Asymmetry between moral and physical excellence

We can use a Mahatma Ghandi or a Mother Teresa as a moral exemplar to figure out what our virtues should be. But we cannot use an Usain Bolt or a Serena Williams as a physical exemplar to figure out what our physical capabilities should be. Why this disanalogy between moral and physical excellence?

It’s our intuition that Bolt and Williams exceed the physical norms for humans to a significant degree. But although Ghandi and Mother Teresa did many supererogatory things, I do not think they overall exceed the moral norms for human character to a significant degree. We should be like them, and our falling short is largely our fault.

Walking

Unfortunately, most of the forms of exercise I do are too intense for me to think hard while exercising, though perhaps my subconscious is doing something. The main exception is that when swimming, I can do some thinking, but I am also counting lengths, and I can’t do both at once very well. (I have a project that I keep on putting off where I’d interface a BLE beacon on my person with a phone out of the water and use that to count lengths, but I haven’t done it yet. I suppose I could also get a watch that counts lengths.) Occasionally, I can also do some less deep thinking—say, preparing for class—while biking on flat pavement. But I can’t do serious thinking while rock climbing (however, there is good down time for thinking and writing between climbs), or playing badminton, or kayaking.

Last week, Baylor had a step challenge, so I ended up taking some longer brisk walks, alone. (I walk a fair amount with family.) It reminded me of how it is possible to do a lot of thinking while walking. That’s really nice! Though there is the danger that my achievement-oriented personality will push me to keep on increasing my walking speed, to the point where I won't be able to do deep thinking any more.

A second indoor climbing world record

On July 15, 2023, I set (still uncertified) my second indoor world climbing record: fastest vertical mile (male), doing 112 climbs, at 14.4 meters each, in a total of 1 hour 42 minutes and 58 seconds (continuous time, including descents and breaks; descents do not count towards the mile). The official best time was Andrew Dahir's 1 hour 51 minutes and 37.5 seconds. I am still working on preparing all the materials for submission to Guinness. [Later note: The record has since been officially certified.]

This was a fastest-time for fixed distance (one mile) record. In December, I got a longest-distance (about a kilometer) for a fixed-time (one hour) record. The video below shows the first and last climbs at normal speed and runs the middle 110 climbs at 30X.

I am grateful to Baylor Recreation for all the encouragement I have received, and to the volunteers who made this possible (two timekeepers, two witnesses, two additional safety officers).

Here are some details:

• I am incredibly impressed with Andrew Dahir who had set both of the records in one day! There is no way I would have the endurance for that.
• My vertical speed was 938 meters per hour, somewhat lower than the 1014 meters per hour of my December record, but I had to keep it up for a longer time. Still, I think I was less tired this time: the lower pace compensated for the greater distance.
• The route was a 5.6. 
• Unlike in my previous record, an auto-belay was used.
• I started by doing 12 climbs at a slightly higher pace than I could keep up for the full length, followed by a  minute break, followed by ten sets of ten, with about 1.5-2 minute breaks in between. 
• I got a cramp in the upper right thigh around climb #100, and had to rely more on upper body for the remainder.
• I had a pacing sheet with dual target times both for beating the record by about 1.5 minutes and for beating the record by about 5 minutes. I consistently stayed ahead of both.
• I wore my comfy 5.10 lace-up Anasazi shoes (pinks).
• Mid-way I ducked into the storage room to change into a dry T-shirt.
• I did a lot of short practices with 1-5 climbs at maximum pace (which I wouldn't be able to keep up much longer) to get my muscle memory of all the moves.
• I did three full-length practices starting around May. The first one was slightly slower than Dahir's time. The second was about two minutes ahead of the record, and the third about five.
• I did one mid-length practice about a week ahead, where I unofficially beat my December one hour record.
• To avoid mishaps with video evidence, I had five cameras pointed at the event. Guinness rules require slow motion footage to be available for one-mile events. That makes sense for a run, but is surprising for a nearly two-hour climb, and to satisfy this requirement one of the cameras was a GoPro capturing at 120fps.

Because Guinness wanted the witnesses to log the individual time of each climb, I have a nice graph of how long each ascent took. I started a little faster, slowed down towards the end. The average ascent was 36 seconds. The fastest was 26 seconds (#1) and the slowest was 50 seconds (#111).

 

Of Tetris, ends, and the beatific vision

Suppose I am playing Tetris seriously. What am I aiming at?

It’s not victory: one cannot win Tetris.

A good score, yes. But I wouldn’t stop playing after reaching a good score. So a merely good score isn’t all I am aiming at. An excellent score? But, again, even if I achieved an excellent score, I wouldn’t stop, so it’s not all I am aiming for. A world-record score? But I wouldn’t stop as soon as my score exceeded the record. An infinite score? But then I am aiming at an impossibility.

