Beautiful Performances by Morally Flawed Athletes

Abstract

Much has been written about the presumed interaction between moral and aesthetic properties in art, about whether moral flaws in a work or its artist can compromise the work’s aesthetic value. In the philosophy of sport, similarly, the beauty of an athlete’s performance may be undermined by moral flaws in the performance itself (e.g., in a case of cheating). Yet to be addressed, however, is a potential analogy between artists and athletes where personal moral flaws failing to register in the work or performance may nonetheless compromise aesthetic response. Along with tracing the conceptual terrain in these debates and drawing on earlier work endorsing pluralism in such matters, I will argue that an athlete’s moral flaws may indeed compromise the aesthetic appeal of their performances, even where such flaws stand apart from those performances. In contrast to creative artists whose presence is immaterial to accessing their work, in the case of performing artists and athletes—since they themselves are the vehicles of their work—it is, and ought to be, harder to avoid having one’s moral response to the person diminish one’s aesthetic response to the work. We want athletes to be moral exemplars, I propose, less because they serve as role models and more because we want to preserve unspoiled the aesthetic rewards they provide.

1. Introduction

Much has been written about potential interactions between aesthetic and moral values in art, especially ethical criticism of art where moral flaws in a work or its artist may compromise aesthetic appreciation [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. To a lesser extent, potential interactions between aesthetic and moral values in sport have also been addressed [6,7,8]. In the latter case, however, discussion has been limited to moral qualities of athletes and circumstances that are involved in or part of sport performances. What has been addressed in the aesthetics of art, but not so far in the aesthetics of sport, is how our aesthetic response to an object may be compromised by personal moral flaws in its provider, artist, or athlete, that ostensibly have nothing to do with the object itself.

In this essay I will address this neglected issue, arguing that an athlete’s moral flaws may compromise the aesthetic appeal of their performances even where such flaws have nothing to do with those performances. Where it seems intuitive to suppose that moral flaws in a sport performance—cheating, unsporting conduct, etc.—may compromise our aesthetic appreciation of it, arguably, if less obviously, personal moral flaws independent of the performance may justifiably compromise our aesthetic response to that performance. Showing this will involve understanding points of similarity and contrast between art, or at least certain forms of art, and sport, and a resistance to monolithic, unnuanced perspectives on such questions. I will also argue that in a certain range of cases, in sport as in art, it may be permissible either to have or not to have one’s aesthetic response to a beautiful performance compromised by one’s knowledge of moral flaws in its source. In a certain range of cases, in encountering the same athletic performance with the same knowledge of the athlete’s moral flaws, it could be permissible both for person A to have their aesthetic response compromised and for person B to have their aesthetic response remain uncompromised. I will briefly raise a corollary of my view, to the effect that we want those who provide aesthetic experience to be morally good people not because everyone should be or because they are seen as role models, but rather, or also, because aesthetic experience matters, and so we want to preserve unspoiled the aesthetic experience they provide.

Before beginning, however, a few preliminary remarks are in order. First, my focus here is on moral flaws undermining aesthetic appeal rather than moral virtues enhancing aesthetic appeal, since although the latter is certainly possible, it is not of central concern and does not occupy a prominent place in these debates. Second, although I will speak in more or less general terms of cases in which athletes or artists are morally flawed, I do not suggest that we necessarily know, or know with the same degree of certainty, about these moral imperfections and transgressions. In some cases, the person may have been convicted of a crime, but in others there may be common suspicion and some evidence but room for doubt. Thus, the phrase “morally flawed” is meant to cover cases of questionable moral status as well as clear-cut immorality. Third, “morally flawed” is used also as a general term covering a range of offences from relatively minor cases (e.g., lying or minor arrests) to extreme cases of evil (e.g., murder, rape, abuse). By speaking of all such cases using the same term of reference, I by no means suggest that they are comparable in terms of moral status: some are moral crimes and others are moral misdemeanours. Fourth, the examples I appeal to are to some extent idiosyncratic. Some cases that might seem worth mentioning no doubt will be omitted, in some cases because there are so many examples of the same type. There is no point, for instance, in trying to list the numerous cases of assault or domestic abuse among football players. Fifth, we should be clear that a viewer’s aesthetic response will not be compromised by a moral flaw unless they are cognisant of it. If the aesthetic appeal of an athlete’s performance is, as a matter of fact, undermined by some form of immorality, that will not affect viewer appreciation when such flaws remain covert, even if—were they to become overt—they would have such an effect. Actual cases of compromised aesthetic response or the lack thereof will not necessarily keep in step with perfect information and whatever norms may apply. In my view, the relevant norm will often permit either compromised or uncompromised aesthetic appreciation in light of the performer’s known moral flaws.

