COMPETITION: ITS NATURE EXTENT AND
JUSTIFICATION
By
Dr. David Hitchcock Professor
of Philosophy McMaster
University Honorary
President of the International Association of Greek Philosophy. “áéÝí
áñéóôåýåéí
êáé
õðåßñï÷ïí
Ýììåíáé
Üëëùí”
(Always be the best and excel above all others.)
– Hippolochus to his son Glaucus, in Homer’s Iliad 6.208
Hippolochus’
advice to his son promotes a competitive ideal: to be better than anybody
else. We
see this sort of advice, and its results, in many aspects of our everyday
life. Recently we were thrilled by the performance of Canada’s athletes
at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy: the smashing victories of the
women’s hockey team, the gold medal in curling for the young
Newfoundlanders, Cindy Klassen’s record five medals at a single
Olympics, in speed skating. As our gold medallist cross-country skier
Chandra Crawford put it, “Canadians are no longer afraid to be the
best.” As
buyers of goods and services, we value competition for our business. We
like to know that, if we are not satisfied with a certain barber or a
certain restaurant, we have the freedom to go to another one. And we want
real competition, without collusion on prices or services offered. The
cozy oligopoly of Canada’s big banks, with their lock-step rate
increases and high charges for many services, offends many of us. Many
Canadians want more competition in the financial services sector. In all
sectors, we want businesses to offer us quality products at reasonable
prices. Free and fair competition, where each business strives to be the
best, is our best guarantee. In
our own recreational activities, some of us are very competitive. We play
squash to win, aim to take home some extra money from our winnings at
poker, get intensely involved in a friendly bridge or euchre game. Is
all this competition good for us? Or is there a down side to competitive
striving, a feeling that your worth depends on being better than others
and that you are a loser if you are not? And what exactly is competition
anyway? When
there is a competition, there is something being shared out among them.
When businesses compete in a given sector of the economy, they compete for
customers. When athletes or sports teams compete, they compete for
victory. When political parties compete, they compete for votes. In a
competition, there is always something being distributed among the rivals
as a result of the competition. The
thing that is being shared out must be what the economists call a
“diminishable” good. That is, whatever share of it goes to one
competitor is no longer available. We cannot compete for a
non-diminishable good like information, because giving some information to
one person does not make it unavailable for others. The
thing that is being shared out must also be what the economists call an
“excludable” good. That is, it must be possible to grant a share of it
exclusively to one competitor without simultaneously granting it to the
others. There can be no competition for a non-excludable good like
breathable air in the atmosphere. The
diminishable and excludable thing that is shared out must be a good thing.
Often the competitors actively pursue it. Recognition as the best is such
a good, as the striving of our Olympic athletes and the advice of
Hippolochus indicate. In other cases of competition, the thing shared out
benefits those who get it, even if they do not strive for it. Trees in a
forest that compete for sunlight do not consciously strive for it, but
their share of the sunlight benefits them, in the sense of helping them to
flourish. So
there cannot be a competition for things that are neither actively pursued
nor beneficial. Prisoners do not compete for solitary confinement. They do
not want it and it does not benefit them. Competition
is opposed to chance. A lottery is not a competition. Nor is the
‘lottery of life’. Each of us receives a genetic endowment not of our
own making and encounters circumstances not of our own making. Competitive
games and games of chance correspond to very different personalities. The
French anthropologist Roger Caillois makes this point with his own special
terminology. He calls the competitive spirit agôn, using the
Greek name for a contest. And he calls the principle of games of chance alea,
using the Latin word for a game using dice. ‘Agôn, the
desire and effort to win a victory,” he writes in his fascinating book Man,
Play and Games, “implies that the champion relies upon his own
resources. He wants to triumph, to prove his supremacy. Nothing is more
creative than such an ambition. Alea, on the contrary, seems to be
a foregone acceptance of the verdict of destiny.’ Not
all competitions have just one winner. Competing firms can be
simultaneously successful. Children who compete for the attention of their
mother can each end up getting enough. But there is always a conflict of
interest among the rivals. Whatever share of the presumed good goes to one
competitor does not go to any other competitor. The
foregoing remarks enable us to answer our question: What is competition? A
competitive situation, we can now say, is one in which the actions or
characteristics of two or more rivals determine at least partially how a
presumed good is shared out among them. This good must be excludable and
diminishable. The rivals compete with one another for the presumed good.
They may be individual human beings, teams, businesses, animals, and even
plants. We can even speak about objects in our visual field competing for
our attention. Competition
may be confused with other relations. Striving to live up to an ideal, or
to be at least as good as some role model, shares many features with
competition. But it lacks the symmetry of the competition relation. When
we emulate a role model, the role model is not striving in a similar way.