A phrase we might use is: “I am trying to get the best score I can.” But while that is how we speak, it doesn’t actually describe my aim. For consider what “the best score I can get” means. Does the “can” take into account my current skill level or not? If it does take into account my skill level, then I could count as having achieved my end despite getting a really miserable score, as long as that maxed out my skills. And that doesn’t seem right. But if it does not take into account my current skill level, but rather is the most that it could ever be possible for me, then it seems I am aiming at something unrealistic—for my current skill level falls short of what I “can” do.

What is true of Tetris is true of many other games where one’s aims align with a score. In some of these games there is such a thing as victory in addition to score. Thus, while one can time one’s runs and thus have just a score, typical running races include victory and a time, and sometimes both enter into the runner’s aims. This is not true of all games: some, like chess, only have victory (positions can be scored, but the scores are only indicative of their instrumentality for victory).

It’s worth noting that a score can be either absolute, such as time in running, and relative, such as one’s place among the finishers. In the case of place among finishers, one may be aiming for victory—first place—but one need not be. One might, for instance, make a strategic decision that one has no realistic hope for first place, and that aiming at first place will result in a poorer placement than simply aiming to “place as well as one can” (bearing in mind that this phrase is misleading, as already mentioned).

Insofar as aims align with a score, we can say that we have directed activity, but there seems to be no end, so the activity is not end-directed. We might want to say that the score is the “end”, but that would be misleading, since an end is a state you are aiming at. But typically you are not just aiming at the state of having a score—in Tetris, you get a score no matter what you do, though it might be zero. In timed fixed-distance sports, you need to finish the distance to have a time, and for some endurance races that in itself is a serious challenge, though for “reasonable” distances finishing is not much of an accomplishment.

I think what we should say is that in these activities, we have a direction, specified by increasing score, but not an end. The concept of a direction is more general than that of an end. Wherever there is an end, there is a direction defined by considering a score which is 1 if one achieves the end and 0 if one fails to do so.

So far all my examples were games. But I think the distinction between direction and end applies in much more important cases, and helps make sense of many phenomena. Consider our pursuits of goods such as health and knowledge. Past a certain age, perfect health is unachievable, and hence is not what one is aiming at. But more health is always desirable. And at any age, omniscience is out of our grasp, but more knowledge is worth having. Thus the pursuits of health and knowledge are examples of directed but not always end-directed activities. (Though, often, there are specific ends as well: the amelioration of a specific infirmity or learning the answer to a specific question.)

(Interesting question for future investigation: What happens to the maxim that the one who wills the end wills the means in the case of directed but not end-directed activity? I think it’s more complicated, because one can aim in a direction but not aim there at all costs.)

I think the above puts is in a position to make progress on a very thorny problem in Thomistic theology. The beatific vision of God is supremely good for us. But at the same time, it is a supernatural good, one that exceeds our nature. Our nature does not aim at this end, since for it to aim at this end, it would need to have the end written into itself, but its very possibility is a revealed mystery. Our desire for the beatific vision is itself a gift of God’s grace. But if our nature does not aim at the beatific vision, then it seems that the beatific vision does not fulfill us. For our nature’s aims specify what is good for us.

However, we can say this. Our nature directs us in the direction of greater knowledge and greater love of the knowable and the lovable. It does not limit that directedness to natural knowledge and love, but at the same time it does not direct us to supernatural knowledge and love as such. As far as we naturally know, it might be that natural knowledge and love is all that’s possible, and if so, we need go no further. But in fact God’s grace makes the beatific vision possible. The beatific vision is in the direction of greater knowledge and love from all our natural knowledge and love, and so it fulfills us—even though our nature has no concept of it.

Imagine that unbeknownst to me, a certain sequence of Tetris moves, which one would only be able to perform with the help of Alexey Pajitnov, yields an infinite score. Then if I played Tetris with Pajitnov’s help and I got that infinite score, I would be fulfilled in my score-directed Tetris-playing. However, it would also be correct that if I didn’t know about the possibility of the infinite score, it wasn’t an end I was pursuing. Nonetheless, it is fulfilling because it is objectively true that this score lies in the direction that I was pursuing.

Similarly, our nature, as it were, knows nothing of the beatific vision, but it directs us in a direction where in fact the beatific vision lies, should God’s grace make it possible for us.

This also gives a nice explanation of the following related puzzle about the beatific vision. When one reads what the theologians say about the beatific vision, it appears attractive to us. That attractiveness could be the result of God’s grace, but it is psychologically plausible that it would appear attractive even without grace. The idea of a loving union of understanding with an infinite good just is very attractive to humans. But how can it be naturally attractive to us when it exceeds our nature? The answer seems to me to be that we can naturally know that if the beatific vision is possible, it lies in the direction we are aimed at. But, absent divine revelation, we don’t know if it is possible. And, trivially, it’s only a potential fulfillment of our nature—i.e., a good for us to seek—if it is possible.

Does this mean that we should reject the language of “end” with respect to the beatific vision? Yes and no. It is not an end in the sense of something that our nature aims at as such. But it is an end in the sense that it is a supreme achievement in the direction at which our nature aims us. Thus it seems we can still talk about it as a supernatural end.

A new world record

[April, 2023 update: This record has been accepted by Guinness. I wonder how long it will last.]

