Do not look away if you’re not interested in tennis. Trust me: this isn’t ultimately about sport at all…
Last weekend saw an extraordinary sporting achievement. Rafael Nadal fought from two sets down to defeat Daniil Medvedev in an epic Australian Open final that lasted five hours and 24 minutes. Not only is Nadal 35, old for an elite tennis player, but he had hardly played for six months because of a chronic foot injury and recently had a bout of Covid. Only six weeks before the final he had wondered if he would ever play professionally again.
For tennis buffs, the win had historic significance. Extraordinarily, before this match Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic had all won twenty of the highest ranking grand slam tournaments each, six more than the next placed man, Pete Sampras. For many, this 21st win meant that – for now at least – Rafa was the GOAT of men’s tennis: the Greatest of All Time.
Debates about sporting goats (I revert to lower case to exaggerate the silliness of the concept) are as heated and passionate as they seem pointless. It’s just impossible to compare different players in different eras. Totting up wins doesn’t do it because how many titles a player claims in a career depends on other factors, such as the quality of other players of their generation. The greats of the past played with different equipment and didn’t have the rigorous training regimes of today. Who knows how a cricketer such as the portly WG Grace would have fared in an age of extreme athleticism?
Thoughts like this often lead people to jump to the conclusion that the idea of the objective goat is as ridiculous as it sounds. Any judgement about who’s the greatest is entirely subjective.
I think this sceptical move is too-quick and reveals how little people understand what objectivity really involves. Yes, determining an objective goat sounds impossible, but the idea is that goats are entirely subjective is much more ridiculous. It would be absurd beyond belief to say that I am the goat of men’s tennis, and that there’s no point in disagreeing with me because that’s my subjective opinion and that’s all there is to it. We may not be able to agree on who the goat is, but sensible discussions about greatness require us to consider objective criteria.
The impossibility of reaching a consensus on caprine matters is mainly due to the ambiguities of the word ‘greatest’.That does not mean our disputes are ‘merely semantic’. Rather, as David Chalmers argues, we should ask not what the true meaning of the key word in question is but ‘what role do we need this word to play?’
If you get clear on that, competent judges will tend to agree. For instance, we could just say that by ‘greatest of all time’ we simply mean the person who’s won the most major titles. Then it would objectively be true that Rafa is the goat. But we could want ‘goat’ to do the work of identifying the player who has achieved the most on all the different surfaces professional tennis tournaments use: hard, clay and grass. Here the maths is tricky but Nadal, with 13 of his 18 wins on the clay of Paris, would not come top.
The main thing that is not objective here is which meaning of ‘great’ an individual chooses to prioritise. But even this is not completely subjective. For example, it is not reasonable to argue that the consummate entertainer Mansour Bahrami is the men’s tennis goat, since no reasonable meaning of ‘greatest tennis player’ would put the criteria of showmanship top. It would be as daft as arguing that Pat Rafter is the real goat because he was hot.
It’s still true that even if we are clear about what kind of greatness we’re interested in, there is an inescapable element of judgement in deciding who or what is the best of anything. But it is wrong to think that judgement is entirely subjective. Tom Kasulis argues that it is a modern Western idea to link judgement exclusively with subjectivity. He gives the example of judging figure skating. There is no way to do this which guarantees competent judges all give the same score. But each of these judges is weighing up objective criteria and they tend to score very similarly.
This is also true in matters like wine tasting, where the very idea of objectivity is often laughed at. But good wine tasters really are identifying qualities in the wine. The only thing that is irreducibly subjective about wine is whether you like it. But that is not the same as what the quality of the wine objectively is. ‘It is good’ does not mean the same as ‘I like it’.
Our main mistake, I think, is to assume that objectivity must yield determinacy. Sometimes, we can be objective but the inherent imprecision about what we’re being objective about means that no definitive answer can be given. When there simply is no single meaning of ‘great’, the most objective analysis in the world isn’t going to be able to reach a definitive judgement about who is the greatest.
