to success for the team as a whole and for individuals on it. There is no reason to believe that we can succeed in this context without doing numerous repetitions of basic bodily movements, including practicing standing up to the boss or looking coworkers in the eye or affirming their contributions in meetings or enabling more vulnerable workers to evade risk and exploitation even as they and we work to reduce their vulnerability. These are not inborn talents or instantaneous decisions we make, but embodied skills. Accomplishing them has something to do with moral motivation, obviously, but overcoming akrasia—as if we were resisting the temptation to exploit or harass—is typically not the relevant site of that motivation. The problem of moral motivation in Sexual Harassment is about whether we have the muscle memory to get a highly complex maneuver right with a lot on the line.

It might be wondered where the inefficiency is: Isn’t S trying to most efficiently rescue C without getting them both fired? An obvious point is that trying to act without getting them both fired is already a constraint on efficiency. This may seem too quick, but the point is, we see our actions as maximizing efficiency only because we have so internalized constraints on efficiency that we do not even count the more efficient alternatives as options. It might be more efficient for S to physically attack B. Even more efficient, from S’s individual perspective, might be to run away and let C deal with it alone. But the ethical challenge is to defend the vulnerable in a way that values each, even the aggressor, and both avoids escalation and makes B less likely to repeat this behavior in the future. The multiplicity of goals and constraints ensures inefficiency.

Within these constraints we can roughly describe an action that would display consummate skill: to protect C in a way that helps B see himself from others’ perspective and understand how his behavior harms his own interests as well as others’, thereby not only interrupting the current instance of sexual harassment but preventing its happening again, while helping B become a contributor to team efforts rather than a liability. Engineering this outcome is not a capacity we are born with and it cannot be accomplished by force of will alone. Nor is it possible to codify rules that are granular enough to capture the required actions. Without a mechanics, and the antecedent physical practice required to hone it, the idea that morality is in any serious way “action-guiding” is pie in the sky.

6. Rule books

In addition to the motivational and competition objections aired at the outset, ethics raises an epistemic challenge that sports typically do not because our knowledge of ethical rules is both contested and stunted, inasmuch as even the best worked-out theories and schools of thought are riven by disagreement and lack the detailed canonical rules that exist for even uncomplicated pastimes like touch football. Put otherwise: if ethics is a sport, we have no idea what sport it is. But to make matters worse, if we could know the rules with sport’s level of precision, something would be amiss, because then ethics would be a system of rules that any precocious child could become expert in, and such a model of ethics is absurd (Annas Reference Annas2011, 33–34). The epistemic challenge is thus a dilemma: ethics can’t be a sport because we don’t know the rules, but if we knew the rules then what we were doing wouldn’t be ethics.

The second horn—the precocious child problem—mischaracterizes the “rule book” idea in two crucial ways. The first is that it conflates rule books with instruction manuals. Put in our terms, it imagines that the rule book could cover not just rules but mechanics.Footnote ²² This is not how rule books work. The rules of tennis will not help T with her topspin backhand, even though it is because of the rules that a topspin backhand is possible. Nor is it clear why we should think that young people cannot be moral exemplars in their own right. The activists of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Sunrise Movement, and the March for our Lives are younger than most ethicists, but we have a lot to learn from them about how to comport ourselves in daily life, which ends to pursue, and how to become active. Perhaps they are “phenoms” who have discovered a new technique that transcends our previous best theory of the game. Or perhaps they are showing us that we have been cheating so long and so successfully that we conveniently forgot that what we were doing was against the rules.

The first horn of the epistemic dilemma, though, still stands. If ethics is a sport, we don’t know what sport it is. If we cannot know what sport we are supposed to be playing, we can’t play. Yet we can be ethical. So ethics is not a sport.

In response, it is true that there is no canonical rule book or authoritative governing body. So we are left to figure out, experimentally and cooperatively and sometimes just by deciding, what the rules are. The people we tend to look to for coaching—clergy, parents, ethicists, even other members of “the community of the virtuous”Footnote ²³—are at best highly fallible. In other words, it is clear that ethics is not a highly formalized professional sport with a canonical rule book and authoritative governance structure. But neither are most of the games or sports we play in daily life. In most cases, we are simultaneously players and gamewrights: we revise and rewrite rules as we play in order to achieve a better fit between rules and competencies; we optimize difficulty so that the game remains challenging enough to be continuously enjoyable, while posing for us only demands that we have some hope of mastering. Although it’s rare to make up a new sport out of whole cloth, it’s also rare that we follow canonical rule books to the letter. Ethics is the same in both respects. The athletic model of ethical performance should not be taken to imply that ethics is a professional sport.Footnote ²⁴

7. Playing by the rules

I have already discussed some ways that the athletic model helps us to understand ethical response in cases like Sexual Harassment. I would just reemphasize that this case belies standard models of moral performance, which focus on the quantity of demand and the psychological problem of compliance, as against the embodied skills required and the kinesiological problem of performance. What S needs is not a greater quantity of ethical output. Let S be a moral saint; alas, because S has been so busy clicking “Donate,” or maximizing earnings so as to give them to efficacious charities, S lacks the skills needed to support C. Without the relevant moral skills, S is going to choke.

