WHEN A BASEBALL outfielder traps the ball as it bounces—or picks it up on the half-volley, as non-Americans would say—he will generally leap up as if he has caught it cleanly, hoping to persuade the umpires that the batter is out. This is by no means considered bad behaviour in professional baseball. It’s what good fielders do. You’d be letting your side down if you didn’t try your hardest to take advantage of the umpires’ uncertainty.
The contrast with cricket is striking. Fielders in cricket are supposed to say whether or not they have caught the ball. Traditionally the batsman, and indeed the umpires, have accepted the fielder’s word on whether a catch was fairly made, even at the highest levels of the game.
The modern Television Review System is complicating the situation, with its tendency to make fair catches look foul, but the principle still runs deep in cricket. It’s not just embarrassing to be found out pretending to a catch you know you didn’t make—it’s downright shameful. Your teammates won’t want anything to do with you, let alone the opposition. You will have been exposed as someone lacking in moral fibre.
No doubt many cricket fans will take this comparison to be yet more evidence of the inferiority, not to say degeneracy, of the American summer game. But I think that this is quite the wrong reaction. I love cricket above all other sports, but baseball is also a fine game, with many virtues of its own. What is more, it has a great deal of pride in its traditions, and a strong concern, bordering on obsession, with propriety and good behaviour.
In truth, the two games place different moral demands on their players. While it would be disgraceful for a cricketer to claim a catch he hasn’t made, this is morally quite acceptable in a baseball player.
This might seem puzzling. How can one and the same action be immoral in one sport, yet moral in another? We seem to be getting dangerously close to the idea that all morality is relative—that there is no real difference between right and wrong, just different ideas of what is socially acceptable. But this does not follow at all. I believe in absolute moral standards as much as the next philosopher. It is just that this absolute morality manifests itself differently in cricket and baseball.
To understand cases like these, we first need to distinguish between morality and convention, and then to understand their relationship.
From an early age, all humans recognize that there is a difference between morality and convention. They understand that morality is universal, independent of authority, and has to do with genuine welfare, while convention varies across societies, depends on decree, and governs matters of no intrinsic importance.
This distinction has been much studied by social psychologists, following the influential work of the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel in the 1980s. In The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention, Turiel showed that children discriminate naturally between moral principles, which they view as unalterable, and rules instituted by parochial authorities, which they assume can easily be changed. Turiel’s work has since been confirmed by a wide range of studies covering subjects of different ages and religious and cultural backgrounds.
In one of Turiel’s original studies, children were asked whether the teacher’s permission would make it all right (a) to speak without raising your hand first or (b) to steal. The children all agreed that talking without hand-raising would be legitimated by the teacher’s say-so, but they felt differently about stealing. No, it would not be all right to steal, insisted one thoughtful eight-year-old in Turiel’s original study. “People wouldn’t like to have things stolen.”
At first pass, the difference between cricket and baseball is clearly a matter of convention, not morality. No issues of human welfare hinge on whether catches are self-policed or left to umpires; both games could easily enough decree that things be done differently; and the example itself shows that nothing universal is at issue. Whether or not you own up to trapping a catch is a conventional matter, like raising your hand before speaking, not a moral issue like stealing.
As I explained in the last chapter, every sport has an agreed code of fair play, a set of conventions that governs the players’ behaviour. These don’t always line up with the formal rules—sometimes the players’ conventions license rule contraventions, and sometimes they prohibit actions that don’t break the rules. The conventions are a set of expectations the players bring to the game and that define their sense of sportsmanship. When youngsters are introduced to a sport, they are taught how to behave, which tricks are acceptable and which not, and in time they will teach these traditions to the next generation.
