Win to play, don’t play to win! A Kantian take on the ethics of sporting competition

This paper offers a Kantian analysis of the ethics of playing sports and other competitive games. It is not uncommon to suppose that they are all and only about winning; i.e. to treat victory as the final and highest end in competitive activities. I will argue that this is a mistake, because it leads to an unethical attitude towards both the competitive activity itself (playing) and towards one’s opponents. As an approach to competition, this is wrong in both of the familiar Kantian senses: it involves a volitional inconsistency, or split and self-contradictory motivation; and it engenders disrespect of persons essentially involved in the competitive activity. The account grounds some widely-held ethical intuitions around fair play, fine play, the collaborative nature of competitive activity, and the importance of respect for one’s opposition. It also helps explain an important, but somewhat obscure, feature of Suits’ theory of games: the idea that they ‘reverse the ends and means of other activities’.