Randolph Feezell writes, “Celebrated athletes are role models, not moral exemplars.” (Feezell 32). He justifies them as being role models by indicating that they become lusory objects when playing sports, under his own criteria. Feezell defines a lusory object as, “…an object whose meaning or significance cannot be understood independent of the way in which the game is defined and interpreted in terms of its lusory means and lusory goals, that is, its rules and conventions.”(Feezell 31). He compares athletes to actors in a movie and suggests that their participation in sports includes more than an aesthetic appeal. Feezell discusses that these lusory objects, “whose meaning and significance are internal to the world of the sport in which they excel,” is due to them playing in an autotelic domain of the sports competition with its own rules and bounds. (Feezell 32).
Feezell says that the reason that athletes can be role models is because first, that there exists some threshold of knowledge that must be had in order to consider the athlete to be a moral exemplar where the knowledge creates the model to be modeled. Second, because he says, “… exemplarism wants celebrated athletes to recognize their moral influence on others, it cannot object to the notion that celebrated athletes have a special influence on how others, especially young athletes, understand the ethical aspects of sports participation.” (Feezell 33). Feezell concludes with discussing that because of these points, athletes are to be role models but not moral exemplars (Feezell 32).
While I do agree that athletes are role models, I disagree with Feezell’s rationale about that and absolving them of moral exemplar status. Anyone in pursuit of making any sound moral judgment cannot reduce a person to a lusory object; in the context of Feezell’s argument, the spectators can’t pass legitimate moral judgments on lusory athletes for the same reasons spectators can’t pass legitimate moral judgments on lusory baseball bats. By creating a special class of elite people and calling them ‘lusory objects’, Feezell doesn’t absolve them of the moral responsibility that all extant people carry equally at all times in any reasonable society to pursue actions that ought to be deemed morally exemplary. What I mean here is that the only kind of ‘Barry Bonds’ that can be a ‘lusory object’ is his likeness such as found on baseball cards or similar merchandise.
I vehemently disagree with Feezell when he writes that, “Our sports heroes should be thought of more as imagined objects or fictional characters in a drama, whose character and exploits we admire within this illusory domain, rather than persons whose life outside of sports is exemplary, noteworthy, or even interesting.”(Feezell 31). To suggest that it’s appropriate to ever consider that it’s morally appropriate to dehumanize any human being in this way is to install a level of unjustified control into a spectator which reduces their individual agency and free will. This mechanism enables spectators to view another person as an object, depending on the narrative into which they’re placed, onto which any moral or immoral action may then be justifiably be taken. This eerily resembles the same human flaw that Stanley Milgram identified in his book Obedience to Authority, where people engaged in normative situations that caused them to unknowingly take unethical actions. To limit one’s perception of the authenticity of another human being because of another human beings authority who perpetuates the behavior reveals that Feezell may have not fully considered the implications of his argument.
Because a spectator believes they can reduce a person into a lusory object suggests that it’s not because the other is a lusory object. It’s because they’re perceived as a lusory object by the spectators who are willing to live vicariously through another human being, or any other individual reason, that the behavior becomes normative and seems to exist to substantiate Feezell’s argument. Feezell compounds his error when he writes, “…the epistemological problem arises because we simply do not know enough about our sport heroes in order to believe that they are moral exemplars whose life or conduct in general is worthy of imitation.” (Feezell 32). Feezell thought this because his argument is posited on the dualistic paradigm of there only being “lusory”, and “not lusory” people as a normative case, on which his definition of role model is constructed. This lacks the requisite overlap of ipsative criteria held by individuals to which this purportedly compiled information is evaluated against. While there’s a threshold of knowledge that’s relevant to making such a decision, there’s not some singular threshold of acquired knowledge that causes someone to become a moral exemplar. Feezell’s argument makes the spectator a library of information, incapable of passing rational moral judgments. It’s important that both the knowledge and criteria overlap with spectators’ internal valuations in such a way that the evaluation leads to “TRUE” in the case of answering to whether or not the celebrated athlete is a, “moral exemplar whose life or conduct in general is worthy of imitation,” as Feezell writes (Feezell 32). Due to this disconnect, I’d say that Feezell’s argument is missing critical information that could possibly be better made by expanding his definition of ‘lusory’.
If there are more than the set of objects that are lusory or not lusory, what are both of these the respective subsets of that would include the subset of what all the players actually are, that may suggest some intermediary state between lusory and not lusory? In the case of professional wrestling like the the WWE, individual attitude becomes super-lusory, and this is called kayfabe. This word is not easily understood in the context of the English language due to constraints stemming from English thought and that may have actually been Feezell’s most overlooked point. Feezell’s suggestion that there’s a flaw rooted in the linguistic effects of the English language is quite astute when he wrote, “It is a failure of our language, or rather our linguistic sensitivities, that we refer to the person, qua father and husband, with the same name as the lusory object.” (Feezell 31). While objects may be lusory for various reasons, athletes don’t really fit into Feezell’s definition. This suggests that a more complicated process is happening which might be more aptly discussed in the context of a discussion that includes kayfabe and English linguistics. The discussion is outside the scope of this paper.
In conclusion, Feezell isn’t alone in his lapse in logic with his attempt to make the case that people can be objects in the same way baseball’s are objects. These flaws in logic have previously enabled people to egregiously conclude that it’s possible to depersonify a human being in such a way that moral actions may be taken against them such they’re somehow absolved of judgment. This appears to be rooted in the linguistic structure of the English language that facilitates this type of behavior. In being naive to this, Feezell bridged the gap in his own logic by discussing idea of athletes having “heightened responsibilities”. Further investigation into his salient argument on those grounds may reveal a link that may possibly better justify his argument.
Works Cited
Feezell, Randolph. “Celebrated Athletes, Moral Exemplars, and Lusory Objects.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, vol. 32, no. 1, May 2005, pp. 20–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2005.9714668. Accessed 06Apr2025.
Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority. Harper, 1974.