Football, Misdirection and Lying

Football, Misdirection and Lying

The Catholic Intellectual Tradition has a long and complicated history in regard to what constitutes lying. Thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine hold the position that it's never morally justifiable to tell a lie. The speech act is meant to communicate truth. Intentionally communicating things that are ordered towards deception is disordered. Lying, or deceptive communication, is always wrong, then. Just like with any wrongdoing, there are different levels to how grave the wrongdoing is. 

There is debate within this tradition as to how much information needs to be given. When someone walks past me in a store and says, “how are you today?,” a long response detailing the state of my gallbladder is probably not in keeping with that conversation. Similarly, jokes are not considered to be lies, even though they involve momentary deception. So, there is an acceptance that different types of conversations warrant different types of responses. 

Clearly, we communicate more than just with words. If I stand up and walk briskly at you with an angry expression while rolling up my sleeves, your assumption will probably be that I’m going to confront you. 

Thinking about lying through the lens of action leads to some other significant questions. For example, in military battles, there are often attempts at deception. Deception is useful for protecting soldiers through camouflage, aiding in ambush, or in surprising an enemy. False Flag Operations in Naval Battles are a good example. Navy’s used to acquire enemy flags and raise them on their own ships, in an attempt to trick enemies into thinking they are passing a friendly ship. Once the enemy ship gets within range, the ship can attack. All of these can be defended as examples of lying, even though speech isn't involved.

From the traditional perspective it would seem to be immoral to engage in this kind of military deception.

As an assistant football coach, I’ve been thinking about another implication of this discussion. It is common for football teams to utilize misdirection. Oftentimes teams will call plays with the aim of tricking the defense. Football fans will be familiar with things like fake punts, surprise onside kicks, and flea flickers. All of these use pretty drastic means of deceiving opponents about what kind of play is coming. 

Even beneath these drastic types of plays, there are even more simple plays that seem aimed at deception. Counter plays for example look to show a run in one direction to get defensive players to over pursue in one direction, and then to run the actual play in the opposite direction. Similarly, play action passes are aimed at making defensive players think a run is coming, or at least freezing them to think about it, so that you can create space for receivers to get open for a passing play. 

Thinking about these means of misdirection seems to be immoral from a traditional perspective. These plays intentionally deceive defenses into thinking one thing is coming, so that offenses can take advantage of it. Similar to military deception, this seems to involve lying. 

However, I stated above that even this traditional perspective on lying holds that particular kinds of discourse allow for more flexibility here. Joking, for example, allows for momentary deception for the goods of laughter and friendship. I also gave the example of simple greetings. When we ask how someone is doing, we are surprised to hear a thoughtful and deep answer to that. We all know someone that overshares things about themselves, that don't seem in keeping with the kind of conversation being had. If this principle holds for speech, it should hold for other kinds of communication too. The example I gave earlier of approaching someone angrily looks different depending on the situation. If you just threw a baseball at the back of their head, that’s a different kind of situation than if you attached him to a long email chain he doesn’t want to be a part of. In the former case, you can expect a confrontation, in the latter case, you might suspect he’s pretending to be angry for a laugh. 

So, a principle that seems to be at play here is that we can identify the parameters around different types of communication and respond accordingly. In football, it is clear to everyone involved that it is a game. Two teams are competing to score more points than their opponent. It follows from this that offenses can use misdirection to try to help them move the football. And so, it seems that misdirection is justified, and even enhances the competition. In the same way that jokes and appropriate dialogue enhance relationships, misdirection ups the stakes of football and makes the competition all the better. 

What Principle Determines Whether a Thing is Alive?

Introduction

Modern Biology textbooks often begin with some variation of this question. The answer includes some assortment of the following characteristics: Made of Cells, Organized (or specialized), Grows and Develops, Reproduces, performs Homeostasis, and performs Metabolism. These lists vary. Some include a couple more attributes, some cut a few, and some group some together. My thesis in this essay is that there is a better principle to determine whether a thing is alive: namely, Aristotle’s notion of living things as self movers. Obviously, this expression will need explanation. I will be drawing on the tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to do this. I will argue that the modern conception actually fits nicely into the more explanatory and more succinct principle offered by Aristotle and Aquinas.  

I will proceed in the following way. First, I will explain St. Thomas’s notion of living things as self-movers. Second, I will critique the modern description of life as an amalgamation of features. Third, I will show how the modern view can be incorporated into the Aristotelian model. 

Living Things as Self-Movers

St. Thomas Aquinas tackles this question in I. 18. 1 of the Summa. He begins by outlining this principle of self-movement. The difference between a living animal and a dead one, is that a living one can move itself, while a dead one needs to be moved by another. Next, he describes how movement needs to be taken generally. Movement, for Aquinas, is closer to the word change. He is not limited only to locomotion when he describes movement. Rather, there are several senses of this term. An ice cube that melts into a puddle of water undergoes a kind of motion, or change. Similarly, a student who masters the spanish language has moved from a potential knowledge of spanish to an actual understanding. Movement, then, can mean any kind of change for St. Thomas. Non-living things can move. Rivers can flow, rocks can roll and planets can orbit. The key difference is in what is causing the movement. Non-living things are always moved by something outside it. Living things are agents, and so act on their own. Living things move in and through themselves. 