One more point is worth mentioning. Throughout I will be talking about aesthetic response and aesthetic appreciation. In both cases I am emphasising different dimensions of aesthetic experience. There are different theories of what aesthetic experience is, and I do not presuppose any particular theory of such experience here. But I have in mind the type of pleasure we experience when we encounter satisfying works of art and comparable kinds of experiences in other domains such as nature and sport. By ‘aesthetic response’ I have in mind the more immediate, less reflective side of aesthetic experience, which in many ways one cannot help, yet which may nonetheless involve, to some extent, other cognitive and affective states. By ‘aesthetic appreciation’ I mean the more reflective side of aesthetic experience whereby one inwardly affirms, in some sense rooted in aesthetic response but transcending it, the object of one’s appreciation. A useful approximation may be to say that aesthetic response is unreflective aesthetic experience, and aesthetic appreciation is affirmed aesthetic experience. The latter, I think, differs from aesthetic judgement in so far as one may affirm one’s aesthetic response without necessarily judging its source to be universally appealing as an object of appreciation.

With these qualifications in mind, we may proceed.

2. Two Values, Two Views, Two Domains

The idea that values come in different forms or types is familiar enough: there are moral values concerned with permissible and impermissible actions and with good and bad character traits; there are aesthetic values concerned with pleasing appearances and rewarding experiences in art and nature; there are rational values concerned with forming justified beliefs and adopting effective strategies. Here, we are concerned with the first two types of value in particular: broadly moral or narrowly ethical value on the one hand, and aesthetic value on the other. Although there is little doubt that these are very different types of value, there is some debate about whether, to what extent, and in what domains they might interact.

Perhaps the most pre-critically intuitive position in these debates is autonomism, the view that moral and aesthetic values are fundamentally different kinds standing as mutually independent. That is, the autonomist sees moral standing and aesthetic standing as entirely separate forms of value, each as essentially irrelevant to the other [10]. That a person happens to be physically attractive or unattractive, for instance, will have no bearing on their moral character. A saint may be ugly, or plain, or beautiful; a sinner likewise. The autonomist position may be held as a matter of absolute principle, applying universally irrespective of context, or more cautiously as an exceptionable principle, applying in most if not all cases and in most if not all domains. Although such examples may be intuitive, autonomism, in its most extreme form, denies that ethical criticism has any proper place in the evaluation of art [4]. Most theorists in the debate about ethical criticism adopt some form of middle-ground position, whether moderate interactivism [2,5], moderate autonomism [6], or threshold pluralism [8,9], the latter initially developed for art but here applied to sport and further refined.

Opposed to autonomism in its most extreme form is what I will call “interactivism”, the view that even if aesthetic and moral values are normally distinct, there are nonetheless some cases and some domains in which they interact. An extreme version of interactivism is highly implausible. No one credibly asserts that aesthetic and moral values always or in most cases imply each other, though Marxist criticism, e.g., [7], would suggest otherwise, at least in the domain of art. Extended beyond the art world, extreme autonomism implies, again, that physical attractiveness is a moral achievement, no matter whether we mean the appeal of an athletically conditioned physique—which might suggest moral worth in the form of a work ethic—or the appeal of someone who just happens to have features we tend to find attractive. Building muscle might have some moral significance, but having a handsome or pretty face does not. Of course, we might understand such characteristics as naturally agreeable rather than aesthetically appealing, and we might create art in which moral vice is signalled by physical flaws and virtue by physical pulchritude, but the point stands. An appealing natural vista will only suggest moral implications if one believes in a divine creator whose rather extensive body of work includes the vista. The notion of God as artist is a common theme in theological aesthetics [11]. Atheists, however, can appreciate the beauty of such a vista without any commitment to moral significance or divine creation.