And now for something not very philosophical. Today, in front of two witnesses and two timekeepers and with the help of Levi Durham doing an amazing feat of belaying me for an hour, I beat the Guinness World Record in greatest vertical distance climbed in one hour on an indoor climbing wall. The previous record was 928.5m and I did 1013.7m (with about half a minute to spare). On Baylor's climbing wall, this involved 67 climbs divided into sets of 10 (the last was 7), with about a minute of rest between sets (the clock kept on running during the rest).

Technical notes:

• The top of the wall is 15.13 meters vertically from the ground (as measured by a geology grad student), at 3.5 degree slab.
• I trained for about three months, not very heavily. In training did two unofficial full-length practice runs, and in each I beat the previous record: in the first one I got 947.1 meters and in the second I got 1004.5, so I was pretty confident I could beat the 928.5 meters on the official attempt (though I was still pretty nervous). I also trained by doing a small number of approximately 1/2 or 1/3 sized practices (maybe three or so), and more regular shorter runs (1-10 climbs) at fast pace. 
• The route was a standard 5.7 grade for most of my training (including when I unofficially beat the records), with Rock management kindly agreeing to keep the route up for several months for me. For the final attempt, we added holds to make the finish at the top of the wall, and changed three other holds to easier ones. (Guinness has no route grade requirements.) 
• A Kindle Fire running a pre-release version of my Giant Stopwatch app provided unofficial timing for audience to see and for my pacing. I had to modify the app to have a periodic beep to meet Guinness's requirements of an audible stop signal.
• I climbed in sets of 10. The planned pace was 8:18 per set and a 44-45 second rest between sets (clock runs during rests,), averaging at 49.8 seconds per climb including descent. I was always ahead of pace, and I occasionally took a mini break at the mid-point time if I was too far ahead.
• On the ground there was a sheet of paper with the start and end times of each break printed in large letters (calculated by this script), as well as the mid-point time for each set of 10 to keep me better on pace. 
• I wore moderately worn (one small hole) and comfortable 5.10 Anasazi shoes, a Camp USA Energy harness, shorts and a T-shirt. (I have not received any sponsorship.) My belayer used a tube-style device and wore belay gloves.
• In the morning I stress-baked pumpkin muffins for myself and the volunteers. I had the muffins, water and loose chalk on a table for use during breaks.
• About half-way through, I ducked into the storage area inside the rock and changed to a dry shirt. 
• Most of my practice was with an auto-belay, and at a shorter distance per climb (and hence greater number of climbs needed) since the auto-belay makes it impossible to get to the top of the wall. The auto-belay is also spring loaded so it effectively decreases body weight (by 7 lbs at the bottom according to my measurement). Then a couple of weeks ago the auto-belay was closed by management due to a maintenance issue, and I had a break in training until the Wednesday before the official attempt when I trained with a manual belay. 
• Since Guinness requires video proof in addition to human witnesses, in the interests of redundancy, I had three cameras pointed at the attempt. The best footage (above) is from a Sony A7R2 with a zoom lens at 16mm, producing 1080P at 59.94 fps. Video was processed with Adobe Premiere Rush. The processing consisted of trimming the start and end, and adding a timing video track I generated with a Python OpenCV2 script, synchronized with single-frame precision at the 1:00:00 point with the footage of Giant Stopwatch (barely visible under the table towards the end of the video; early in the video, glare hides it). For the unofficial version I link above, I accelerated the middle climbs 10X in Premiere Rush.

Games and consequentialism

I’ve been thinking about who competitors, opponents and enemies are, and I am not very clear on it. But I think we can start with this:

1. x and y are competitors provided that they knowingly pursue incompatible goals.

In the ideal case, competitors both rightly pursue the incompatible goals, and each knows that they are both so doing.

Given externalist consequentialism, where the right action is the one that actually would produce better consequences, ideal competition will be extremely rare, since the only time the pursuit of each of two incompatible goals will be right is if there is an exact tie between the values of the goals, and that is extremely rare.

This has the odd result that on externalist consequentialism, in most sports and other games, at least one side is acting wrongly. For it is extremely rare that there is an exact tie between the values of one side winning and the value of the other side winning. (Some people enjoy victory more than others, or have somewhat more in the way of fans, etc.)

On internalist consequentalism, where the right action is defined by expected utilities, we would expect that if both sides are unbiased investigators, in most of the games, at least one side would at take the expected utility of the other side’s winning to be higher. For if both sides are perfect investigators with the same evidence and perfect priors, then they will assign the same expected utilities, and so at least one side will take the other’s to have higher expected utility, except in the rare case where the two expected utilities are equal. And if both sides assign expected utilities completely at random, but unbiasedly (i.e., are just as likely to assign a higher expected utility to the other side winning as to themselves), then bracketing the rare case where a side assigns equal expected utility to both victory options, any given side will have a probability of about a half of assigning higher expected utility to the other side’s victory, and so there will be about a 3/4 chance that at least one side will take the other side’s victory to be more likely. And other cases of unbiased investigators will likely fall somewhere between the perfect case and the random case, and so we would expect that in most games, at least one side will be playing for an outcome that they think has lower expected utility.

