Moral Reasoning in the Context of Sport

Moral Reasoning in the Context of Sport

David Light Shields & Brenda Light Bredemeier,

Co-Directors

The Center for Sport, Character & Culture

The University of Notre Dame

What I want to talk about today is a phenomena that we call, "game reasoning." At its core, game reasoning is simply moral reasoning that occurs in the context of competitive sports, and perhaps elsewhere as well. But before we get specifically to the theme of game reasoning, I would like to back up and set the stage a bit.

As Kohlberg understood it, moral reasoning exhibited the property of "structural wholeness." According to this tenet of his theory, the organizational principles or structures of moral reasoning remained, by and large, consist across a wide range of specific moral content areas. In recent years, of course, this notion of structural wholeness has been – if not entirely abandoned – at least scaled back considerably. Specific developmental trajectories are now postulated for such particular moral issues as distributive justice, understandings of forgiveness and reconciliation, understandings of the moral obligations of friendship, understandings of civil liberties and civil rights, and so on.

Similarly, context was not originally thought to play much of a role in the formation of moral judgment, but it, too, in recent years, has been the topic of substantial theorizing and empirical research, particularly by those who follow a domain approach to the development of social cognition.

The result of these shifts toward a more detailed study of issue-specific and context-specific moral reasoning is a developmental psychology that is permeated by a rather bewildering array of diversity and variation. Whether and how development in one narrow slice of morality relates to development in other areas remains largely ambiguous. What has remained, for many of us, is a firm belief in the necessity of postulating an interpreting, meaning-making subject and a patterned environment, neither of which can be reduced to the other.

When we began our investigation of moral reasoning within the context of sport, the Kohlbergian assumption of structural wholeness was still the prevailing conviction among many who worked within the structural developmental approach to moral development. We assumed that there was such a thing as "moral" reasoning and that, with a few notable exceptions, it remained relatively stable across diverse contents and contexts. But we also noted that in the philosophical and social science literature on play, games, and sport it was commonplace to discuss these activities as somehow "set apart" from everyday life. The noted philosopher Huizinga (1955), for example, described play as "a stepping out of ‘real life’ into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own" (p. 8). Handelman (1977), an anthropologist, wrote that entry into the play realm requires "a radical transformation in cognition and perception" (p. 186). Schmitz (1976), a sociologist, similarly suggested that play transfers participants into a world with new forms of space, time, and behavior, "delivering its own values in and for itself" (p. 26).

If entry into play and sport involves such significant cognitive and affective adjustments, then we might anticipate that there will be clear delimiters of the experience, markers of the experiential boundaries. And, indeed, anthropologists, such as Firth (1973), have documented rituals and conventions that serve to mark off the spacial and temporal boundaries of play and sport; these rituals and conventions not only designate special space and time, they symbolically function to reconstitute people into players and players back into people.

In light of this literature, when we became interested in the moral dynamics of sport and how sport may or may not influence the moral development and reasoning of its participants, we thought it would be valuable to construct sport-specific moral dilemmas to use alongside standard ones. And so we did. To do so, we used Norma Haan’s (1978; Haan, Aerts & Cooper, 1985) theory of moral development, which may be less familiar to many of you than Kohlberg’s better known theory. Though some of the differences in perspective between Kohlberg and Haan are significant, their theories have clear overlaps. They each used moral dilemmas as an assessment methodology and the main trajectory of their developmental theories were sufficiently similar that I don’t think we need to spend time here elaborating on their differences. Like Kohlberg, Haan hypothesized three main levels of development that move from a more egocentric orientation, through a middle level that is more conventional or conforming in its orientation, to a mature level in which fairness is a guiding principle.

So we developed a set of sport dilemmas similar to the standard moral dilemmas used in the Haanian interview. We then administered both our new sport dilemmas and the standard ones to male and female basketball players and nonathletes at the collegiate and high school level (Bredemeier & Shields, 1986). One finding of note, tangential to the present discussion, is that among the 50 college students, the nonathletes had significantly more mature moral reasoning than did the basketball players, a finding that held across both types of dilemmas. More relevant to our present discussion, we found that reasoning about the sport dilemmas was significantly below that of the reasoning about the standard dilemmas. This held for both athletes and nonathletes, for males and for females, and for both the college and high school samples. We did find, however, that the gap between sport and everyday life moral reasoning, the amount of divergence between them, was greater for the athletes than the nonathletes.

Our findings seemed congruent with the literature, discussed a moment ago, that sport is somehow "set apart" from everyday life. If entry into sport involves a transformation of cognition and affect, then it is reasonable to hypothesize that moral reasoning undergoes some change in its underlying structure when one moves from general life into sport. The divergence in moral reasoning scores that we found at least partially supports this hypothesis. We labeled the type of moral reasoning that occurs in sport "game reasoning."

