Is Pride in a Sports Team Foolish Pride? (By Guest Blogger Brad Cokelet)
I had a friend in high school, let’s call him Randy the Rebel, who was proud to have never read any of the assigned books for any of his English classes. I remember one break during college when he said he was no longer proud of that - he realized his pride had been foolish because not reading the books was nothing to be proud of.
This raises an interesting question: what should we, and what should we not, be proud of?
In thinking about this it is useful distinguish between two reasons we might have for saying that someone’s pride is foolish. The first is that the person is proud of something morally or ethically objectionable. The Nazi guard’s pride in having killed more prisoners than any other is foolish, and itself immoral, because nothing immoral is something to be proud of. But, as Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued, we may also criticize someone’s pride simply because it is inappropriate; some things are nothing to be proud of even though they are not immoral. Take, for example, my friend Randy’s “feat” of not reading the assigned books.
But what, then, makes something an appropriate object of pride? What does Randy’s “feat” lack?
One suggestion, built on Phillipa Foot's comments in her paper “Moral Beliefs” is as follows: in order to be an appropriate object of pride a thing must (1) belong to the person who is proud of it and (2) provide the person with some advantage or be an achievement. On this view, Randy’s pride was inappropriate because not having read the books was not really much of an achievement and provided him with no overall advantage. Personally, I like this but lean towards making the advantage bit a necessary condition; I think it is foolish to be proud of something that is not good for you.
D’Arms and Jacobson have recently objected to this account by appeal to the example of a sports fan. Consider a fan who is proud of the Buccaneers. On Foot’s view, this seems inappropriate because the team is not something that belongs to the fan. Or so D’Arms and Jacobson claim. On the contrary, I think that when we say that a fan is proud of his team, we really mean that she is proud to be a fan of a winning team, and that *is* something that belongs to her.
But even if that response works, I have to admit that on my view being a sports fan, even of a winning team, is not much to be proud of because it is not much of an achievement (it is mostly luck) and gives you only a minimal advantage (bragging rights, maybe the spoils from an office pool, etc.) I think it is foolish to be proud of your favorite team’s accomplishments.