If interactivism is plausible anywhere, it is in domains where the normal separation between aesthetic and moral values, for whatever reason, does not seem to apply. One such domain is art. In art it seems that aesthetic and moral values can and often do interact. Let us be clear, however. The idea is not that the moral properties of things depicted in a work of art somehow affect the aesthetic value of that work, although the quality of the depiction surely will. The novels of Thomas Harris do not suffer artistically because of the evil characters they depict, most notably Hannibal Lecter. The reason they do not suffer aesthetically is that such psychopathic characters and worldviews are depicted but not endorsed in such works. By contrast, works of art that excuse or endorse morally problematic perspectives are often subject to ethical criticism, proving aesthetically flawed in that a work’s aesthetic features, broadly construed, include the expressive and cognitive significance of the work, and these are affected by such morally problematic stances [2]. What sort of reactions and responses are justified in such cases is nonetheless a matter of some dispute.

Another domain where interactivism seems uncharacteristically plausible is that of sport. In the words of Stephen Mumford, “factors that are ethically bad can detract from sport’s aesthetic value, and factors that are ethically good can improve sport’s aesthetic value” [10] (p. 68). For instance, if we see that an athlete is cheating, or if we discover after the fact that they were cheating, that will tend to compromise our aesthetic appreciation of their performance, however otherwise beautiful. Likewise, an athlete who exhibits unsporting behaviour may compromise aesthetic appreciation of their performance even if they do follow the rules. On the other hand, if we understand an athlete’s performance as expressing a morally positive character trait, such as courage—challenging a superior opponent, playing through injury or illness, and so on—that will tend to enhance our aesthetic appreciation of their performance. When we speak of the ugly side of sport, or for that matter of the beauty of sport, we employ terms that are both morally and aesthetically charged.

This is not to say that aesthetics and ethics only interact in art and sport or that they always interact in these domains: a soldier’s wartime courage under fire may be beautiful, and a standard courtesy in sport need not be. It is to say, however, that since art and sport are two domains in which such values notably and plausibly interact, there may be useful parallels between them to explore in breaking new theoretical ground. To be specific here, although sport philosophers have addressed moral flaws within sport affecting aesthetic appreciation, they have not examined the possibility of external moral flaws playing a similar role. I will fill that gap here, along with exploring further parallels between sport and art vis-à-vis interactivism that have not been discussed in the literature. In addition, I will refine an account of what I call threshold pluralism in addressing aesthetic-moral interaction in sport and art alike.

3. Threshold Pluralism

One of the cases that has been discussed in some detail to motivate interactivism in art as well as sport is that of the highly controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a feature-length propaganda film sponsored by the Nazis and celebrating the spectacle of the Nuremberg rallies [3,10,12,13]. What makes the film noteworthy rather than a mere historical document is that, from an aesthetic perspective, it is a work of great artistic innovation and influence in the history of cinema: great artistry in service of evil ideology. However plausible autonomism might seem on its own abstract face—its aesthetic and moral properties do seem mutually irrelevant—in such a case as Triumph of the Will, the aesthetic quality of the work is spoilt by the morally repugnant content and purpose of the film in furthering the Nazi agenda. We may suspect there is something wrong with someone who could detachedly enjoy the artistry of the film without being disturbed by moral revulsion at its content [13]. An even more extreme example is provided by the fictional television show Hannibal, in which various serial killers arrange the remains of multiple victims in intricate displays. The point is not that we cannot distinguish the moral significance from the aesthetic properties of such displays, but rather that most people—understandably and rightly so—in encountering such a scene in real life would have their moral revulsion overwhelm anything like an appreciative aesthetic response. Being able to have such appreciation would be statistically rare indeed, either psychopathology itself or a benign yet highly unusual ability to abstract and compartmentalise.