Our puzzle was: how can one and the same action—claiming a catch you know you haven’t made—be morally shameful in cricket but acceptable in baseball? In response, I have drawn attention to the difference between morality and convention, and observed that different sports have different conventions about acceptable behaviour. You might be wondering whether this takes us any closer to a solution. True, we can now see that the cricketer who falsely claims a catch is departing from the conventions of his sport in a way that his baseball counterpart isn’t. Still, the issue wasn’t just that the cricketer was being unconventional, but that he was being immoral. Yet deviating from social conventions is by no means always a moral transgression. Somebody who holds their knife in the wrong hand, or who addresses a duke as “my lord” rather than “your grace”, may be committing an embarrassing faux pas, but it would be silly to condemn them as morally inferior simply because of their social incompetence.
Not all conventions, however, are as morally insignificant as rules about holding knives and addressing dukes. In other cases, conventions substantially alter the moral landscape. Conventions are not themselves the same as moral principles, as Turiel’s work makes clear. But even so, the particular conventions adopted by a social group often make a difference to what morality requires of its members.
The most obvious examples involve physical coordination. Take driving on the left rather than the right once more. In itself this certainly isn’t a moral issue. There’s nothing morally amiss with countries that do it differently. But if you are in a country where everybody else is driving on the left, it would be downright immoral, and not just eccentric, to insist on driving on the right. The point is that we have an absolute moral duty, applicable across all societies, not to endanger the lives of others recklessly, and this imposes a moral requirement on us to conform to the local highway code, whatever that might be.
The same logic applies to codes of manners. It is a matter of arbitrary convention that shaking hands is the normal manner of greeting in England, while bowing is expected in Japan. But at the same time it is a universal moral rule that we should respect our fellow human beings and not insult them wantonly—from which it follows that we all have a moral obligation to hail our fellow citizens politely, by shaking hands in England, or bowing in Japan, or in general by adopting whatever form of greeting is expected locally.*
As well as ensuring road safety and enabling expressions of respect, socially variable conventions also play a role in deciding what counts as an agreement or promise. In America, someone hailing a taxi is implicitly promising to tip the driver above the set fare, but this doesn’t apply in Australia. Because of the underlying universal moral principle that you should not renege on your commitments, conventions like these also make a difference to the moral landscape. If you scoot off without tipping the cab driver, you are acting immorally in the States, but not in Australia.
These are the conventions that matter in sporting contexts. Anybody taking part in a cricket match has effectively agreed to abide by the cricketers’ code of practice, and in particular not to claim catches they haven’t made. So someone who does pretend that they’ve made a catch, when they haven’t, is like someone who enjoys an evening in the bar with friends but then sneaks off when it’s their turn to buy the drinks. They are reneging on an implicit agreement in order to gain an unfair advantage.
That is why the cricketer is immoral where the baseball player is not. The deal made by baseball players when they sign up to a game is different. They aren’t counting on each other to self-police catches. Instead they have agreed to leave it to the umpires. And so they are not breaking ranks and taking advantage of the others if they try to get away with a phoney “catch”.
The point generalizes. The various understandings of fair play observed by different sports are like contracts that you enter into when you start a match. This is why players who violate the spirit of the game aren’t just choosing to be unconventional. They are transgressing the universal moral principle that you shouldn’t gain advantage over others by breaking your promises.
Sports fans are very quick to complain about standards. Their favourite targets are games other than their own and the depravity of the present day. Cricket fans are sniffy about baseballers, rugby fans are shocked by soccer players, golf fans look down on tennis players, and all of them agree that contemporary sports performers can’t hold a moral candle to those of past generations.
If you ask me, these Jeremiahs are nearly all mistaking conventional differences for moral failings. The different standards upheld by different sports are at first pass just alternative contractual arrangements, different sets of expectations about what the players owe each other. Given these arrangements, the players of any given sport have a moral responsibility to adhere to their agreed code. But it doesn’t at all follow that the sports with less restrictive codes are morally inferior.
Of course, sporting codes change over time, just as social rules of etiquette do. There is now more shirt-pulling in soccer than when I was young, cricketing tail-enders are no longer spared dangerous deliveries from the fast bowlers, it is now standard practice to “ice” the kicker in American football, rugby spectators no longer fall silent for place kicks, and so on. But I see no reason to view these changes as moral deterioration, as opposed to a shift from one set of workable social expectations to another.