We also thought our findings were congruent with informal observation. Sport commentators often contrast the on-field behavior of athletes to their off-field behavior. A football player, for example, may be described as mean and nasty on the football field, but gentle and kind in everyday life. Moreover, athletes themselves often make this same distinction. For example, former heavyweight boxing champion, Larry Holmes, once said in an interview that before he enters the ring, "I have to change, I have to leave the goodness out and bring all the bad in, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." In an interview that we did with Ron Rivera, who played with the Chicago Bears, he described a similar transformation. In talking about his everyday personality, he described himself as typically soft-spoken, considerate, and friendly. But when asked to describe the on-field Ron, he replied, "He’s totally opposite from me. ...He’s a madman. ...No matter what happens, he hits people. He’s a guy with no regard for the human body."

I find that quote fascinating. Rivera begins by asserting a radical dualistic view of his own persona, objectifying and distancing the athletic self from what he perceives to be his real self. Speaking of the athletic self: "He’s totally opposite from me. ...He’s a madman..." This sounds very much like the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Larry Holmes.

I suspect that many of you may question the moral legitimacy of the reasoning transformations implied in these quotes. But my point right now is that it is a commonplace experience in the world of sport to alter the way one typically thinks and feels about moral issues. Perhaps Holmes and Rivera represent somewhat extreme cases, though I don’t think they are all that atypical. The reality is that many actions that may be seen as totally illegitimate in everyday life–such as inflicting pain on another human being–may be accepted and even embraced as a routine part of some sports.

To get a better idea of what was happening with moral reasoning in sport, we reanalyzed our data, coding each coherent moral thought for its moral level and identifying the percentages of reasoning at each level. This analysis revealed that the reasoning about sport dilemmas had a much higher proportion of egocentric reasoning than did parallel reasoning about the standard dilemmas.

We then took one more step. To better understand this change, to better understand this shift toward more egocentric patterns of moral thinking in sport, we conducted a qualitative study in which we asked athletes specifically about the differences between their thinking about moral issues in sport and in other areas of their life. In these interviews, we focused specifically on the issue of aggression because of its clear moral implications, and we interviewed athletes immediately following a game so as to maximize the likelihood of tapping the forms of reasoning actually used during competition.

What we found is that many athletes, certainly not all, saw sport as a time of letting go of everyday life concerns, including, at least to a limited extent, moral concerns. They wanted to throw themselves into the sport experience, thinking only about their own interest, and perhaps that of their team. This fits the description of sport provided by Ennis (1976) who describes sport as an "institution of release." It is a sphere of activity that is not only "set aside" spacially and temporally from everyday life, it "sets aside" or releases the concerns of everyday life. Indeed, part of the appeal of sport is its relative freedom from daily concerns. That "moral release" theme recurred in many of our interviews. For example, one athlete put it this way:

In sports you can do what you want. In life it’s more restricted. The pressure is different in sports and life. It’s harder to make decisions in life because there are so many people to think about, different people to worry about. In sports you’re free to think about yourself.

For this athlete, and for many others we interviewed, sport released them from the everyday obligation to think of others.

There are a number of special conditions present in the sport context that help create this sphere of freedom and release. Sport is a very unique context that has a number of atypical features that jointly function to create its "set aside" character. First, action is oriented toward an artificial, scarce goal, namely winning. Second, both the goal (winning) and the actions allowed (such as dribbling in basketball or soccer) have no particular value or meaning apart from the sport context. Sport is tethered to play, and, in itself, is nonserious and nonconsequential. Third, the game relevant interests of the participants are, by definition, in zero-sum opposition. If one party obtains the goal, by necessity the other party or parties do not. Fourth, and this is critical, the actions that comprise sport are rule-governed and those rules have been carefully designed to both equalize opportunity and minimize risk. One could say, perhaps, that they are based on the moral concepts of justice and care! Finally, at least in formal, organized sport, action is continually and externally monitored to insure a reasonable level of conformity to the equalizing and protective rule structure.

All of these features of sport, working together, allow the sport participant to focus narrowly on performance and largely set aside other concerns. Egocentrism is allowed because the goal has no intrinsic value. It is allowed because the moral issues of fairness and protection are already presupposed. It is allowed because moral authority is, by design, externalized and placed in the hands of coaches and officials.

Of course, moral issues do arise in sport and they actually arise quite frequently. Whether one chooses to use pain as a tactical strategy, and to what degree, is a moral decision. How strictly one wants to interpret the rules is a moral decision; when and how much to use techniques of psychological distraction on opponents is a moral decision, and so on. Often, such moral issues are subtly negotiated among the players in virtually ever game.

We call the form of moral exchange that occurs in sport, "bracketed morality" (Bredemeier & Shields, 1986a, 1986b; Shields & Bredemeier, 1984, 1995). It is morality that in some important ways is "bracketed" off from everyday life. At its best, "bracketed morality" is simply a playful deviation from everyday life with no real world consequences. In a very real sense, people "play" at egocentrism. In such cases, we view it as entirely appropriate and legitimate.

We used the term bracketed to connote two points. First, as I have been suggesting, the moral exchange that occurs in sport is different from that of daily life. Mature moral action in most spheres of life is marked by attention to the need to equalize the obligations and benefits in one’s various relationships. Sport, on the other hand, is characterized by a greater degree of personal freedom, and a lessening of such relational responsibility. Focus on self-interest is not only allowed in sport, it is presupposed. As a consequence, egocentric moral thinking characterizes much of the moral exchange in sport. Because of the unique features of sport described earlier, this egocentrism is viewed as legitimate by all parties involved (or at least nearly all) and by most observers.