Of course, in practice, the two sides are not unbiased. One might overestimate the value of oneself winning and the underestimate the value of the other winning. But that is likely to involve some epistemic vice.

So, the result is that either on externalist or internalist consequentialism, in most sports and other competitions, at least one side is acting morally wrongly or is acting in the light of an epistemic vice.

I conclude that consequentialism is wrong.

The 2018 Belgium vs Brazil World Cup game

In 2018, the Belgians beat the Brazilians 2-1 in the 2018 World Cup soccer quarterfinals. There are about 18 times as many Brazilians and Belgians in the world. This raises a number of puzzles in value theory, if for simplicity we ignore everyone but Belgians and Brazilians in the world.

An order of magnitude more people wanted the Brazilians to win, and getting what one wants is good. An order of magnitude more people would have felt significant and appropriate pleasure had the Brazilians won, and an appropriate pleasure is good. And given both wishful thinking as well as reasonable general presumptions about there being more talent available in a larger population base, we can suppose that a lot more people expected the Brazilians to win, and it’s good if what one thinks is the case is in fact the case.

You might think that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, and Belgians are few. But, clearly, the above facts gave very little moral reason to the Belgian players to lose. One might respond that the above facts gave lots of reason to the Belgians to lose, but these reasons were outweighed by the great value of victory to the Belgian players, or perhaps the significant intrinsic value of playing a sport as well as one can. Maybe, but if so then just multiply both countries’ populations by a factor of ten or a hundred, in which case the difference between the goods (desire satisfaction, pleasure and truth of belief) is equally multiplied, but still makes little or no moral difference to what the Belgian players should do.

Or consider this from the point of view of the Brazilian players. Imagine you are one of them. Should the good of Brazil—around two hundred million people caring about the game—be a crushing weight on your shoulders, imbuing everything you do in practice and in the game with a great significance? No! It’s still “just a game”, even if the value of the good is spread through two hundred million people. It would be weird to think that it is a minor pecadillo for a Belgian to slack off in practice but a grave sin for a Brazilian to do so, because the Brazilian’s slacking hurts an order of magnitude more people.

That said, I do think that the larger population of Brazil imbues the Brazilians’ games and practices with some not insignificant additional moral weight than the Belgians’. It would be odd if the pleasure, desire satisfaction and expectations of so many counted for nothing. But on the other hand, it should make no significant difference to the Belgians whether they are playing Greece or Brazil: the Belgians shouldn’t practice less against the Greeks on the grounds that an order of magnitude fewer people will be saddened when the Greeks lose than when Brazilians do.

However, these considerations seem to me to depend to some degree on which decisions one is making. If Daniel is on the soccer team and deciding how hard to work, it makes little difference whether he is on the Belgian or Brazilian team. But suppose instead that Daniel is has two talents: he could become an excellent nurse or a top soccer player. As a nurse, he would help relieve the suffering of a number of patients. As a soccer player, in addition to the intrinsic goods of the sports, he would contribute to his fellow citizens’ pleasure and desire satisfaction. In this decision, it seems that the number of fellow citizens does matter. The number of people Daniel can help as a nurse is not very dependent on the total population, but the number of people that his soccer skills can delight varies linearly with the total population, and if the latter number is large enough, it seems that it would be quite reasonable for Daniel to opt to be a soccer player. So we could have a case where if Daniel is Belgian he should become a nurse but if Brazilian then a soccer player (unless Brazil has a significantly greater need for nurses than Belgium, that is). But once on the team, it doesn’t seem to matter much.

The map from axiology to moral reasons is quite complex, contextual, and heavily agent-centered. The hope of reducing moral reasons to axiology is very slim indeed.

The good of competent achievement

One of the ways we flourish is by achievement: by successfully fulfilling a plan of action and getting the intended end. But it seems that there is a further thing here of some philosophical interest: we can distinguish achievement from competent achievement.

For me, the phenomenon shows up most clearly when I engage in (indoor) rock climbing. In the case of a difficult route, I first have to try multiple times before I can “send” the route, i.e., climb it correctly with no falls. That is an achievement. But often that first send is pretty sketchy in that it includes moves where it was a matter of chance whether I would get the move or fall. I happened to get it, but next time I do it, I might not. There is something unsatisfying about the randomness here, even though technically speaking I have achieved the goal.

There is then a further step in mastery where with further practice, I not only happened to get the moves right, but do so competently and reliably. And while there is an intense jolt of pleasure at the initial sketchy achievement, there is a kind of less intense but steadier pleasure at competent achievement. Similar things show up in other physical pursuits: there is the first time one can do n pull-ups, and that’s delightful, but there is there time when one can do n pull-ups whenever one wants to, and that has a different kind of pleasure. Video games can afford a similar kind of pleasure.