In previous works, a colleague and I articulate a middle-ground position respecting the intuitive appeal of both autonomism, in general, and cases like Triumph of the Will that strongly suggest interactivism [8,9]. I will refer to this position as “threshold pluralism”, as it embraces both a moral threshold for aesthetic-moral interaction and posits a range of cases in which various responses, sometimes mutually incompatible, may be appropriate for different people. In general terms, certain moral flaws are too insignificant to affect aesthetic response, others too significant not to affect it, and in some cases, depending on the person, either a compromised or uncompromised response may be appropriate. What it is that inclines some people to be more willing or able to forgive moral flaws in such matters lies beyond the scope of this article. It is the permissibility of such pluralistic responses that is of foremost concern rather than what may incline us toward them.

To add some detail to the above theoretical sketch, consider the legal distinction between crimes and misdemeanours having a counterpart in the moral sphere. That is, some moral flaws will count as relatively minor misdemeanours, whereas others will count as significant moral crimes. The legal distinction may track these to some extent, but only imperfectly. If one lies occasionally, this may count as a moral misdemeanour but certainly not a legal one, although certain forms of lying will constitute serious breaches of the law (e.g., fraud). In terms of compromising our aesthetic response to the work of artists or athletes, it seems intuitive that moral misdemeanours generally should not interfere with aesthetic experience, whereas moral crimes, especially serious ones, probably should. This is the threshold part of the threshold pluralist view.

Just as there are trifling moral flaws that should not compromise aesthetic response and serious moral crimes that probably should, there are, again, intermediate cases to which either response may be appropriate. Just as it would be too detached to watch Triumph of the Will without moral qualms, so too it would be too fussy to have one’s aesthetic appreciation of a work disturbed by the knowledge that its creator, say, had a speeding ticket. Consider, however, an intermediate pair of cases: the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both acknowledged great poets, both confirmed antisemites [14]. Threshold pluralism suggests that in such cases the moral flaws may be serious enough to justify having one’s aesthetic response to the work compromised, but plausibly not so egregiously intrusive as necessarily to undermine one’s aesthetic appreciation [8,9]. Likewise, with Riefenstahl’s Olympia, also sponsored by the Nazis and documenting the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, an aesthetic appreciation of the film—including Jesse Owens’s historic gold medal performances—need not be washed out by the Nazi pedigree or the film’s much subtler, less intrusive elements of Nazi ideology [12,13]. This is the pluralist part of threshold pluralism.

The distinction between moral crimes and moral misdemeanours serves as a criterion for the posited threshold, both objectively and within individuals. Moral misdemeanours should not compromise one’s aesthetic appreciation, whereas moral crimes may. No one’s aesthetic experience should be compromised if an artist or athlete exhibits unsurprising human frailties: telling white lies, receiving parking tickets, paying bills late, and so forth. Some people may have a lower threshold than others with respect to immoral behaviour, however. If an artist or athlete is convicted of assault, for instance, this may permissibly compromise person A’s aesthetic appreciation but not B’s. This could happen if, say, A but not B were either a victim of assault or an advocate for assault victims, and therefore understandably more sensitive to such cases.

Even within individuals, however, there will be constraints on appropriate response and appreciation. If one is put off by the antisemitism of an Ezra Pound in approaching his poetry, one would expect similar misgivings about the work of his close cousin, both in poetry and in antisemitism, T.S. Eliot. Likewise, an individual’s gut-level response may conflict with the appreciation they should have, in which case resolving the conflict may be appropriate, perhaps by revising one’s appreciation or perhaps by quelling one’s gut-level response, depending on one’s further consideration. The upshot is that the threshold kicks in objectively at the point when moral misdemeanours become moral crimes. Beyond this, differences between personal thresholds may vary, subject to constraints of general consistency, in accordance with what is contextually reasonable for the person.

