Greg: You’ve competed in sports, but most of your professional work has been in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. So what inspired you to write a book about philosophy and sports? Were you hesitant to delve into a topic that might not be considered serious philosophy?

David: Sports have always been a big part of my life, and still are. I played plenty of sports as a child—but even more as an adult, when I’ve competed in organized versions of soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, squash, field hockey and sailing. I don’t play all those sports anymore, but I carried on with cricket well into my fifties, and still do a lot of tennis, sailing and golf.

So when I started blogging on my new website a few years ago, a natural option was to focus my philosophical gaze on sports. I wasn’t at all worried that this mightn’t be viewed as serious—just the opposite really. The philosophy of sport is a well-established branch of philosophy, and is nothing if not serious, very much concerned with issues of morality, doping, enhancement, and so on. I was interested in a far wider range of topics, including the mental and political dimensions of sports, and one of my main priorities in writing about them was to be lively rather than earnest.

Greg: What is it about sports that raise questions of morality and philosophy?

David: When I first started writing about sports, I didn’t expect that they would raise so many interesting philosophical issues. But there turned out to be no end to the ways in which sports teach us lessons that aren’t easily available elsewhere. I came to think of sports as the philosophical equivalent of particle accelerators in physics. Just as particle accelerators allow physicists to find out how matter behaves in exceptional high-energy conditions, so sports show us things about human beings that aren’t normally apparent in less testing conditions.

For example, consider the fast-reaction sports like baseball, tennis, cricket, squash, and table tennis. In all of these, it takes less than half a second for the ball to reach the receiver. That’s no time for anything except reflex reactions. Yet at the same time, the athletes’ responses will depend on their consciously chosen game plans. This tells us something about the way conscious decisions guide actions in general, not just in sports.

As I see it, conscious decision-making does all its work before the moment for action arrives: you formulate a plan before the game, perhaps adjusting it during pauses in the action as events unfold. But once you have opted for a strategy, you must then hand it over to your body and its unconscious control mechanisms to execute it in the few milliseconds allowed by a ball arriving at around 100 miles per hour.

I now think that this is how decision-making works in general, and not just in the context of fast sporting skills. We make our plans in advance, when we have time to think and reflect, and then try to ensure that our unthinking bodily mechanisms perform them automatically when it is time to act. In my view, this division of labour explains an awful lot about how humans work. I’m now trying to persuade my non-sporting colleagues in the philosophy of mind that the sporting evidence undermines their more conventional theories of human decision-making.

“Sports teams also show how we often think as teams.”

Greg: Are there different issues at play in team sports versus individual sports?

David: Team sports also teach us things about human nature that would otherwise be very difficult to discover. Most philosophers and social scientists think of humans individualistically. Groups are just collections of individuals—in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and families.”

If you think about sports teams, however, it’s obvious that they transcend their individual members. Red Sox fans had to wait eighty-six years for their team to win the World Series again. But the fans weren’t of course rooting for a specific set of individuals through all those years. The players who were originally in the 1918 team were all dead by 2004.

The point isn’t specific to sports teams. They are just one example of how many of the things that matter to us go beyond “individual men and women and families”—countries, colleges, traditions, humanity itself.

Sports teams also show how we often think as teams, as well as care about them. When a team is working out its tactics, it’s not a matter of each individual deciding what to do separately, but of their asking what should we do?—and then all playing their parts when they fix on an answer. Of course, sometimes teams fall apart, with their members pulling in different directions. But a harmonious team acts as a single agent. Again the moral is a general one. Groups of people are often willing to subordinate themselves to collective decisions—hunting parties, friends on holiday, political units. Sporting teams are just the most obvious case.

Greg: In your book, you also discuss rules in sports. These rules can either be explicitly written down in a rule book or tacitly accepted by the players. Baseball is especially known for having several “unwritten rules.” These behaviors aren’t written in any rule book but were accepted by most players as consistent with fair play and good sportsmanship. In recent years, many Major League Baseball players have started to flout these unwritten rules. Is there an inherent danger that unwritten rules can fall by the wayside over time? How are unwritten rules enforced in other sports? And how do we judge which rules (written or unwritten) take precedence when they come into conflict, whether in sports or society at large?