That said, eventually the joy of competent achievement fades, too, when one’s skill level rises far enough above it. I can with competence and reliability run a 15 minute mile, but there is no joy in that, because it is too easy. It seems that what we enjoy here has a tension to it: competent achievement of something that is still fairly hard for us. There is also a kind of enjoyment of competent achievement of something that is hard for others but easy for us, but that doesn’t feel quite so virtuous.

There is a pleasure for others in watching an athlete doing something effortlessly (which is quite different from “they make it look effortless”, when in fact we may know that there is quite a bit of effort in it), but I think the hedonic sweet spot for the athlete does not lie in the effortless performance, but in a competent but still challenging performance.

And here is a puzzle. God’s omnipotence not only makes God capable of everything, but makes God capable of doing everything easily. Insofar as we are in the image and likeness of God, it would seem that the completely effortless should be the greater good for us than the challenging. Maybe, though, the fact that our achievements are infinitely below God’s activity imposes on our lives a temporal structure of striving for greater achievements that makes the completely effortless a sign that we haven’t pushed ourselves enough.

All this stuff, of course, mirrors familiar debates between Kantians and virtue ethicists about moral worth.

Sports injuries and the problem of evil

An argument from evil against the existence of God based on sports injuries would not, I think, be found very persuasive. Why not?

I take it that this is because of the retort: “The athletes freely undertook these risks.”

This free undertaking is not the whole of the explanation of why sports injuries are less troubling as examples of the problem of evil. Another part is the idea that there are significant goods at stake in sports, and real danger is a constitutive component of some of these goods. But that the risk is freely accepted is surely a major part of our lack of worry. We are much more worried about evils that befall those who did not freely undertake the relevant risks.

Note also that as a rule we do not—though there are notable exceptions—blame the athletes for freely undertaking the risks of sports injuries. We feel that, generally speaking, they are within their rights to undertake these risks for these potential benefits.

But if God exists, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He cares for our good more than we care for ourselves. And he has more rights over us than we have over ourselves. If this is correct, then just as we have the right (limited as it is) to accept certain serious risks, God has an even greater right to impose risks on us.

The observation that God would have more rights over us than do over ourselves by no means solves the problem of evil. But it helps.

Deserving the rewards of virtue

We have the intuition that when someone has worked uprightly and hard for something good and thereby gained it, they deserve their possession of it. What does that mean?

If Alice ran 100 meters faster than her opponents at the Olympics, she deserves a gold medal. In this case, it is clear what is meant by that: the organizers of the Olympics owe her a gold medal in just recognition of her achievement. Thus, Alice’s desert appears appears to be appropriately analyzable partly in terms of normative properties had by persons other than Alice. In Alice’s case, these properties are obligations of justice, but they could simply be reasons of justice. Thus, if someone has done something heroic and they receive a medal, the people giving the medal typically are not obligated to give it, but they do have reasons of justice to do so.

But there are cases that fit the opening intuition where it is harder to identify the other persons with the relevant normative properties. Suppose Bob spends his life pursuing virtue, and gains the rewards of a peaceful conscience and a gentle attitude to the failings of others. Like Alice’s gold medal, Bob’s rewards are deserved. But if we understand desert as in Alice’s case, as partly analyzable in terms of normative properties had by others, now we have a problem: Who is it that has reasons of justice to bestow these rewards on Bob?

We can try to analyze Bob’s desert by saying that we all have reasons of justice not to deprive him of these rewards. But that doesn’t seem quite right, especially in the case of the gentle attitude to the failings of others. For while some people gain that attitude through hard work, others have always had it. Those who have always had it do not deserve it, but it would still be unjust to deprive them of it.

The theist has a potential answer to the question: God had reasons of justice to bestow on Bob the rewards of virtue. Thus, while Alice deserved her gold medal from the Olympic committee and Carla (whom I have not described but you can fill in the story) deserved her Medal of Honor from the Government, Bob deserved his quiet conscience and “philosophical” outlook from God.

This solution, however, may sound wrong to many Christians, especially but not only Protestants. There seems to be a deep truth to Leszek Kolakowski’s book title God Owes Us Nothing. But recall that desert can also be partly grounded in non-obligating reasons of justice. One can hold that God owes us nothing but nonetheless think that when God bestowed on Bob the rewards of virtue (say, by designing and sustaining the world in such a way that often these rewards came to those who strove for virtue), God was doing so in response to non-obligating reasons of justice.

Objection: Let’s go back to Alice. Suppose that moments after she ran the race, a terrorist assassinated everyone on the Olympic Committee. It still seems right to say that Alice deserved a gold medal for her run, but no one had the correlate reason of justice to bestow it. Not even God, since it just doesn’t seem right to say that God has reasons of justice to ensure Olympic medals.

Response: Maybe. I am not sure. But think about the “Not even God” sentence in the objection. I think the intuition behind the “Not even God” undercuts the case. The reason why not even God had reasons of justice to ensure the medal was that Alice deserved a medal not from God but from the Olympic Committee. And this shows that her desert is grounded in the Olympic Committee, if only in a hypothetical way: Were they to continue existing, they would have reasons of justice to bestow on her the medal.