Although threshold pluralism was initially developed to account for aesthetic-moral interaction specifically in art [8], it is no less applicable to such interaction in sport. An athlete’s minor moral flaws inside or outside the game probably should not interfere with our aesthetic appreciation of their performance, whereas particularly major or intrusive moral flaws make compromised appreciation both more likely and more appropriate. As with art, intermediary moral flaws in sport are probably consistent with justified pluralistic responses. Specifying where the threshold lies between these subcategories may not be entirely clear, and we will turn next to an important distinction between two different types of moral flaws potentially undermining sport’s aesthetic rewards.

Earlier views of aesthetic-moral interaction in sport [10,12,13] focus on morally relevant features of the performance of athletes and the context of competition in illustrating the plausibility of such interaction, leaving little room to accommodate autonomist, much less pluralist, intuitions. Over such views, threshold pluralism has distinct advantages. First, in positing a threshold below which an athlete’s minor moral flaws are irrelevant to aesthetic appreciation, threshold pluralism agrees with the autonomist about the independence of aesthetic and moral qualities in such cases. In the pluralist realm just above the threshold, likewise, we respect both the autonomist intuition that some more substantial moral flaws need not compromise aesthetic response while also respecting the interactivist intuition that such flaws may alternatively compromise aesthetic response, that it is reasonable in such cases to respond either as an autonomist or as an interactivist. Furthermore, where earlier accounts focused exclusively on moral properties within sport as potentially affecting aesthetic response, threshold pluralism for sport as developed here is motivated in part to include the possibility of moral flaws outside sport sometimes having a similar effect inside sport.

4. External Moral Flaws

Mumford draws a parallel between cases like Triumph of the Will in art and notable cases of immorality in sport, in particular Ben Johnson’s drug bust that cost him his gold medal in the 100 m at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. As Mumford puts it, before the scandal broke, many admired Johnson’s world-record performance with “aesthetic awe”, though afterward “we no longer see it as having aesthetic value” [10] (pp. 73–74). I will call these Mumford cases, and what they have in common is a loss of aesthetic value owing to internal moral flaws. Triumph of the Will suffers aesthetically because of morally objectionable content bearing on our experience of the film, as Johnson’s sprint suffers aesthetically because of a morally objectionable action (i.e., cheating) bearing on our experience of the run. We cannot see the cheating in the run itself, a point of disanalogy, but it remains a cheating performance and thus an aesthetically compromised one.

In contrast to internal moral flaws that aesthetically compromise a work of art, there are also cases of external moral flaws—flaws in the artist rather than the work—that seem to compromise, at least to some people and to some extent, the aesthetic quality of their work. Focusing on an artist’s work or an athlete’s performance, we can distinguish moral flaws that are internal to that work or performance from moral flaws that are external to it but lie, for instance, in the artist or athlete themselves beyond the context of sport or art. ‘Internal’ here means within the work or performance rather than within the artist or athlete who brings it into the world. Thus, for example, many people find it hard or undesirable to engage with or appreciate the films of a Kevin Spacey or the standup of a Louis C.K., even though the immoral behaviour attributed to them evidently does not intrude into their work [15]. These are external moral flaws in my sense, external to the performances. The same can be said of Richard Wagner’s music vis-à-vis his well-documented antisemitism [16], or Woody Allen films or Alice Munro stories after disappointing revelations of their actions (or inaction) behind closed doors [17,18]. There are, of course, many other examples. The work may not suffer, but many former or would-be appreciators do, losing sources of actual or possible aesthetic pleasure and fulfilment.

There has been significant discussion of external moral flaws potentially undermining the aesthetic value of artworks [19,20,21,22,23]. Despite this, however, and although the philosophy of sport has addressed internal moral flaws undermining the aesthetic value of sport [10,12,13], there is a notable dearth of discussion of external moral flaws playing a similar role in compromising sport’s aesthetic value. To redress this neglect, we may begin with plausible examples, assuming the performances in question have a prima facie aesthetic value. We may no longer see Oscar Pistorius’s gold medal Paralympic and noteworthy Olympic performances as aesthetically pleasing, or the athlete himself as a worthy symbol of the spirit of sport, after his conviction for killing his partner [24]. The revelation of Michael Vick’s illegal dogfighting ring seriously compromises our appreciation of his on-field play [25]. Tonya Harding’s role in the assault of rival and teammate Nancy Kerrigan undercuts the appeal of her performances [26], and Conor McGregor’s unruly behaviour outside the octagon tarnishes his shining performances inside the octagon [27]1. These are but several of the many examples where an athlete’s personal moral flaws off the field mute the aesthetic appeal of their performances on the field. Consider the discouraging number of athletes in the United States brought up on charges of assault and domestic abuse, especially in aggressive sports like football and boxing.

