An ethicist and world-class athlete reflects on her sport
The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners by Sabrina B. Little. Oxford University Press, 2024. 296 pp., $17.99
In this fun book, ultramarathoner and virtue ethicist Sabrina Little brings together her two lifelong passions: athletics and moral theory.
Little is Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership and American Studies at Christopher Newport University. A scholar of virtue ethics, she also happens to be a world-class ultra-marathoner with several national titles and a silver medal in world competition. In this book she invites readers to join her in reflecting on the role physical fitness plays in moral formation.
The subtitle of the book declares that “Good People Make Better Runners,” but Little’s argument is more the reverse. She argues running helps to develop good habits that both require and cultivate moral virtues. In addition, Little wants to improve the impoverished moral language in athletics; she wants to give us words for what athletics at its best can do for our moral lives.
The Examined Run is a deeply personal book; its tone is warm, welcoming, and conversational. It’s informative without being condescending and presupposes little to no familiarity with the great works of moral philosophy. Little speaks about her own moral and athletic development, recounting stories of her training regimen, injuries, competitions, and even delightful anecdotes like being locked in a bathroom after a race, awaiting to be tested for performance enhancing drugs. She also devotes attention to her career as a high school cross-country coach—a position that enabled her to train young women to become impressive athletes while also helping them to cultivate certain virtues.
I am deeply sympathetic to Little’s overall argument. Exercise makes you tougher, more resilient. Sticking to a regimen makes it harder to stay out late partying, or to overeat, or to consume various drugs and alcohol. Plato too stated that good habits formed by exercise can help to form moral virtues. And as study after study shows, Americans could use more exercise.
However, one liability for sports ethicists is that many athletes are lovers not of virtue but of victory. They aim to be the fastest, the strongest, the hardest, the best. I can’t help but think of the many athletes who were terrible human beings. The greatest baseball player of all time was an alcoholic adulterer. The first man admitted to baseball’s Hall of Fame was an inveterate racist. The greatest golfer of all time is another adulterer and is alleged to have a problem with prescription pills. The greatest basketball player of all time is a degenerate gambler as well as a . . . . well, feel free to watch the documentary The Last Dance on Netflix and make up your mind, but I think the technical term is a “jerk.” But, man, what a basketball player.
On the other hand, for every story about athletes cheating, juicing, corner-cutting, blood-doping, judge-bribing, gambling, point-shaving, ball-deflating, trash-can-banging, and outright knee-capping an opponent with a baton, one could counter with a tale of an athlete who guided a rival to the finish line, eschewing a hollow victory. Or a father helping an injured son to finish a race. Or countless athletes helping to make wishes come true.
Little approaches morality in athletics from the perspective of “broadly neo-Aristotelian” virtue ethics—a discipline that focuses on character development and the habits that help individuals become excellent or virtuous.
Aristotle asks in The Nicomachean Ethics, Is the acquisition of virtue up to us? He believes it is, but he also says that how we were raised “makes all the difference.” How do those two positions accord with one another? Furthermore, what’s the relationship between moral and intellectual virtue, for example? Do we have to know what is good to do it? Is knowing what is good sufficient for doing it? Don’t some people know the good but fail to do it? Aristotle and Little call this phenomenon “weakness of will.” We think we see it all the time, but Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle’s teacher, denied there was such a thing. And when Aristotle treats “weakness of will” (akrasia), he begins by speaking of it in common sense terms, but he ultimately concedes Socrates was correct. In his Ethics, Aristotle seems to question the notion that humans are moved by moral concerns at all.
Little draws on Aristotle for her discussion of “Performance Enhancing Virtues,” those positive character traits that help us perform better in given roles, especially athletics. The four PEVs she singles out are resilience, joy, perseverance, and humor. The last is the ability to laugh at ourselves and to see contradictions in ourselves. By contrast, pride is a performance-enhancing vice, according to Little: It can enhance our performance, but it’s morally vicious. Little follows Aquinas in calling pride the root of all vices. Intransigence, she says, is another vice. A stubborn athlete might think she’s persevering (a performance enhancing virtue) whereas she may actually be exhibiting intransigence (a performance enhancing vice).