This suggests a different response that an atheist could give in the case of Bob: When we say that Bob deserves the rewards of virtue, maybe we mean hypothetically that if God existed, God would have reasons of justice to grant them. This does not strike me as a plausible analysis. If God doesn’t exist, the existence of God is a far-fetched and fantastical hypothesis. It is implausible that Bob’s ordinary case of desert be partly grounded in hypothetical obligations of a non-existent fantastical being. On the other hand, it is not crazy to think that Alice’s desert, in the exceptional case of the Olympic Committee being assassinated, be partly grounded in hypothetical obligations of a committee that had its existence suddenly cut short.

Canadian doubles

Since the shutdowns of the spring, I’ve been playing more tennis, with my son and with graduate students. Sometimes you end up having three people wanting to play tennis, though, and what do you do?

The canned solution is Canadian doubles where you have two people on one side and one on the other, you get two points for winning on the singles side and one for winning on doubles, you rotate the players counterclockwise between games, and you end at some fixed number of points, say 11, by a lead of two. And the singles court is used on the singles side while the doubles court is used on the doubles side.

This is a good game: alternating between being a single playing facing off against two and playing as part of a team is fun. However, we noticed two difficulties. First, the standard rotation scheme has the result that each time one serves, one faces the same person. That reduces the variation. A fix of this is to depart from the counterclockwise rotation. A more serious problem is that towards the end of a match, when playing on the double side, one can have a perverse desire to lose the game. For imagine that your partner has 10 points, you have 8, and the third player has less than 8. Then if your side wins, your partner reaches 11 and wins the match. But if your side loses, you may still have a chance to win the match later. This can sap motivation.

Also missing from the standard Canadian doubles is that in the interest of trying all combinations, it would be nice to have the chance to be a singles server and a singles receiver in the same match.

So, after a number of iterations, here is improved Canadian doubles (I am Canadian, by the way). Instead of playing to a fixed score, you play three rounds of six games. Highest score wins. Ties are possible. You can end early if you can see that the number of games left is insufficient to change the ranking between the players.

The first and third rounds have serving from the doubles side. The second round has serving from the singles side. In each round, positions rotate in such a way that each of the six arrangements occurs once. Moreover, the positions are so arranged as to minimize the same player “being on the spot” too many times in a row. Thus, no one serves twice in a row or is in singles twice in a row, and we rule out the tiring sequence of singles, then serving, then singles again. I generated the sequences with a brute force python script.

Round 1: Service from doubles side

Server	Partner	Receiver
B	C	A
C	A	B
A	B	C
C	B	A
A	C	B
B	A	A

Round 2: Service from singles side

Server	Receiver-Deuce	Receiver-Ad
A	C	B
C	A	B
A	B	C
B	A	C
C	B	A
B	C	A

Round 3: Service from doubles side

Server	Partner	Receiver
C	B	A
B	A	C
A	C	B
B	C	A
A	B	C
C	A	B

Hangboard build

With our climbing gym still closed, I made a hangboard for myself and my son, a quick and inferior clone of the Lyons Edge Hideout. My build instructions are here (with kind permission from Lyons Edge).

Multidimensionality of game scoring

One obvious internal good of a game is victory. But victory generally isn’t everything, even when one restricts oneself to the internal goods. Score is another internal good: it is internally better to win by a larger amount—though a narrower victory (but not so narrow that it look like it was just a fluke) is typically externally more enjoyable. Similarly, there can be the additional internal good—often created ad hoc—of winning without making use of some resource—winning a video game without killing any character, or climbing a route while using only one hand. But there are other internal goods that are not just modifications of victory. For instance, in role-playing games, being true to your character’s character is an internal good that can be in conflict with victory (this is important to the plot of the film The Gamers: Dorkness Rising). There is an honor-like internal good found in many games: for instance, in versions of cut-throat tennis with rotation, it makes sense to throw a game to prevent your doubles partner from winning—but it would feel dishonorable and like poor sportsmanship. Elegance and “form” are other internal goods found in many sports.

Enumerating these internal goods would be an endless task. Probably the better thing to do is to say that we have the normative power of creating a plurality of internal-value partial orderings between possible playthroughs and labeling them as we wish, often using terms that provide an analogy to some external value comparison: “more honorable than”, “more peaceable than”, “more victorious than”, “more elegant than”, etc.

Racquet sports

With the gym shut down, my teenage son and I have been exploring the world of racquet sports, including some more obscure ones. We love badminton, but we’ve been having too much wind (and pretty much any wind is too much for semi-serious badminton), so we also got a crossminton set. That was fun, though after the recent storms the wind is too high even for crossminton. Tennis has also worked for us, and is much more wind-tolerant, but I can't do it as often due to the danger of injury. We sometimes play ping pong on our kitchen table, but the table is a bit too small for a really good game (and the kitchen a bit too small for a larger table).

I also made wooden paddles for Goodminton / Jazzminton for light play with our seven-year-old. Sadly, it’s harder than advertised, at least for her, but I have been enjoying solo play, rallying with myself, one paddle in each hand. They could easily have been cut by hand, but I used my CNC router. The build instructions, with links to stl and svg files, are here.