This is not to say, of course, that such moral flaws affect everyone or affect everyone the same way. One may still judge the athletic performances of a Pistorius or a Vick to be exemplary despite their terrible off-track and off-field behaviour. Indeed, I do not deny that the athletic performances are exemplary. What I am saying is that, just as there are many artists whose external moral flaws undermine many people’s aesthetic response to, and appreciation of, their work, we find analogous cases in sport. There is no contradiction in holding that a work of art may be great but nonetheless marred by moral flaws [2]. So too, I claim, we may acknowledge the great achievements of morally flawed athletes even as we admit that such flaws may compromise our aesthetic appreciation to some extent. Note that in the Ben Johnson case as discussed by Mumford [10], the cheating, while internal to the performance, is not evident in the performance itself (i.e., is unseen), and so in this respect is similar to external moral flaws.

To complete the threshold pluralist picture as applied to sport, consider plausible intermediary cases where it seems reasonable to have one’s aesthetic appreciation either compromised or unaltered by an athlete’s extra-performative moral flaws. Examples here might include Wilt Chamberlain’s philandering [28] and Pete Rose’s betting scandal [29]. It could be reasonable for one’s aesthetic appreciation of such athletes’ performances to be either preserved despite, or undermined because of, such compulsive behaviour. The question of whether Rose should be in the Hall of Fame is partly, if implicitly, an aesthetic question. Although his records, including the baseball’s all-time hit record, are not in question, their beauty has certainly been marred by the betting scandal. Those who want Rose excluded are often concerned that inducting him would “look bad” or “be bad for the sport”. These are at least inclusively aesthetic concerns.

5. Sources of Resistance

The committed autonomist would look at the Chamberlain and Rose examples and see no connection between the beauty of these athletes’ performances and their problematic behaviour outside the game. Some might see psychological connections between these athletes’ drive to dominate in sport and a drive to dominate in other, more morally questionable ways as well. Some might even approve of such external moral flaws as essential to their athletic excellence, recasting them perhaps as alpha male virtues. The hardcore autonomist may also insist that the same applies to more extreme cases of external moral flaws, that the exemplary athletic performances of an Oscar Pistorius or a Michael Vick are in no way tainted, from an aesthetic point of view, by the dogfighting or murder. This would not constitute a legitimate excuse for immoral behaviour, of course, as the connection is hardly necessary, nor if it were would it excuse such bad behaviour. The autonomist, moreover, brooks no connection between the widely acknowledged appeal of these athletes’ performances and the presumptive if often ignored ugliness of their personal moral failings.

For the autonomist, the sources of resistance to interactivism are principled: the artist is not the art, and the athlete is not the performance. Thus, on this view, having or allowing our aesthetic judgement to be undermined by any external moral flaws of the artist or athlete is irrational, to fall prey to fallacious thinking. But which fallacy are we guilty of? It could perhaps be the guilt-by-association fallacy, although the connection between artist and art and between athlete and performance is more direct than mere association. Perhaps instead, then, it is the genetic fallacy, the illicit inference that a thing has a certain property because its origin does. Art and sport do not necessarily inherit moral flaws from the artists or athletes who create them, and when they do, it is because the flaws are internal (immoral content, cheating, etc.) rather than external as we are considering here.