So where does physical fitness fit in a good life? I confess that I think exercise is an important part of a life well-lived. But Little runs ultra-marathons ranging in distance from fifty to a hundred miles. Only the Proclaimers can boast of traveling a longer distance au pied. Speaking of walking, my grandmother, Dot Dot (may she rest in peace), always scolded me for exercising excessively and said all a person needs to stay fit is a brisk walk each day. Aristotle too was a fan of moderation and hitting the “golden mean,” so he may well have found the kinds of distances Little regularly traverses excessive. Or perhaps, given our sedentary lifestyles, what was considered excessive in earlier times may have become moderate now. Certainly most Americans tend to the opposite vice and cannot be accused of exercising too much.
What about philosophers? Were they good athletes? Philosophers appear to abhor exercise! What great philosopher hitherto has been an athlete? Despite what Jacques Louis David would have us think, Socrates notoriously had a paunch. His student Plato was a hefty fella, and Aristotle was a dandy. In fact it’s hard to imagine any philosopher exercising. Kant? Hegel? Rousseau couldn’t go for a walk without tripping over a dog and nearly dying. As for the theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, nicknamed the Dumb Ox, his belly was so big his Brothers had to cut a little bit out of the refectory table just so he could sit down to take meals. To adulterate Nietzsche, an exercising philosopher belongs in a comedy (a fact Monty Python parodied to great effect).
And yet, as Little notes, in the Republic when Socrates describes the education of the guardians in his “City in Speech,” the young who will ostensibly go on to become philosophers, physical exercise (gymnastics) takes up half of their education. Socrates’s concern with exercise was not merely theoretical: He regularly hung out in gymnasia and regularly exercised himself—including dancing! One of Socrates’s students, Xenophon, also records a rather lengthy exhortation to exercise Socrates gave to a companion who was in terrible shape.
But Socrates judged the benefits of exercise, above all, by its contribution to thinking. Exercise can help to combat forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and madness. Being in bad physical condition can even drive out your knowledge!Â
Little agrees, arguing that exercise is an important part of a life well-lived. And yet it’s not entirely clear to me that physical exercise makes one more virtuous—or that good people make better athletes (unless we mean morally good people make morally better athletes). It just seems like it’s something that can help.
In this case, exercise looks like it develops something like self-control rather than, say, the virtue of moderation. According to Socrates, as Xenophon reports, self-control was the foundation of virtue. But Xenophon’s magnum opus tells the story of another guy who demonstrated enormous self-control, Cyrus the Great, who put his self-control in the service of crime on the greatest scale: world tyranny! This makes self-control a morally neutral faculty; it can serve either good or bad undertakings. There have been, after all, successful criminals who exuded remarkable self-control in a well-executed bank robbery or art heist.
So maybe exercise can help us to cultivate moral virtue, but this is no guarantee. We would do well to note, Aristotle suggests, that most humans are not in fact virtuous or vicious; rather, we fall somewhere in the middle, possessing or lacking self-control, which is a kind of second-best virtue. The morally neutral character of self-control may help to explain why athletes seem no better or no worse than the rest of us. Some are admirable people, but others are jerks.
Understanding athletes to be governed by self-control might also explain why the virtues we think we perceive in athletes sometimes fall away. Many of the best athletes I knew in high school became fairly unfit adults—the habits didn’t stick once the goal of victory was gone.
Little has achieved her goals in this book. She provides readers with a welcome opportunity to reflect on their own relationship to exercise and morality. Books by or about word-class athletes abound, but it’s very rare that the world-class athlete also happens to be as “steeped in the history of philosophy” as she is.
Greg McBrayer is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ashland University, and he also works with the Ashbrook Center. He is the co-translator of Plato’s Euthydemus, the editor of Xenophon’s Shorter Writings, and co-host of The New Thinkery podcast. He invites you to follow him and The New Thinkery on Twitter.