Works in Progress
up-to-date as of 5/21/24
The Rules of the Game: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Robot Referees
I argue that blown calls (when referees fail to properly enforce on-field rules) undermine the (1) competitive values we ascribe to sport, (2) the value of the excellences promoted in specific sports, and (3) the fairness of the contest. Blown calls have these undermining effects because they cleave excellence apart from winning. In cases where promoting sporting excellence is the point of engaging in the sport, blown calls must be reduced as much as possible. I argue that in the contemporary sporting context, characterized by increasing athletic ability of competitors and the convoluted rule books governing modern sports, human referees lack the perceptual and cognitive capacities to reliably enforce rules. Therefore I argue that stakeholders including players, leagues, and fans ought to support at least supplementing human referees with robot referees, though I prefer the stronger thesis that human referees should be replaced entirely by robots.
Fair Contest and Sports Gambling: Why States Have a Duty to Require Accurate Refereeing, And Why Accurate Refereeing Means Robot Referees
The mere possibility of blown calls undermines the claim of those who put on and participate in the game that the competition is a fair one. I argue that states which legalize sports gambling have a quasi-fiduciary duty to impose regulations that ensure contests on which their citizens can bet are fair ones. It is already well-established that the government has an interest in protecting consumers by regulating contests of all sorts, including by ensuring the fairness of contests and advertising for those contests. I argue that the government’s interest in protecting includes ensuring that individual bettors are treated fairly by other parties in the sports gambling economies. This obviously includes regulating sports gambling organizations, but I argue it includes regulating the fairness of the contests on which people place bets.
Because blown calls can materially impact whether a bet gets paid out or not, the government has an interest in ensuring that blown calls do not happen any more than is necessary. One option to reduce or solve the problem of blown calls is to supplement or replace entirely human referees with “officiating technology” or robot referees. Officiating technology represents a clear and marked improvement over human referees along several important ethical dimensions, including accuracy, predictability, and transparency. But even if officiating technology is not perfect, it is still better than relying solely on human referees in that it better protects the interests of sports bettors.
“Why Are You Yelling at Me? It’s Not My Fault!”: Disruptive Protest, Responsibility, and Critical Pedagogy
Some philosophers (most notably Smith 2013) have developed accounts of blame as a form of moral protest. According to Moral Protest accounts of blame, blaming another person involves judging that the person is blameworthy and therefore modifying one’s own attitudes towards that person to challenge whatever moral claims the blamed person’s conduct implies (Smith 2013). This suggests that one way of viewing protests is (possibly among other things) a way of blaming others for their moral failings.
To felicitously blame someone paradigmatically requires that the person is responsible for whatever they are being blamed for. Insofar as protestors are engaged in blaming, then the felicitousness of protest would seem to require that the targets of protest be responsible in the right way for whatever they’re being blamed for.
Protestors are often castigated when their activities target people who aren’t properly held accountable for the state of affairs being protested. If we understand protest as a mode of blame, then many protest activities are objectionable: insofar as protests target people who aren’t truly blameworthy, they are at best infelicitous and morally objectionable at worst.
There is a way of understanding protest activities as felicitous and justified whether or not the targets of a protest are responsible for the state of affairs being protested. Drawing on a pedagogical account of moral criticism I develop in my dissertation, I show that treating protest as mode of moral criticism helps justify disruptive protest activities that target people who aren’t responsible for the state of affairs being protested.
The function of moral criticism draws the criticized person’s attention to reasons they had to act differently which they somehow failed to appreciate. Unlike blame, which requires responsibility to be felicitous, criticism only requires that its target have the capacity to appreciate the reasons she had to act differently. Responsibility is somewhat beside the point when we criticize others. Where blame is backwards-looking, criticism is distinctly forwards-looking: it aims to scaffold the criticized person’s future exercises of moral agency.
A primary function of protest activities is to draw the target audience’s attention to reasons they failed to appreciate but which gave them reason to act differently. Insofar as protest aims at improvement over the moral status quo by prompting moral improvement of individuals, the task of protestors is to draw attention to difference-making reasons for why the status quo represents a morally unacceptable state of affairs.
The Ethics of Moral Criticism (Dissertation)
I advance a pedagogical account of moral criticism, arguing that the extant philosophical literature on the various ways we talk to others about their moral failings (i.e., blame, formative criticism) has overlooked an important practice which I call moral criticism.
In Chapter 1 I argue that norms on moral discourse that aim to limit instances of moral disagreement are – by their own lights – misguided. If what we want is to push ourselves to be morally better as individuals and societies, then moral disagreement is indispensable. Instead of adopting norms limiting moral disagreement, it would be more consistent with the values of moral progress and growth to adjust our perspective on the moral significance of disagreement so we can fully appreciate its value.
In Chapter 2 I present my positive account of moral criticism. I provide a way of understanding moral criticism in pedagogical terms. Drawing on the burgeoning literature on the normative dimensions of attention, I suggest that moral criticism addresses the criticized person as a reasoner by drawing their attention to difference-making reasons that they had to act differently. Unlike blame, moral criticism is not essentially focused or dependent for its propriety on moral responsibility. Instead, moral criticism focuses on reasons the object of criticism failed to appreciate but which gave her reason to act differently.
In Chapter 3, I argue that we should adopt a particular dispositional response to criticism when we are the object of the criticism, which is an open-minded disposition. After I develop a minimalist account of open-mindedness, I offer two kinds of reasons — moral reasons and epistemic reasons — for why being open-minded in response to moral criticism is prima facie better than the four closed-minded responses which I survey. The reasons in virtue of which open-minded engagement with moral criticism is morally and epistemically preferable give most of us at least instrumental reason to engage open-mindedly and cultivate our capacity for open-minded engagement with moral criticism.