Jack Casey

What reason, if any, is there to object to the use of Artificial Intelligence in sport? While the existing literature has investigated several issues about the ethics of AI in sport, these studies have tended to focus on how general worries about AI such as transparency, privacy, bias, impacts on human rights and inequalities that may arise or be exacerbated by the use of AI in sport. In this paper, we will take a different approach by asking how such technologies may change the excellences that a sport is testing and developing. After identifying failures in existent arguments for analogous cases of proscription, we offer a novel framework for understanding proscription. We argue that the introduction of a novel technology risks changing the cluster of excellences that a sport is testing and promoting. Focusing on the strategic and tactical thinking of the coach in football, we argued that the cluster of excellences in football would be contracted if this were outsourced to AI systems. We will argue that this shows the need for a widespread debate involving those involved in sport about whether to allow sports to be transformed in this way or not.

In this paper Casey argues that formalism, as an account of the nature of sport which takes sports to be constituted fully by their rules, cannot deal with some of the apparent problems that arise when considering sport through the lens of a possible worlds analysis of modality. He argues that formalism fails to get many of our intuitions regarding the identity and non-identity of games across worlds correct; this problem he calls the identification problem. He also argues that this is also a problem for two other popular accounts of the nature of sport – conventionalism and broad internalism – given the role that formalism plays in underpinning them.

Most philosophers treat ontological dependence and metaphysical dependence as distinct relations. A number of key differences between the two relations are usually cited in support of this claim: ontological dependence's unique connection to existence, differing respective connections to metaphysical necessitation, and a divergence in their formal features. Alongside reshaping some of the examples used to maintain the distinction between the two, I argue that the additional resources offered by the increased attention the notion of grounding has received in recent years potentially offer us a way to unite the two relations, promising the attendant benefits parsimony offers, as a result.