So articulated, the autonomist position is certainly plausible. It furthermore reflects an analogous distinction to that in the philosophy of science between the context of discovery and the context of justification. On this distinction, there is a principled difference between how scientific theories come about—often an idiosyncratic, messy, even biased process—and how the results are justified [30]. Just as a scientist’s personal moral flaws have no bearing on the quality of their theories, so too for artists vis-à-vis their art and athletes vis-à-vis their performances. As an illustration, note that what an artist intends a work to mean may differ from the best or most rewarding interpretation [31,32]. Thus, in art and sport alike, we arguably have a principled distinction between the context of creation and the context of reception whereby moral flaws in the former do not imply moral, much less aesthetic, flaws in the latter. The proposed parallel between the context of discovery/context of justification distinction in science and a context of creation/context of reception distinction in art and sport is provocative, providing another glimpse into what makes autonomism and the autonomist side of threshold pluralism appealing.

My purpose in suggesting the plausibility of autonomism is to motivate a defence of interactivism, and specifically threshold pluralism, in a range of cases where an athlete’s moral flaws not bearing on their performance may nonetheless compromise our aesthetic appreciation of such performance. Where the autonomist might hold that having compromised appreciation is irrational and impermissible in such cases, and the diehard interactivist might insist that our aesthetic appreciation should be compromised and that we are in the wrong otherwise, the threshold pluralist position is that in a wide range of such cases either response may be appropriate. In some cases, an athlete’s external moral flaws may permissibly leave A’s appreciation unaffected, as autonomism would have it, but seriously compromise B’s, as interactivism would have it. Threshold pluralism allows for either response often to be appropriate. The question is, given the principles motivating autonomism, how is it that the interactivist response is legitimate at all? The answer is that there is an essential difference between performers and creators, as we shall see.

6. Performers as Vehicles

So far, we have stressed the plausibility of both autonomism and interactivism in the context of threshold pluralism applied to both sport and art. There are many cases in both domains about which, intuitively, it is reasonable either to have one’s aesthetic response undermined or, alternatively, to have it remain unaffected. In such cases it seems more reasonable to suppose that either response may be reasonable than to insist that one of the two must be erroneous. This led to the distinction between internal and external moral flaws as potentially relevant to the question of whether compromised aesthetic appreciation is appropriate. Specifically, interactivism is most plausible vis-à-vis cases involving internal moral flaws, whereas autonomism is most plausible vis-à-vis cases involving external moral flaws. What needs to be shown now is how the interactivist position can accommodate cases of external moral flaws permissibly compromising aesthetic value. Although both theories find some vindication in threshold pluralism, there is yet a further analogy to draw between certain artists and athletes in overcoming some of the resistance to interactivism discussed above.

In art, there is a vital distinction between creative artists (e.g., writers, painters, and composers) and performing artists (e.g., actors, musicians, and dancers), not that these are mutually exclusive categories by any means. In the former case we typically engage the work without having to encounter the artist themselves, whereas in the latter case we can only engage the performer’s work through an encounter with the artist themselves. Thus, it will be easier, and in a sense more forgivable, to appreciate the work of a morally problematic but usually absent creative artist than the work of a morally problematic but invariably present performing artist [9]. It is comparatively easy to appreciate many of the sculptures and fonts (e.g., Gill Sans) designed by Eric Gill, despite evidence of his having horribly abused his children and pets; by contrast, it would be very difficult—and rightly so—for most people to appreciate unsullied the standup and sitcom performances of Bill Cosby; when we encounter one of his performances, we are confronted with the man himself [9,33,34]. Unlike creative artists, performing artists are essential vehicles for an audience to encounter their work. In standard cases, we cannot encounter the work without encountering the person as well.

Qualifications are in order, however. The point is not that artists are entirely absent from created works or that the personhood of performing artists necessarily obtrudes into their performances. Certainly not. In some created works from which the artist is literally absent, the creator’s personality may nonetheless be stamped on the work, as in the case of auteurist cinema. Likewise, the virtue of certain types of performers, such as character actors, lies precisely in their ability to disappear into a role. The point is not, then, that a created work shows no evidence of its creator’s personality, or that the person behind the performance always comes through. The point is rather one of tendency. The person of the performer is literally present in a performance, whereas the person of the creator is usually absent from the work, which means if one is bothered by a moral flaw in the person but not the work, it will be easier, all else being equal, to avoid having one’s appreciation of a work marred by the artist’s personal moral failings when that person is absent than when they are present. Horrible person that Gill was, his person does not obtrude into his font, quite unlike the case with Cosby and his standup performances.

