Suits’ Utopia and Human Sports

Abstract

In this article, I consider Bernard Suits’ Utopia where the denizens supposedly fill their days playing Utopian sports, with regard to the relevance of the thought experiment for understanding the sports we currently play and have played. I argue that the thought experiment is irrelevant for understanding our current and past sports, i.e. human sports. I identify two views on games and sports in Utopia; the strong view of games and sports in Utopia is that game and sport playing would be inevitable in Utopia; the weak view of games and sports in Utopia is that game and sport playing in Utopia is possible. Whereas the strong view is obviously false, the weak view can be defended. However, this means that it is underdetermined whether there at all will be sports in Suits’ Utopia and this in itself throws seriously doubt upon the viability of the thought experiment vis-à-vis human sports. Furthermore, while human and potential Utopian sports will share the same internal purpose of winning sport competitions, they will have widely differing external functions or purposes since they are part of radically different circumstances. Human sports are born out of the non-Utopian circumstances of the human condition and fulfil our needs for competition and domination, whereas Suits’ Utopians would have no such needs, and the way in which they would potentially engage in their sports would be quite foreign to us. On closer inspection, when we think seriously through the circumstances in which Utopian sports would operate and how human sports function in the non-Utopian state of affairs we call our world, we find that the former do not to any relevant degree inform us about the latter. Suits’ Utopia provides no guide for thinking about human sports.