Nina Windgätter

Much of what Stephen Mumford says in his book Football: The philosophy behind the game about the value and beauty of soccer resonated with me, despite the fact that I grew up in Alaska where there is a very different soccer culture. When reading the book, I could not help but reflect on how different our experiences of the sport have been, and the role that the institutions of soccer have played in our experiences. In this commentary, I argue that by failing to include a systematic discussion of the institutions of soccer in his book, Mumford idealizes soccer in ways that are epistemically and morally wrong. I argue first that soccer has a hierarchical structure with FIFA on top, and that most of the active debates about soccer are debates about institutional design and implementation. Second, I give some of the history of women’s exclusion from soccer institutions and argue that this history helps shape today’s gendered disparities. Third, I channel discussion of the dangers of ideal theory by Charles Mills to argue that when we idealize soccer too far from its unjust institutions, we might take men’s soccer to be the standard, and judge women’s soccer to be deficient. We therefore might engage in discrimination laundering, thinking women’s soccer is worth less than men’s because of the lack of fan engagement and conceptual understanding of women’s soccer, which were caused, in part, by women’s historical exclusion from the sport. This is particularly the case with the aesthetic judgements central to Mumford’s account of soccer. As he argues, our aesthetic appreciation is a skill that has to be cultivated. Given the widespread background injustices in soccer, we are far less likely to have cultivated an appreciation for the women’s game. In glossing over these gendered disparities, Mumford unintentionally reinforces gendered aesthetic norms, missing the opportunity to help his readers overcome epistemic barriers to appreciating all soccer, not just the historically favored men’s game.

In my dissertation, I argue that the enterprise of corrective justice requires answering questions about what is unjust and how we ought to set and pursue corrective justice goals. To answer these questions in a way that will allow us to correct for the persistent and entrenched injustices which result from processes of stratification in our society, I’ll put forward a two-tiered social contract theory, which will allow us to approach these questions in a way that will capture the agreement we can have and allow us to structure the persistent disagreement that we cannot and ought not avoid. In the first tier—the cooperative position—the parties know only that they’re in what I’m calling the ten circumstances of cooperation—the circumstances in which modern cooperation takes place. These circumstances includes the social complexity and opacity inherent in complex cooperative arrangements which have epistemic effects on our social cognition in ways that make our view of our social arrangements at best partial, and work to obscure important features of our social reality, especially those affecting those at the bottom of our stratified social relations. This tier generates four cooperative ideals—proficient rationality, democratic equality, social understanding, and dignity—that function as a theory of justice which can gain an overlapping consensus in society but still allow for meaningful disagreement to take place. In the second tier—the corrective position—the parties have access to the circumstances of cooperation, four cooperative ideals, and a general and specific domination contract. These domination contracts model how stratified social relations operate to constrain people within social systems, including the ways that people think about those systems. I argue that the parties would affirm a principle of corrective justice as involving coalitions of differently-situated actors working together over time to dismantle unjust mechanisms, and five desiderata for applying that principle to circumstances as we confront them. They would do so because that is the only way to overcome the practical and epistemic barriers put in place by the domination contracts.