Consider, for example, the reason why so many tennis players say that Roger Federer is the ultimate goat. Other players may be stronger, more competitive, more victorious, but no one touches him for the beauty, elegance, artistry and intelligence of his play. (It’s striking that many of the adjectives used to describe him seem more suited to aesthetics than sport.) Pretty much anyone who really understands tennis agrees with this. If they don’t think that this makes him the goat, it’s because they think that other factors should weigh more heavily.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve been strongly inclined to call Federer the goat. But seeing Nadal win his 21st open title made me concede that his combination of skill, determination and extraordinary mental focus – one of the key skills in tennis – makes him a worthy greatest of all time.)
Tennis is just a case study here. The broader point is that in many domains we assume that where no definitive single answer as possible, there is nothing objective to be said and it’s all a matter of subjective judgement. But if we are clear what we mean by the words that we use, we will often find that, in fact, most of what we are disputing can be objectively judged. Just don’t expect objectivity always to deliver unequivocal conclusions.
Bargain Book of the Week
I’m starting a bargain Book of the Week offer for newsletter subscribers. This week’s offer is a first edition hardback copy of The Godless Gospel, which I’ll happily sign, with a dedication on request. These are going for £10 each, with free worldwide postage and packing for supporters, or £2.50 p&p UK, £3 Europe, £5 Rest of the World. If you want one, just reply to this email saying so and I’ll issue a PayPal invoice.
New at JulianBaggini.com
A veritable deluge this week. Two of my comment pieces have come out in the New Statesman online. The first takes the philosophical idea of an ‘error theory’ and applies it to politics. My argument is that the Labour Party, like the Democrats in the US and progressive parties elsewhere, doesn’t have a credible story to tell voters why they were wrong to abandon them, in part because they don’t properly understand the reasons themselves.
The other looks at the current crisis in the UK government through the lens of Aristotelian and Confucian virtue ethics. I link the degenerate culture of 10 Downing Street with the corrupt character of its head, something that both Aristotle and Confucius would have totally expected.
Meanwhile, over at Prospect there’s my interview with the philosopher David Chalmers about his new book Reality+. I’m hoping to get permission to produce an extended podcast from this wide-ranging interview. Stay tuned.
Then there is the last of a three-part mini podcast series on why the debate over trans rights is such a fraught one, with guests Catarina Dutilh Novaes and Mary Leng, now out on my website and Apple podcasts. If you’re at all interested, or perhaps baffled, about why this issue is so heated, I urge you to listen to my two insightful, thoughtful witnesses.
Finally, I’ve reviewed How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by the creator of The Good Place, Michael Schur, for the Wall Street Journal. In a nutshell: entertaining, mostly accurate.
A reminder that my next supporter-exclusive online Cafe Philosophique will be this Sunday, February 6th, at 8pm UK time. It’s an hour of conversation on a topic suggested by a supporter. This time I’m going for Michael Lawton’s suggestion ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner: discuss.’ Is to understand all to forgive all? There were other good ideas and I hope to get round to them in future sessions. If you’re not a supporter and you’d like to come, sign up now and email me for the Zoom link. Being a supporter costs from £5 a month, which is less than the price of a ticket to similar online events I’ve done.
On my radar
I didn’t want to review How to Be Perfect without having seen The Good Place so I’ve been binge watching it. I’m not sure it teaches you much about philosophy but it is very funny and surprisingly gripping. Any comedy that manages to include moral philosopher TM Scanlon has got to be an achievement.
I have a confession which I fear will spark a flurry of unsubscribed notifications: until now I have never read a single Dostoevsky novel. I finally finished Crime and Punishment and have to admit to feeling a bit of a philistine. There’s lots to like and admire about it, including some eminently quotable lines, (‘A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof’) but I wonder whether its impact is inevitably diluted at a time when many of its existential themes have become so familiar to us.
It was good to hear a few philosophers on the radio this week. Lea Ypi’s memoir of growing up in Communist Albania, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, was BBC Radio Four’s book of the week. And Nina Power was discussing her book about masculinity, What Do Men Want? on Start the Week. I’ll be reviewing this soon, so more about it in due course.
I’m continuing to chair the Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lecture series online, most Thursday evenings until late March. You can watch them all afterwards on YouTube but we really like a live audience to ask questions. Otherwise, I get to ask all of my own.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for your interest. Until next time, if nothing prevents…