"Commitment": Phenomenology at the rock wall

If you watch people rock climbing enough (in my case, only in the gym, as I have seen disturbing outdoor climbing safety numbers, while gym climbing safety numbers are excellent), you will hear a climber get advised to “commit” more. The context is usually a dynamic move for a hold, one where the climber’s momentum is essential to getting into position to secure the hold, with the paradigm example being a literal jump. The main physiological brunt of the advice to “commit” is to put greater focused effort into jumping higher, reaching further, grabbing more strongly, etc. But the phenomenological brunt of the advice is to will more strongly, with greater, well, commitment. And sometimes when one misses a move, one feels the miss as due to a lack of commitment, a failure to will strongly enough.

While once I heard someone at the gym say “Commit like you’re married to it”, the notion of commitment here seems quite different from the ordinary notion tied to relationships and long-term projects. The most obvious difference is that of time. In the ordinary case, a central component of commitment is a willingness to stick to something for an extended period of time. The climber’s “commitment” lasts at most a second or two. This results in what seems to be a qualitatively different phenomenology, but it could still be that the difference is quantitative, much as living through a week and living through a second only feels qualitatively different.

But there seems to be a more obviously qualitative difference. The rock-climbing sense of “commit” is essentially occurrent: there is an actual expending of effort. But the ordinary sense is largely dispositional: one would expend the effort if it were called for. Moreover, the rock-climbing sense of the word is typically tied to near-maximal effort, while in the ordinary sense one counts as committed to a project as long as one is willing to expend a reasonable amount of effort. In other words, when it would be unreasonable to expend a certain degree of effort, in the ordinary sense of the word one is not falling short of commitment: the employee unwilling to sacrifice a marriage to the job is not short on commitment to the job. The rock-climbing sense of commitment is not tied to reasonableness: a climber who holds back on a move out of a reasonable judgment that near-maximal effort would be too likely to result in an injury is failing to commit on the move—and typically is doing the right thing under the circumstances (of course in both sense of the word “commit”, there are times when failure to commit is the right thing to do).

Finally, the ordinary sense of divides into normative and non-normative commitment. Normative commitment is a kind of promise—implicit perhaps—while non-normative commitment is an actual dispositional state. Each can exist without the other (though it is typically vicious when the normative exists without the dispositional). In the climbing case, normally the normative component is missing: one hasn’t done anything promise-like.

Here is a puzzle. Bracket the cases where one holds back to avoid an over-use or impact injury (I would guess, without actually looking up the medical data, that when one is expanding more effort, one is more tense and injury is likely to be worse). One also understands why someone might fail to commit to a job or a relationship, in either the normative or the non-normative sense: a better thing might come one’s way. But when one is in the middle of a strenous climbing move, one typically isn’t thinking that one might have something better one could do with this second of one’s time. So: Why would someone fail to commit?

My phenomenology answers in two ways. First and foremost, fear of failure. This is rationally puzzling. One knows that a failure to commit to a climbing move increases the probability of failure. So at first sight, it seems like someone who goes to a dog show out of a fear of dogs (which is different from the understandable case of someone who goes to a dog show because of a fear of dogs, e.g., in order to fight the fear or in order to have a scary experience). But I think there is actually something potentially rational here. There are two senses of failure. One sense is external: one is failing to meet some outside standard. The second sense is internal to action: one is failing to do what one is trying to do. The two can be at cross-purposes: if I have decided to throw a table tennis match, my gaining a point can be a failure in the action-internal sense but is a success in the external sense.

In climbing, outside of competitive settings, it is the action-internal sense that tends to be more salient: we set our own goals, and what constitutes them as our goals is our willing of them. Is my goal to climb this route, to see how hard it is, or just to get some exercise? It’s all in what I am trying to do.

But in the action-internal sense, generally the badness of a failure increases with the degree to which one is trying. If I am not trying very hard, my failure is not very bad in the action-internal sense. (Of course, in some cases, my failure to try very hard might bad in some external sense, even a moral one—but it might not be.) So by trying less hard, one is minimizing the badness of a failure. There is a complex rational calculus here, whether or not one takes into account risk averseness. It is easy to see how one might decide, correctly or not, that giving significantly less than one’s greatest effort is the best option (and this is true even without risk averseness).

The secondary, but also interesting, reason that my phenomenology gives for a refusal to commit is that effort can be hard and unpleasant.

More on competitive sports and other games

I wonder how psychologically feasible it would be to generally engage in competitive sports or other games with one's intention being that the one's competitor win against as strong an opposition as possible. This is not all that difficult to achieve when competing with one's child: one may want the child to beat one, and to beat one when one is playing at one's best. The psychological difficulty is that one's intention that one's competitor win may well weaken one's playing. If one could play excellently with such an intention, wouldn't it be a laudable way to play?