As for Stepping Lightly, in a grossly unjust world plunging into climate chaos, G’s predicament is analogous to that which LeBron James confronts when down 3-1 against Golden State. Who wouldn’t love to find a magic bullet and win it all in an instant? But G has to work with others to enhance everyone’s skills—upping G’s game requires enabling others to up their games. G needs to work with others to set rules that all will follow, and a revised mechanics to implement those rules. Individually, G might prioritize among commitments and, as much as possible, drop those that contravene provisional rules. Rules are likely to evolve as more people are brought on board. Actions that are pointless when done alone might be essential to a team effort. Some acts that are individually pointless might also signal G’s willingness to coordinate. There will be instances of akrasia here, but, by and large, for most of us I suspect, the greater challenges are not willingness to sacrifice, but feeling like we are on a team that has a game plan, and figuring out how to live green in a way that fosters rather than undermines our other responsibilities, including family and work.

Morality pervades each of these zones of activity by shaping how we may go about living in each zone: how we rear our children, what work we do and how we do it, how and what we eat, and so on. We need not do these things for moral reasons, but we strive to do them morally. The various zones of activity in daily life constrain and shape one another by making demands of their own: to be a better parent, friend, colleague, neighbor; a more reliable advocate against workplace sexual harassment; an exemplar of better choices but not a scold or a downer. To become expert at meeting variegated demands is a challenging embodied metaskill requiring practical reason, focus, and coordination. Normally we cannot (without wronging others) simply abandon one thing to pursue the others, any more than LeBron James can win the championship by taking a shot every time he has the ball.

While morality’s instantaneous clutch performance demands continually push us to improve our execution, the limits of our skills and capacities at any given moment limit just how much we can reasonably hope to accomplish, or how well; a beginner simply cannot hit a topspin backhand, and trying will lead to farce, not to hitting a winner. Similarly, well intentioned but naïve “white knights” who indulge fantasies of rescue in cases like Sexual Harassment risk embarrassment or worse. They need to learn how to play a productive role in a broader team effort that freezes out the undesirable behavior by creating an environment where it cannot succeed and seems pointless even to those who might otherwise be tempted to try it. But in the absence of, or before they have accomplished, that collective success, those who hope to respond adequately to Sexual Harassment-style cases need to have put in the practice hours of looking people in the eye and holding their ground against glaring bullies, recognizing exploitation and vulnerability, nonservile deference, quotidian egalitarianism, and so on. And these are embodied skills that we improve by practicing, not by merely deciding they are the right thing to do. At least after the very earliest stages of life, the demands we are striving to meet do not involve ethical core competencies—signing checks or refraining from unwanted touch—but the asymptotic improvement of skills according to a provisional mechanics.

The athletic model also amplifies the sociality of ethics.Footnote ²⁵ Sports are learned from others at the outset and played cooperatively with others throughout life. Even in competitive sports, games go well only if everyone puts cooperation in the shared activity ahead of coming out on top. In team sports, individual rationality just is team reasoning: doing what would be useful for me to be doing right now. And solo sports are deeply communal; one is tempted to say there can no more be a “private sport” than a private language. Through iterations of instruction, training, acceptance, and execution, the athlete becomes a member of a community—of basketball players, or mountain climbers, or whatever. Her aspirations are shaped by what others have done and aspire to do. What counts as an impressive feat depends in part on what her peers and idols have managed to do or feel compelled to try.Footnote ²⁶ In the athletic community, her behavior speaks louder than her words, and determines her stature in the community. If she ceases to do what’s required to periodically participate in the sport, she will cease to be a member of the community. Her credibility as a basketball player or climber depends on her continued actions and how they are received by others. Morality shares this communal structure: meeting its demands is a team enterprise, not an individual one, and a community of accountability is of the essence of what it is to understand oneself as a moral agent, and to be one.Footnote ²⁷

In addition to illustrating the social character of morality, this point also suggests why we are all at risk of hypocrisy. Like T working at her backhand, we all recognize what it would be like to better embody the values we espouse. Hypocrisy of a sort may be essential to morality, then, since if we did not fall short of our values, those values would evidently not be challenging us at all. I can easily meet the demands of reciprocity that I hold my children to; by now, these are core competencies. It’s harder to meet the demands of reciprocity that I myself aspire to. And so it should be. As skill levels rise, so do aspirations; by definition, aspirations are at least slightly beyond what we have hitherto accomplished. In other words, the mechanics of moral agency are asymptotic: no matter how good we get, the distance we’ve traveled seems easy in retrospect and the distance ahead stretches out into infinity. To fail to be hypocritical in this way would be to suffer from the delusion of perfection. It’s not just that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue”; it’s that the “hypocrisy” of the virtuous is a virtue.

