Moral Antirealism, Internalism,and Sport

level neither our descriptions nor our normative judgments can make intelligible 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 normative entities that Moore singled out for praise—the appreciation of beauty—was a value cherished by his cherished Bloomsbury friends. What this should immediately 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 conviction 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 incompatibility 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 objective pretensions—not only is better fitted to an antirealist rendering but also implies MORGAN 170 Moral Antirealism, Internalism, and Sport 171 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 Sport To 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 approximations 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 normative 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 arguments 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 wildeyed 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 movement 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 insisting 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 MORGAN170 Moral Antirealism, Internalism, and Sport 171 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 comfortable 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 re