To look down on other games just for being different is the sporting equivalent of despising all foreigners for their uncouth ways. The true sports fan will recognize that there are many equally good ways of arranging games—and that there’s therefore nothing morally wrong with baseball players claiming catches they haven’t made.
Still, having said this, I don’t want to insist that all sporting codes are equally admirable. Some sports do end up encouraging genuinely immoral behaviour.
In one of the early group matches in the 2014 soccer World Cup, the Portuguese defender Pepe held off a challenge from Germany’s Thomas Müller with an arm that brushed Müller’s chin. The latter’s reaction was to throw himself to the ground clutching his head. This so infuriated Pepe that he promptly head-butted Müller and got himself sent off.
I was watching (in a bar in Paris, after a philosophy workshop) and I was shocked. Not by Pepe’s head-butt—that was just dumb, and not particularly surprising from a player well known for his volatility. Rather it was Müller’s play-acting that dismayed me. Germans don’t fake injuries to get other players into trouble. It was like seeing Mary Poppins steal a purse.
This got me thinking. Why wasn’t this just another case of one set of conventions replacing another? Historically, professional soccer players didn’t use to play-act to engineer penalties for the opposition. But it has increasingly become common practice. So why was I so shocked? Why didn’t I view this as just another change in sporting customs? Müller was simply behaving in a way that had become normal among his fellow professionals. He would arguably have been a fool not to. Given that everybody else was using this trick, he would have been letting down his side by not doing so too.
But on reflection I realized I didn’t see it like that. I admired the Germans for holding to the old ways, and was distressed precisely because I was observing a falling-off in standards. It is morally better if soccer players don’t lie to gain an advantage over their opponents. I felt it was a pity if the Germans had joined those teams that did this.*
The comparison with social conventions is again instructive. As a general rule of thumb, it is not a bad idea to observe existing social customs. However, the principle “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” only takes us so far. Not all social mores are harmless variations of protocol.
Many traditions demean women, others reinforce prejudice, and some are downright abhorrent. Female foot binding in China, racial segregation in the American South, and the subjugation of Jews were all once regarded as acceptable, indeed essential, components of historical societies. With codes like these, it is more honourable to breach than observe them. We can be thankful that they are all now regarded as occasions for shame rather than pride.
Some sporting codes are similarly reprehensible. They invite athletes to behave in ways that are morally indefensible. I have already discussed how some soccer players feign head injuries hoping to get opponents sent off. It is not hard to think of other clear-cut examples.
The rugby culture of punching opponents tends to spill over into biting, eye-gouging, and even sticking your finger up your opponent’s bottom (though it should be said that this last practice is frowned upon even by front-row forwards). Until recently competitive road cyclists fed themselves a battery of performance-enhancing drugs, and this self-abuse was compounded by the corrosive hypocrisy of repeated public denials.
I would say that these practices are the sporting equivalent of Chinese foot binding. They take us beyond local customs and into the realm of objective immorality. Even if the sporting communities in question condone them, this doesn’t make them all right.
Are there any general rules specifying when sporting codes overstep the limits of acceptability and become objectively immoral? As it happens, it is surprisingly difficult to draw any principled boundary between valid sporting conventions and morally repugnant practices.
A first thought might be that a code is bad to the extent that it authorizes violations of the rules. Isn’t that just cheating, and so automatically contemptible? As we have seen, however, this doesn’t hold up at all. It is often perfectly proper to break a sporting rule and take the penalty. I have already mentioned the example of basketball players fouling in the last seconds to stop the clock and give themselves a chance to win. Nobody thinks of this ploy as immoral sharp practice. It’s a perfectly normal move in the game.
Stopping the clock in basketball is by no means an isolated case. There are plenty of other examples of morally acceptable rule-breaking. In soccer, a forward will happily risk an offside penalty in the hope of catching the defence napping. In rugby it is illegal to hang on to the ball when you are on the ground after a tackle, but you’ll be letting your side down if you don’t do this to prevent an imminent try. Snooker players are penalized four points if they “miss”—that is, end up playing a foul shot to avoid leaving their opponent an easy pot—yet it often makes sense for them to do this many times in succession. Penalties for these technical infractions are simply part of the game, like paying rent when you land on someone’s square in Monopoly.