Also, no diminishable good is being distributed. Emulation of an ideal
only becomes competition when several people vie with one another to see
who can come closest to the ideal. Hippolochus in his advice to his son is
telling him both to live up to an ideal (“be the best”) and to succeed
in a competition (“excel above all others”). Thinkers
usually contrast competition to cooperation. For example, they are
contrasting models of the evolution of species. Darwin thought that
egoistic competition was the key; there was a “struggle for
existence”, as he put it. Kropotkin, in opposition, maintained that all
species development flows from sociability, the desire of members of a
species to be in relationship with their own, and the quality of life they
get from these relationships. When
we cooperate, two or more of us contribute jointly to produce some good
thing in which we all share. Cooperators have a common interest in
producing this good. They work together to produce it. Competitors work
against one another to get something that the others cannot have. We
cannot both compete and
cooperate with each other in the same respect for the same good. But
we can compete in one respect
and cooperate in another. In team sports, the members of each team
cooperate to help their team defeat its rival. Participation in team
sports combines training in cooperation with training in competition. In
business, competing firms can cooperate through common institutions like
cheque clearing centers, agreements on industry-wide standards, and trade
associations. Competition
is not hostility or enmity. Competitors can even do good deeds for their
rivals. In the recent Winter Olympics, we saw a Norwegian ski coach hand a
ski pole to a Canadian competitor whose pole had just broken. After the
attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, brokerage firms
helped their affected competitors to continue in business. In
fact, harming a rival is unfair competition. The point of victory-oriented
competition, in particular, is not to harm the rival. It is to show that
you are the best. Seriously meant combat between human beings or groups of
human beings—street fights, civil wars, wars between states, guerrilla
wars fought by ‘freedom fighters’, terrorist attacks—is not
competition, though it may have a competitive motivation. Combatants are
not rivals for an excludable and diminishable good. They are striving to
defeat each other for the same of some goal. We would not speak of
revolutionaries in the Greek war of independence competing with the
Ottoman Empire, or of Osama bin Laden in his terrorist activities
competing with the United States. Is
competition a good thing, or a bad thing? Or is it a good thing in some
respects and up to a point, and a bad thing if it goes too far? Caillois
articulates a common attitude. “Agôn, the principle of fair
competition and creative emulation, is regarded as valuable in itself. The
entire social structure rests upon it. Progress consists of developing it
and improving its conditions, i.e. simply eliminating alea, more
and more… chance is not only a striking form of injustice, of gratuitous
and undeserved favor, but is also a mockery of work, of patient and
persevering labor, of saving, of willingly sacrificing for the future—in
sum, a mockery of all the virtues needed in a world dedicated to the
accumulation of wealth. As a result, legislative efforts tend naturally to
restrain the scope and influence of chance.” But
these remarks over-extend the scope of the principle of competition. Work,
saving, perseverance, sacrificing for the future, and other middle-class
virtues may be opposed to a reliance on chance. But they are not
necessarily, or even typically, practiced in a spirit of competition.
Likewise, creative emulation is not the same as competition. In
our society, Caillois’ praise of competition applies to the more limited
sphere of selection for such benefits as admission to advanced education
and training programs, employment, and promotion. In such situations,
competition based on merit is fairer than selection based on personal
connections, and produces better results. Is
competition the best principle of economic organization? Competition makes
for efficiency. It also allows our
activities to be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary
intervention of authority. But a carefully thought out legal framework is
required to make economic competition beneficial. Economic liberalism is
not just a matter of leaving firms free to act as they wish. Even
the neo-liberal economic theorist Friedruch Hayek acknowledges, in his
classic book Road to Serfdom, that economic competition can only be
effective if certain conditions are met. If they are not, the government
should use other methods of guiding economic activity. For effective
economic competition, the parties in the market should be free to sell and
buy at any price at which they can find a partner to the transaction.
Anybody should be free to produce, sell, and buy anything that may be
produced or sold at all. Entry to the different trades should be open to
all on equal terms. The law should not tolerate any attempts by
individuals or groups to restrict this entry by open or concealed force.
