It has been said that the public at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games included connoisseurs and amateurs (“The magic of the Games is to bring together fine connoisseurs [of a] discipline and complete novices”) (1). Among them, of course, were many supporters. However, it is debatable whether the qualities of connoisseur and supporter are compatible: the latter is biased, while the connoisseur is objective, and therefore impartial – which, in theory, should prevent him or her from fully playing the role of a supporter.
French Olympic champion Laura Flessel commented on the recent fencing competitions at the Grand Palais in Paris:
“There is a public of connoisseurs, but there is also a very committed public. We needed this French chauvinism to push our fencers. We shouted all day long to encourage them. And if our voices break tomorrow, we'll take some honey.” (2)
For his part, journalist Vincent Duluc compared the “Olympix,” a French neologism referring to spectators who “only take an interest in a sport at the time of the Olympic Games” (3), to “connoisseurs:”
“Judo is without doubt the sport where the difference between the Olympix and the connoisseurs is the most glaring. The former shout and call for penalties at every turn, while the latter get agitated because they anticipate the phases of the game: in the end, the two noises complement each other.” (4).
These two quotations raise the problem of the compatibility of the qualities of connoisseur and supporter. We can try to support this by looking at the characteristics of the connoisseur.
The connoisseur is knowledgeable in one particular field, for example a sporting discipline: he or she has the skills required to produce a sound judgement, likely to be recognised as valid by other connoisseurs. Although connoisseurs may have different opinions, their judgements are always based on good reasons. These reasons are objective, meaning that they are not influenced by personal interests (5). Such objectivity is almost equivalent to impartiality, as expressed in this definition:
“Attitude, disposition of mind of one who ‘sees things as they are,’ who distorts them neither through narrow-mindedness nor bias.” (6)
The art critic Marie-Geneviève de La Coste-Messelière counted “disinterested objectivity” among the qualities of the connoisseur (in this case, the art connoisseur), alongside, among others, clear-sightedness, broadmindedness, distance and detachment (7). Clear-sightedness plays an essential role. To distinguish the connoisseur from the ignorant spectator, François Guizot noted that “the connoisseur looks at the beauties of a painting that he sees; the ignorant spectator looks at the painting without seeing the beauties” (8).
Disinterested objectivity evokes impartiality (9), but how can we define this precisely? One possible response is to refer to the norm that “like cases should be treated alike.” This can be used as a criterion of impartiality. For philosopher Peter Railton, this norm corresponds to one of the commonly accepted characteristics of morality. It can be found in many situations, such as the breaking of promises:
“If two acts of promise-breaking are the same in every factual respect, then if one of them is wrong, so must the other be; if one of them is to be judged blameworthy, so must the other. In particular, mere differences in who is involved cannot change things.” (10)
The “like cases should be treated alike” norm applies easily to our subject: if a foreign athlete performs the same action as an athlete from the same country as the connoisseur, the latter, because he or she is a connoisseur, will attribute the same value to the two actions.
This norm has been criticised. Philosopher Bernard Gert considers it “mistaken,” even though, in his view, it represents “the most common characterization of impartiality” (11). Gert illustrates this with a sporting example taken from baseball, an example which, for practical reasons, we transpose to football. Consider the case of a referee. At the start of the game, the referee is indulgent when fouls are committed by one or other of the teams. However, he ends up interpreting the attitude of certain players towards him as a lack of respect. As a result, he punishes harshly, fouls for which he was lenient at the start of the game. In this case, the referee does not treat similar cases in the same way, but remains impartial, since he does not favour one team over another.
Ruwen Ogien observes that the norm “treat like cases alike” is “a rule of formal consistency that demands that we persist in our moral judgments without explaining what justifies them” (12). It only has value if the “initial judgement” is morally justified. For example, in judging that “Hitler is a fine fellow” and that, by application of the norm, “all those who behave like Hitler are fine people” (an aberrant and scandalous conclusion), the initial judgement “Hitler is a fine fellow” is obviously problematic. The problem of the relevance of the initial judgement does not arise in the case under consideration: the two athletes, the foreigner and the compatriot, perform similar gestures or techniques, which authorises the application of the norm “like cases should be treated alike” (13).
If the connoisseur of a sporting discipline judges impartially, it is unlikely that he or she will behave with ostentatious partiality, which does not prevent him or her from preferring the victory of his compatriots. He or she will say, for example, without exuberance:
(a) “I am pleased that this competitor, a compatriot, has won the competition,”
and then add, with the same disinterested calm:
(b) “If we look carefully at the way the competition was run, it appears that the loser respected the spirit of the game, unlike the winner, who favoured calculation.”
A supporter, on the other hand, is likely to say (a) (exuberantly) and fail to say (b), or even to be incapable, for lack of skill, of even thinking about (b)...
References
(1) “Les yeux du monde se posent sur l’escrime montbéliardais,” L'Est Républicain, 29 July 2024.
(2) “JO 2024 - Escrime. ‘Je n’ai jamais connu ça’ : l’ambiance du Grand Palais les a déjà comblés,” Ouest France, 28 July 2024. See also, on a critical note, “Les Français sont-ils en train de pulvériser le record olympique du chauvinisme ?,” Die Tageszeitung, reproduced in Courrier International, 8 August 2024.
(3) “Paris 2024 : les ‘Olympix’, ces Français devenus experts du sport sur le tas,” France Télévisions, 6 August 2024. The word is “used by connoisseurs to mock those who take an interest in a sport only at major competitions,” and who “have an annoying habit of showing off their newly-acquired science” (“Les ‘Olympix’, ces nouveaux toqués de sport accros aux JO,” Le Figaro, 6 August 2024).
(4) « Les ‘Olympix’, ces nouveaux toqués…,” op. cit.
(5) However, it is difficult to assert that the connoisseur can have an attitude that is absolutely independent of his or her personal values and interests. Daniel Andler observed that pure objectivity would require scientists to “exclude themselves by thought from the world they are studying” (“L’ordre humain,” in D. Andler, A. Fagot-Largeault & B. Saint-Sernin, Philosophie des sciences, Volume 2, Editions Gallimard, Folio Essais, 2002).
(6) A. Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, Paris, PUF, 18th édition, 1972.
(7) M.-G. de La Coste-Messelière, “Connaisseurs,” Encyclopædia Universalis France, 5th edition, Volume 4, 1972.
(8) M. F. Guizot, Dictionnaire universel des synonymes de la langue française, 6th édition, Didier et Cie, 1863.
(9) The deduction proposed in our introduction: “the connoisseur is objective, and therefore impartial,” comes from the definition in the Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie. As Christian Godin points out, the identity between objectivity and impartiality can apply to the exercise of judgement (Dictionnaire de philosophie, Librairie Arthème Fayard / Editions du temps, 2004).
(10) P. Railton, “Realism and its alternatives,” in J. Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge companion to ethics, Routledge, 2010.
(11) B. Gert, « Moral Impartiality », Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 20(1), 1995, pp. 102-128.
(12) R. Ogien, L’influence de l’odeur des croissants chauds sur la bonté humaine et autres questions de philosophie morale expérimentale, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2011, translated by M. Thom, The influence of the smell of croissants on human kindness. An introduction to ethics, Columbia University Press, 2015.
(13) Ogien sees this norm as an “expression” of the “moral requirement of impartiality.” However, the term “consistency,” which he uses to refer to a “rule of formal consistency,” is arguably more appropriate. Roderick Firth defends this argument (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12(3), 1952, pp. 317-345).
To cite this article: Alain Anquetil, “The Olympic Games, connoisseurs and supporters,” The Philosophy and Business Ethics Blog, 22 August 2024.