So, a living thing is simply that which can exercise change on or through itself. A squirrel scouring the ground for nuts is executing complicated actions ordered towards specific goals. Similarly, a sunflower moves itself in accord with the sun throughout the day to obtain maximum amounts of sunlight. Trees and Shrubs grow in a way that allows them to obtain sunlight. Even simpler than this though, the squirrel works to regulate an internal environment that is comfortable for the squirrel. Just as a sound engineer modifies all the dials and modules in a studio to optimize sound, the squirrel tinkers with all sorts of internal hormones and materials to be able to function well. The same can be said for plants who change the amounts of chemicals they take in so that water can be best preserved. Are these not types of self movement? The organism is executing and acting on the world to preserve itself. This, I think, is what differentiates the living from the non-living for St. Thomas Aquinas. 

Critique of Modern Biological Description of Living Things

As I stated in the introduction, modern biology considers things to be living that check the boxes in a relatively standard checklist. This checklist includes being made of cells, conducting homeostasis, metabolizing energy, growing and developing, responding to stimuli and reproduction. There are small variations in this list, but this is a pretty standard one. I think there are a couple significant problems with looking at the question of living things in this way. 

First, lists are not definitions. If you asked me what a human being was, and I proceeded to list off human beings, I failed to understand the question. Even if I listed off attributes that humans typically have, this is still not a helpful definition. To say that a human being is something that has arms, larynxes, and medicine cabinets does not answer the question. 

Second, definitions need to give a principle that sets the limits between types of things. Taking the human being example, we need to describe what makes them in common with other things, then appeal to what differentiates them. Animality is what it has in common, rationality is what separates them from the animals. A human being, then, is a rational animal. This definition gives the principle by which you can include and exclude it against other things. Even a helpful list of attributes (hairy, bipedal, joke-telling, etc), doesn’t accomplish this. 

The definition of life needs to be able to give the principle that separates the living from non-living, while also telling you something about all living things. I think that Aquinas’s definition is actually quite good here. Living things are substances (things that contain a unity), that are capable of self-movement. Rocks are substances, but they don’t have the ability to move according to their own powers. Squirrels are substances who also have the capability for acting on the world around them. So long as we adequately explain what we mean by the term self-mover, this definition seems to be in good shape. 

Reconciliation of Modern and Ancient Perspectives

While the modern perspective misses the mark from being useful as a definition, I think it can be reconciled into the Thomistic perspective. I think that most of the things included in the checklist are actually examples of being a self-mover. Let’s take each one individually. 

Reproduces. In Biology, reproduction involves a passing down of genetic material between generations. This looks different depending on the type of organism we are talking about. Regardless though, this is an act that the organism carries out. And so, is an act of self-movement. 

Responds to Stimulus. This characteristic means that living things react to changes in their environment. Living things are able to act differently depending on their external surroundings. Again, this presupposes an ability to act and change on its own. 

Metabolizes Energy. Living things convert between food and energy. Plants take in energy and convert it to food (while using some of it). Animals take in food and convert it into energy. All living things though have this relationship between food and energy. Again, this is an example of self-movement. Being able to convert chemicals is something that requires agency in some capacity. 

Uses Homeostasis. This refers to living things regulating their internal conditions. When we get cold, we shiver. When we get thirsty, we seek water. Lizards seek shade to avoid overheating. Some viruses will hunker down into a seed form if they sense the presence of certain immunological responses. This is another great example of self-movement, or agency. 

Grows and Develops. This characteristic is actually two distinct features. Growth refers to change in size. This occurs in part due to mitosis. By increasing the number of cells an organism has, it grows in size. Development refers to the different stages of life an organism goes through. Humans go from fetus to toddler to teenager, etc. Both of these also require the organism to be orchestrating and enacting these changes on its own. Rivers grow because of external factors, but foxes grow because of internal movement. 

Made of Cells. This doesn’t factor into this definition much, but is a can of worms that I intend to write about soon. Modern biology considers living things to be nothing but the cells that make them up. Aristotle and Aquinas would recognize that this ignoring of formal causation is actually a root to this problem. Living things have a formal cause that makes them alive. This formal cause is the soul. Corpses still have a material constitution of cells, but they lack the unifying principle of a soul to make them into the unified organism it used to be. I think this is a large reason why modern science can’t see what the principle that determines life is. By ignoring formal causation, science loses its ability to see underlying principles. In this case, agency or self-movement. 

Conclusion

I think the modern list of characteristics of living things fails as a definition. It does not point to a principle that separates living things from nonliving things. It seems to me that Saint Thomas Aquinas’s account of living things as self-movers does allow us to classify things according to a real principle. Nonliving things can only be acted upon. They are passive recipients of what occurs in nature. Living things, though, are actors upon the world. Living things do things. While the characteristics are nice examples of this, this is ultimately secondary to having a principle in place. By returning to this principle, science has a firmer leg to stand on in building up a true study of living things.