For the first time in a fortnight, breakfast today was not spent in front of the television watching the Winter Olympics. The last time the screen intruded on the most important meal of the day (well, of the morning anyway) was for the 2017 Australian Open tennis final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. This has made the last two weeks feel like a kind of holiday or convalescence.
Many of the winter sports combine athleticism, skill and artistry in ways that leave me awe-struck. This combination of elements, however, is also what made me somewhat dismissive of them when I was younger. It seemed to me deeply unsatisfactory that any sport should require judges’ scores. In football, the winner is the team that scores most goals, in running the person who crosses the line first. But in ice dance or figure skating, a panel awards marks, including those for “interpretation”, which rely a lot on their own interpretations.
My concerns about this were finally put to rest recently when I read comparative philosopher Tom Kasulis’s brilliant Intimacy or Integrity. The book concerns the different emphases in ways of thinking found in the West and in East Asia. One of these concerns notions of objectivity. In the West, objectivity is by definition something that requires no personal judgement. If something could be, in principle, determined without any human being exercising judgement, then it is objective. If not, it is subjective. According to this way of looking at things, figure skating is definitely not objectively marked.
In East Asia, however, objectivity is not necessarily and always separate from personal judgement. Kasulis gives the example of gymnastics, which is in many easy similar to figure skating in its judging. Each judge has to use their personal judgement and there will not be complete agreement. However, it is not like film criticism, where we expect huge differences of opinion. Expert judges tend to give very similar scores. In doing so they are being as objective as they can be. But their kind of objectivity cannot be separated from their expertise, from their intimate knowledge of the domain they are judging.
There is something right in this. Argue it’s not “objectivity” if you like but it’s certainly not pure subjectivity either. If, as Thomas Nagel persuasively argues, objectivity is a matter of degree, since no-one can see the “view from nowhere”, we can at least see how forms of knowledge and judgement that require experience and intimate acquaintance can achieve very high degrees of objectivity indeed.
The case for considering figure skating et al bona fide sports is clinched when you turn this analysis around and look at the other so-called objectively scored sports. What you actually find is that none dispense with the judgement of experts at all. In a game of hockey or soccer, for example, referees are constantly making judgements about what is or is not fair play. Some of these could in principle be outsourced to more accurate computers but many could not, since the rules themselves require interpretation. Whether someone is unfairly “interfering with play”, for example, is not and cannot be fully specified. So although it looks like 3-2 is a neat, clear, objective win, very often that score was the result of many decisions that were perhaps even less objective than those of the ice dance judges.
Even speed events can’t dispense with judgement. In the UK we’ve seen a lot of Elise Christie’s misadventures in short track speed skating. More games than not required judges to pore over video footage to see if anyone had skated unfairly. Who crossed the line first was never the final word on the result. And even when there is little for judges to do during an event, they have to decide what is fair equipment and fair medication beforehand.
So sports fans who, like me, find the taint of subjectivity getting in the way of their enjoyment of events scored by judges should relax. Those sports are scored more objectively than you thought, while others are scored less objectively than we’d like to think. One of the reasons sport is so thrilling precisely because success or failure depends on factors that cannot be reduced to algorithms. The expert judgement of both athletes and judges is part and parcel of the spectacle. That should enhance our appreciation, not detract from it.
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