Athletic performances, I propose, should be treated in the same way, for athletes are no less the essential vehicles of their performances than performing artists are the vehicles of theirs. Just as we cannot see a dramatic performance by Kevin Spacey without seeing Kevin Spacey, so too we cannot watch an athletic performance by Oscar Pistorius without seeing Oscar Pistorius2. In performance, the separation between person and work is not absolute, though clearly an actor may portray a character much different from themselves, and athletes may exhibit different character traits on the field than off (e.g., aggressiveness and congeniality, respectively). It is the partial overlap between person and performance in sport, as in art, that partly explains and partly justifies the view that aesthetic experience of performance may be undermined by the performer’s personal moral flaws.

This result should be qualified, however. Yes, performers are people, and yes, this means that in engaging a performance we also encounter the performer. But this does not mean that we are always aware of the performer as such on some level or never suspend our disbelief in, say, the dramatic fiction. Nor does it hold to the same degree across all performing arts. Where actors on stage or screen and athletes on the field are seen by an audience, recording artists are typically heard without being seen, which may diminish the compromising influence of a moral response to the person on an aesthetic appreciation of their work. Thus, there may be more of a debate about the permissibility of listening to an R. Kelly or a Sean “Diddy” Combs than watching films of problematic actors or games with problematic athletes [35,36]. In cases of multiple performers, the more likely it is that the presence of a single immoral one will be muted by the ensemble, although a star will shine through in any case. There are, then, some types of artistic performance (audio recording) and performance context (ensemble) in which the performer’s presence may recede in that they are not seen or spotlighted, which may lessen to some degree the intrusiveness of the person in the performance.

What this means in the sport context is that there may be cases where a problematic athlete’s presence likewise may be less disruptive of one’s aesthetic appreciation insofar as the person behind the athletic performance is less obvious. For example, an athlete who plays in a team sport will, as with an ensemble actor or musician, be merely a part of the display capturing viewer interest rather than its focal point. The same would likewise seem to hold in individual sports where an athlete’s person is obscured by protective gear such as a helmet or by the presence of many other competitors, as in various racing sports when one is part of the pack. In either sport or art, the presence of a problematic performer sometimes may be muted in comparison with other cases where they inhabit more or less uninterrupted attentive focus and are easily identifiable, but this is consistent with such cases being still more intrusive, as a matter of principle, than those in which the creator is entirely absent.

7. The Need for Decency

One of the theoretical advantages of the account above is providing a deeper understanding of our desire to have the artists and athletes we admire be morally upstanding or at least decent people. Is it because everyone should be morally decent? Yes, but that is not the whole story, since it seems a far more urgent and personal concern vis-à-vis artists and athletes. Is it because artists and athletes are often, rightly or wrongly, regarded as role models? Yes, but that is not the whole story either. We may be right to worry about young people looking up to or emulating morally problematic celebrities, but our interest is also self-concerned. We may understand that someone can be praiseworthy for their artistic or athletic prowess yet also blameworthy for evident moral flaws, but when they fall short morally, we ourselves lose something, and we often feel the loss, or the threat of it, personally.

Along with wanting everyone to be morally decent and youngsters to have suitable role models, I propose that the need for decency involves a kind of self-interest along the following lines prompted by my threshold pluralist account. First, aesthetic experience is something that matters to us. It is special, something we care about having and preserving. Second, it is not readily available in everyday life. It is most concentrated, if still rare, only in such domains as nature, art, and sport. Therefore, we want our artists and athletes to be decent people because we want to preserve unspoiled the aesthetic rewards that they provide. This probably will not move the diehard autonomist, who insists that the distinction between moral and aesthetic value is not just principled but holds absolutely, even in exceptional domains like art and sport where the two types of norms seem to coincide in that appreciating one seems to involve taking account of the other. Short of such extremes, however, where aesthetic experience is at a premium, at once special and fragile, we need those who provide it to help us protect it.