Determining the moral course of action has proven to be an admittedly difficult task in countless situations. It’s rare that we actually achieve consensus. This, in part, keeps philosophers in business. And it gets better (or, is it worse?) as we move to the obvious follow-up question: “Why should I be moral in the first place?” And, for our purposes here: “Why should I play the game ethically?”
It turns out this question was answered by Socrates over 2000 years ago. Though it comes in the form: Do the right (i.e. good) thing for its own sake. This tends to leave many wanting more. So we’ll save that tidbit for the end. We will first look at the extrinsic value of doing good, thus answering the rhetorical question likely looming: “What’s in it for me?”
Athletes deal with a multitude of stimuli on a second-to-second basis, involving everything from their own sport-specific fundamentals to an awareness of the other team’s actions, where the ball is going, what play should be run, etc. Any athlete can attend to only a finite fraction of those cues. This is especially true of the youth athlete who not only has a still-forming brain but, as a relative novice to the game, can thus be easily distracted. Think not just of the Little League outfielder picking flowers mid-game, but even the high school star who still experiences novelties in each game and who misses out on relevant cues, be they internal or external, that could otherwise help him succeed.
A fascinating study shows just how much the novice athlete visually attends to in the course of a competition. An eye-tracking device which allows researchers to detect the location of a subject’s gaze shows that novice hockey goalies and tennis players focus on considerably more stimuli than their more experienced counterparts. Thus, with the novice constantly honing in on unnecessary cues, they are bound to make more errors. And that’s just in regards to the visual cues.
The short story: there’s a lot to attend to, be it external visual cues or internal mental ones. Not to mention the self-awareness of the young athlete worried about making a mistake, what mom and dad are thinking, or whether he looks cool in front of the girls who are watching.
With all that in mind, imagine being able to extract an entire subset of cues from their mental palate: those actions deemed unethical and unsportsmanlike. No longer do they consider trying to break a rule without being detected, or cheap-shot another player, taunt or fight or any other similarly unethical actions available to them. In removing an entire subset of possibilities, this frees him up to do the thing he’s there to do: play the game to the best of his abilities. To play the game ethically, and thus, well.
We don’t need a laboratory to test this as we have a live-time experiment currently being conducted. USA Hockey and the NHL have begun to crack down on fighting by assigning more serious penalties to players who fight. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in “enforcers”—those who focus more on fighting—changing their focus in order to improve the remainder of their game. New Jersey Devils’ enforcer Cam Janssen, for example, diverted his focus away from fighting and scored as many goals in 22 games as he did in his previous 312 games. In discussing his explicit decision to focus less on fighting, Janssen lists his new priorities: forechecking, playing the team’s system, handling the puck, behavior in the locker room—all things fundamental to playing hockey well.
In short: by focusing on playing the game ethically—i.e. good—the athlete performs better (i.e. more “good”).
The more philosophically inclined, I imagine, will have a simpler answer, based on the intrinsic value of behaving ethically:
Good is good.
To behave ethically is to behave well: to behave “good.” And good is, by definition, good, otherwise it would be a vacuous concept—imagine, instead, that doing good was actually not good. This defense goes all the way back to Socrates who, through the course of an extensive dialogue of Plato’s, defends the position that behaving justly is intrinsically good.
Think of loving someone or being loved. Of a dear friendship. These things are good in and of themselves. They’re not good in order that you get something of extrinsic value out of them (though you often do). Likewise with playing the game ethically.
We can fast-forward to the present day. We now realized that the science meets out this “good is good” foundation. As Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer writes, “Asking, ‘Why should we be moral?’ is like asking ‘Why should we be hungry?’…It is as much a part of human nature to be moral as it is to be hungry.” This is why it feels good to do good. It feels good not just to have won but to have won well, versus by way of unsportsmanlike or unethical play.
So when athletes congratulate each other in the post-game lineup with the common praise, “Good game,” let that concept of “good” involve not just the skill and strategy imparted but also the manner in which they were imparted. Then “Good game” will really mean something.