But not all action supportive of self-interest is morally appropriate, even in sport. Sport may allow for a greater degree of freedom, but it is not pure moral anarchy. That is the second point. The term bracketed still connotes connection. Bracketed morality is a form of moral action that is nested within a broader, more encompassing morality–the morality of everyday life. It is set apart by its relative leniency, yet it remains connected to the basic presuppositions of morality.

The critical and philosophical question is just how free is a person to neglect standard moral concerns while playing sport. Just how lenient and elastic is this morality? I am not going to attempt a complete answer to that question, but would like to offer one observation. The egocentrism of bracketed morality, the focus on self-interest, the relative moral freedom of sport, presupposes the special conditions of sport, conditions that are designed to guarantee initial conditions of fairness, on-going safeguards of equal opportunity, and reasonable protections of physical well-being. When the freedom associated with bracketed morality is used to undermine these conditions, bracketed morality ceases to be a nonserious and playful deviation from the morality of everyday life and loses its legitimacy.

And in the context of sport, this happens all too frequently. Since sport is known for its penchant for short aphorisms and cliches, let me adapt one here: If you give sport participants a moral inch, they’ll take a mile! Whether we’re talking about blatant cheating, aggression, or verbal abuse, we all know the stories. Now, lest I be misunderstood, let me quickly add that I don’t think athletes are some breed apart from the rest of us. Something else must be going on here. Briefly, what I think is going on is that contemporary sport is rarely just sport. It is business. It is politics. It is entertainment. And so on. As a result, sport participants experience sport less as play than as an opportunity to pursue goals with real world consequences.

Sport is an odd blending of play and work, of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, of "it’s just a game," and, "life’s a game." Under these conflicting tensions and pulls, is it really surprising that a moral leniency that is legitimated, in part, by the playful, nonserious nature of sport is stretched beyond its appropriate bounds? One can hide seriousness under the cloak of play. The egocentrism of "the game" provides an easy rationalization of all manner of moral distortion.

Let me conclude by offering four brief comments on the continuing significance of our game reasoning research. As I mentioned, we initially developed our theory at a time when moral reasoning was thought to be largely consistent across issues and contexts. At that time, it was easy to point out a contrast between game reasoning and general "moral reasoning." Today, it seems one pole of that contrast is unavailable. And, yet, it still seems as though people in the world of sport experience what they themselves perceive as a disjunct between sport and everyday life. Recall the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde comment of Larry Holmes. Athletes often perceive themselves in morally dualistic terms. Understanding this perception and its implications continues, I believe, to be important.

A second point has to do with the role of sport in the moral and social development of kids. At the University of Notre Dame we have started a new center, called the "Center for Sport, Character and Culture." One of our primary goals is to design sport programs that foster positive character development. In this task, we share a goal for sport involvement with millions of parents who believe, perhaps naively, that their children’s participation in sport programs is a good thing. "Sport builds character," is the cultural adage. As researchers, we believe that sport does no such thing. At least not automatically. If sport is to be of any positive benefit, from a moral standpoint, then deliberate effort and planning need to occur. And that effort and planning needs to be informed by an understanding of the real moral dynamics that characterize sport experience. We hope that the theory of game reasoning can help in this regard.

A third point has to do with the implicit moral contract of different social contexts. Consistent with the work of Thorkildsen (1989), we believe different social contexts have implicit moral contracts that influence the moral interpretations and judgments of participants. Perhaps most fundamentally, competitive contexts differ from contexts with other forms of social interdependence. But even within the realm of sport, different sports have different traditions and cultures that lead to variations on the implicit moral contracts. We need to better understand how these contextual variations influence moral judgment, and examine ways that we might modify the moral culture associated with different social practices.

My fourth and final point is that sport is a highly valued cultural institution and that the language and symbols of sport are readily transported into many other spheres of life. Politicians talk about level playing fields; business people talk about being a "team player;" and so on. Linguists tell us that symbols evoke imagery that conveys a depth of meaning unavailable through discursive language. I suspect, and I have no empirical evidence to demonstrate the truth of this suspicion, that one reason for the popularity of sport metaphors is because they confer on the dialog a moral latitude. By implicitly comparing politics or business, for example, to sport via the metaphor, the egocentric morality of sport comes along, as it were, in the metaphor’s baggage. If politics is a game, then game reasoning is appropriate in politics. The problem, of course, is that metaphors are always double-sided. They both reveal and conceal. They highlight or reveal similarities between the context that serves as the origin of the metaphor (in this case, sport) and the new context. But they conceal what may turn out to be important differences in the contexts. In this case, what the sport metaphor may conceal is that the legitimating conditions of game reasoning are often absent in the new context where the sport metaphor is used. To continue our example with politics, the sport metaphor hides the fact that there never was and never will be equalized conditions or effective omnipresent external regulation. It is our hope that a better understanding of game reasoning can lead to a more critical understanding of how sport is used and misused in the broader culture.

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