Being ethical, then, does not just require knowing the rules and having the mental strength to overcome the temptation to defy them. Being ethical also challenges us to master the mechanics, honing and maintaining embodied skills. Philosophical ethics tends to distort this by portraying moral demand in quantitative terms: a monotony of repeated core competencies such as sorting envelopes and writing checks, or skills that are so easily mastered, like wading into a shallow pond, as to be barely above the level of competencies. A life composed of such actions would be deeply alienating. But lived morality is nothing like this.

8. Bodies and skills

Before concluding, I need to address an objection about any ethics that focuses on bodily comportment. The bodies of disempowered people and those with marginalized or stigmatized identities are already excessively policed. For instance, even in environments where sexual harassment is not rampant, women’s bodies tend to be more regulated and more quickly judged than men’s. Similarly, members of racial minorities are often wrongly and prejudicially perceived as aggressive or threatening by scared white people. In a racist and sexist environment, an ethic that emphasizes bodily performance is bound to turn out badly for women and racial minorities, and moreover to further stigmatize those with disabilities.Footnote ²⁸

In reply, I want to emphasize two aspects of the thesis that ethical performance is a form of athletic performance. The first is that there is no single correct mechanics that everyone is required to adopt. As in sports, people with different body types (and intellectual/cognitive types) need to do different things in order to achieve similar results. Or the results that they achieve may be significantly different. This is evident in the differences between divisions within, say, one tennis tournament: singles, doubles, men’s, women’s, junior, senior, wheelchair, and so on. Flexibility of this sort is no more necessary on the athletic model than on any other model of ethics, but the current model provides a way of thinking about moral variability across difference. This flexibility requirement is obvious for virtue theories and those that emphasize relationships, where uniformity is not even an aspiration of the theory. But even a theory like classical utilitarianism, which purports to have a univocal rule for right action, has to modulate that rule in practice for which actions are actually open to someone, and that person’s probability of success. And contemporary utilitarianism, which distinguishes between the criterion of right action and the method of moral reasoning in practice, will require even more flexibility.

Ethical rules on the current picture may be much more detailed, contextual, and revisable than is typically assumed when we have in mind the single overarching rule of Kantianism or utilitarianism. At the same time, the distinction between rules and mechanics shows that the rules are not so granular as to prescribe every act in detail.

The second feature of the athletic model that responds to the objection from different body types is that the athletic model helps to reveal, rather than hide, the way that ethical systems in practice are collectively created and performed, and that all persons are players—coequal participants—rather than playthings or equipment. Consequently, white men, say, who see themselves as unmarked by race, gender, dis/ability, and so on, and hence do not see their role in enforcing social norms around bodily comportment, will have less support from the athletic model of ethics than from many others because this model encourages us to think of ourselves as a team, our fates tied together. And insofar as this supposedly unmarked individual’s behavior is making it harder for others to succeed, that problem is on him, not on them. His behavior may be doing this, whether or not he realizes it, quite apart from his intentions, and even if he is blaming someone else for the problem.Footnote ²⁹ That ethics addresses bodily comportment, not solely intentions, exposes rather than hides this problem, and thus better enables us to solve it together.

9. Conclusion

I have argued that moral performance is a kind of athletic performance, and that the rule structure of ethics makes it so by unifying the inefficiency of rules with the efficiency of mechanics. The variegated embodied demands of morality, combined with our capacity to envision what it would be like to be more skillful than we are, can explain the constant feeling that the demands of ethics outstrip our willingness or capacity to be ethical. We can see skill developments that as yet exceed our grasp, and we may well be frustrated that we cannot yet embody those skills. This is to be expected; the feeling that there is more we could be doing will never leave us, but only asymptote out to infinity. But this account also reminds us how far our skills have already developed. Moral improvement, individual and collective, seems easy in retrospect, which makes us feel insincere when we see what we have not yet mastered and cannot quite articulate why not. But retrospective ease does not mean it was easy at the time, which is a good reminder that we have no reason to think it should be easy going forward.