All right, but what about codes that actively encourage players to deceive the officials? Surely that at least is beyond the moral pale. Openly taking one for the team in full view of the referee still preserves a kind of honesty. But trying to get away with an infraction without being detected looks like a paradigm of immoral behaviour.
Yet this doesn’t work either. In baseball young catchers are taught to “frame the pitch”—to choreograph their catching movements in such a way as to make it seem as if they took the ball in the strike zone. The aim is precisely to deceive the home plate umpire into calling balls as strikes. Far from being regarded as a dirty underhand trick, this skill is widely admired throughout the game.
Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants is regarded as a supreme practitioner of this art. As Major League Baseball’s own website explains, Posey’s “ability to frame pitches… requires a catcher to employ deft hands, remain limber physically and exercise sound judgment. A successfully framed delivery typically travels on the fringes of the strike zone. It’s the catcher’s duty to receive the ball in a way that erases any doubt the pitch is a strike.”
Cricket offers a similar example of benign deception. Batsmen who have feathered a catch to the wicket-keeper will often feign insouciance in the hope of persuading the umpire that they didn’t touch the ball. In first-class cricket, or even serious league cricket, this is perfectly proper, even required on behalf of the team.
Cricket fans sometime argue that the modern practice of leaving it to the umpire represents a moral falling-off from the time when batsmen “walked” without waiting for the umpire’s decision if they knew they’d touched the ball. But it is something of a myth that there ever was such a time. In serious games with proper umpires, batsmen have nearly always waited for the umpire’s decision. (True, a decade ago the great Australian wicket-keeper-batsman Adam Gilchrist was an egregiously quixotic walker. But this was by no means popular with his teammates, many of whom felt that Gilchrist was fostering his image at the expense of the team.)
If there ever was a tradition of walking, it was restricted to a few English gentlemen amateurs who affected this theatrical means of showing their social superiority for a couple of decades after World War II. And even then they weren’t always consistent. Colin Cowdrey, the last in the great line of English amateur captains, had a reputation for walking for obvious decisions, but not for the harder ones, in the hope that his reputation as a walker would influence the umpire in his favour.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that there are no simple rules to tell us when sporting practices overstep the boundaries of morality. According to an influential school in contemporary moral theory, this is just a special case of a difficulty that arises with all moral judgements.
The defining feature of the moral doctrine known as “particularism” is its distrust of general moral principles. Particularists maintain that there are always exceptions to rules like “thou shalt not kill”, or “always tell the truth”, or even “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. In their view, real life is far too messy for any such all-purpose prescriptions.
As particularists see it, difficult choices involve genuine moral complexity. You can’t always satisfy the demands of both kindness and honesty, friends and family, non-violence and justice. No set of mechanical principles can tell you how to balance these issues across the board. Instead, in any concrete situation, you must rely on your moral intuition to tell you the right thing to do.
I am not myself convinced that there are no general principles to be found in the moral realm. Still, there’s no doubt that sporting practices provide a good case for particularists. There really doesn’t seem to be any mechanical formula for morally grading codes of accepted sporting behaviour. The relations between the scoring systems, the rules, and the officials are too complex and varied to allow any easy generalizations. In the end, perhaps all we can do is appeal to our inbuilt ethical sense to tell us when sporting customs have moved beyond local practices and become downright immoral.
In most cases, the divergent customs of different sports are simply alternative conventions, akin to the divergent cultural customs observed in different societies. If you think that there’s something morally wrong about baseball players claiming catches they haven’t made, then you are just making a mistake. But in other cases all should recognize that sporting customs cross the moral line. Even if most soccer players faked injuries, or most cyclists surreptitiously took drugs, that wouldn’t morally legitimate these practices.
The distinction may be difficult to analyse, but it is one worth drawing. It is only by marking the difference between legitimate conventions and corrupt practices that we can hope to keep the latter out of sport.