To be as strong an opposition as possible, it would help to have the intention to win. I wonder if it would be possible to have two clearly logically incompatible ends at the same time: (a) that my competitor win against as strong an opposition as possible and (b) that I win. This isn't as problematic as intending p and not p at the same time. Maybe you can't do that, because any action that furthers not p impedes p. But actions that promote (b) can promote (a) by making the opposition as strong as possible, and vice versa. So it might be that incompatible ends like (a) and (b) can be both held together, though it is uncomfortable to do so.

Competitive sports

We think of competitive team sports as involving two groups of people, with cooperation within each group but competition between the groups. However, there is a better picture. We can think of the two teams as part of a larger cooperating group, which is subdivided into two subgroups. The two subgroups cooperate with each other for the goods that the sport achieves. The means by which the two subgroups cooperate for the goods of the sport is competition, much as when lawyers for two sides (normatively speaking) cooperate for the sake of truth and justice by competitively each giving the best rendition of one side of the case. Central among the goods in the sport case will presumably be athletic excellence (I am grateful to Dan Johnson for pointing out this good to me), but there will be other goods such as health, fun, entertainment of others, etc.

Of course, something similar happens in competitive individual sports: the individuals cooperate with each other in order that they achieve the goods of the sport.

From this high vantage point, all competitive sports--as well as other games--are a cooperative human activity. I think one can feel this particularly well when one wants to play a sport or another kind of game and an opponent becomes only available after some difficulty. There is a gratitude one has to the opponent for making the game possible.

Yet, paradoxically, the cooperation can involve each pursuing an incompatible end: their own victory. But ideally each pursues that end because the pursuit (but not necessarily achievement) of that end is what makes the joint goods possible.

The value of communities

A men's lacrosse team has twice as many members as a basketball team. But that fact does not contribute to making a men's lacrosse team twice as valuable as a basketball team. Likewise, China as a country isn't about 500 times as valuable as Albania just because it is about 500 times as populous. This suggests that an otherwise plausible individualist theory about the value of a community is false: the theory that a community's value resides in the value it gives to individuals. For the kind of value that being on a basketball team confers to its players, being on a lacrosse team confers on twice as many; and the kind of value that being Albanian confers on its members, being Chinese confers on almost 500 times as many people. One possibility is to see the relevant goods as goods of instantiation: it is good that the values of there being a lacrosse team (or at least of a pair of lacrosse teams: a single team being pointless), there being a basketball team (or a pair of them), there being a China and there being an Albania be realized. But I think that isn't quite right. For while changing the rules of basketball to admit twice as many players to a team wouldn't automatically double the community good, doubling the number of basketball teams does seem to significantly increase the community goods by making there be twice as many basketball communities.

In fact, there seem to be three goods in the case of basketball: (a) the good of instantiation of there being basketball teams (and their playing); (b) the community good of each team; and (c) the good for each involved in these communities. Good (a) is unaffected by doubling the number of teams (unless we double from one to two, and thereby make playing possible); good (b) is doubled by doubling the number of teams; good (c) is doubled both by doubling the number of teams and by doubling the team size. Thinking about the behavior of (b) gives us good reason to think that this good does not reduce to the goods of the individuals as such.

But perhaps this reason isn't decisive. For maybe the goods of individuals can overlap, in the way that two Siamese twins seem to be able to share an organ (though the right ontology of shared organs may in the end undercut the analogy), and in such a case the goods shouldn't be counted twice even if they are had twice. For in these cases, perhaps, the numerically same good is had by two or more individuals. If you and I are both friends of John, and John flourishing, then John's flourishing contributes to your and my flourishing, but it doesn't contribute thrice over even though this flourishing is good for three--we should count overall value by goods and not by participants. Maybe. This would be a kind of middle position between the individualist and communitarian pictures of the value of community: there is a single good of type (b), but it is good by being participated in by individuals.

I don't know. I find this stuff deeply puzzling. I have strong ontological intuitions that communities don't really exist (except in a metaphorical way--which may well be importNt) that pull me towards individualist pictures, but then I see these puzzles...

Sewing fun: Climbing chalk bag

With the semester ended, I took a break from philosophizing and sewed a bag for climbing chalk from worn-out jeans and a microfiber cleaning cloth. I mostly followed this Instructable, but added some worn-out guitar string to keep the top nice and round. Sewing is fun!

Education about sports

A lot of worthwhile texts, both fiction and nonfiction, make direct reference to particular sports or use sports analogies or metaphors. These are difficult to understand for readers who do not know the rudiments of these sports. But there is not enough education on these sports in school, except in the context of actual participation in them. But I suspect that only a minority of children in English-speaking countries participates in all of the culturally important sports that figure in English-language texts, sports such as American football, baseball, cricket, golf, hockey and soccer, understanding of which is needed for basic cultural literacy among readers of English (I have to confess to lacking that understanding in the case of most of these sports--my own school education was deficient in this respect). Thus, either there should either be broader participation--but that is unsafe in the case of American football and likely impractical in the case of golf--or there should be teaching about the rules of sports outside of contexts of participation, say in English or history class.

This post is inspired by my daughter's noting her difficulties in reading the cricket-related bits of a P. G. Wodehouse novel.