There should be adequate organization of institutions like money, markets
and channels of information. The legal system should be designed to
preserve competition and make it work as beneficially as possible—not
just the principle of private property and freedom of contract, but also
laws regarding corporations and patents. Finally, the owner must benefit
from all the useful services rendered by his property and suffer for all
the damages caused to others by its use. In
many cases, these conditions are not met. If the owner does not suffer for
the pollution caused by providing services, government must step in and
regulate. Also, restrictions of allowed methods of production are
compatible with competition, as are extensive social services. Thus even
Hayek’s wartime diatribe against socialist economic planning leaves room
for activist governments to promote environmental protection and social
welfare. Even
so, Hayek exaggerates the effects on personal liberty of limited
involvement of government-owned monopolies in the production of goods and
services. Government medical and hospital insurance, for example, is much
more efficiently administered by a single government payment agency than
by a host of competing insurance companies, and hardly less respectful of
personal liberty. A monopoly on the sale of spirits by a government agency
has many social advantages, and also does not seriously erode personal
liberty. Such examples could be multiplied. Whether competition, regulated
monopoly (government or otherwise) or regulated oligopoly is the best
system should be decided on a case-by-case basis for each economic sector
in each jurisdiction, in the light of local circumstances. There is at
best a presumption in favour of competition. And competition, it should be
noted, is compatible with a variety of forms of ownership: owner-operated,
joint stock, worker cooperative, consumer cooperative, government-owned. Robert
Simon, in his book Fair Play: Sports, Values, and Society, has
defended competition in sports as “a mutual quest for excellence in the
intelligent and directed use of athletic skills in the face of
challenge.” Such competition can express and illustrate dedication,
teamwork, courage and loyalty. It can help develop mental fitness,
resilience and strength. But it can also reinforce such undesirable traits
selfishness and linking one’s sense of self-worth entirely to
achievement. On
the other hand, there can be a mutual quest for athletic excellence
without competition. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is a fine example of
such a non-competitive alternative. This is a voluntary, personal
development program for young people. For each Award, participants design
their own program. They select activities to develop life skills in the
areas of service, adventurous journey, practical skills, and physical
recreation. When they achieve their goals, they get a gold, silver or
bronze award. Competition
leads us to put greater effort and thought into developing the qualities
that make for success. The rigorous and carefully calculated training
regime of a competitive athlete or of a professional musician or dancer is
an example. So is the attention to quality and cost control of a firm in a
strongly competitive sector. In contrast, absence of competition induces
lassitude and indifference. So
much in favour of competition. Against it, we must admit that competition
has many negative features. It causes unpleasant and ignoble emotions. As
the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote long ago in his Rhetoric,
rivals arouse fear, especially when they are quiet, dissembling and
unscrupulous. Ambitious people envy their competitors, their rivals in
love, and in general those who are after the same things as they are. Some
writers hold that competition by its very nature is always unhealthy.
Rivalry of any kind, they say, is psychologically disastrous and
philosophically unjustifiable. Competition and cooperation, such people
claim, are mutually exclusive orientations. This claim is an exaggeration.
Competition in one respect is compatible with cooperation in another. It
happens. The
critics of competition also maintain that it excludes those on the other
side from any possible human community. This point is also an
exaggeration. It applies only to all-consuming victory-oriented
competition, which is exceptional and deviant. Rivals in sports, or
business, or love, can and do have good friendships with one another. The
critics also maintain that the desire to win tends to edge out other goals
and values. Debaters don’t care about truth. Competing athletes harm
each other. Rival political candidates tell lies. Honesty and fairness in
business competitors are dishonest and unfair. Whenever people are defined
as opponents, these critics say, doing everything possible to triumph is
the consummation of the competitive structure. What
are we to think about this objection? The desire to win does indeed edge
out other values. But winning at all costs is not part of the structure of
victory-oriented competition. The point of victory-oriented competition is
to demonstrate the winner’s superiority. If so, winning at all costs is
not part of its structure, but is a corruption. It does not demonstrate
superiority, but the appearance of superiority. Critics
of competition also argue that a person whose success depends on being
better than others is caught on a treadmill, destined never to enjoy real
satisfaction, anxious and insecure. Such a person begins to see their
self-worth as conditional on how much better they are than so many others
in so many activities, and thus can become mentally ill. Unconditional
self-esteem is a requirement for mental health. Competitive
individualistic ambition leads to self-alienation, loss of an
experience of community, and anxiety. What
are we to make of this claim that the competitive individualism of
contemporary culture leads to anxiety? People who define their sense of
self-worth by their competitive success will indeed feel anxious if they
believe that they are not succeeding or may not succeed. And much in our
culture reinforces the idea that competitive success, as indicated by the
superiority of one’s possessions to those of others, is crucial to
self-worth. This idea reflects a shallow conception of the good life. When
one looks back over one’s life, what will count for a person free of
serious emotional or cognitive pathologies are one’s relationships with
family and close friends, one’s achievements, one’s manner of
conducting oneself in one’s various roles, and the quality of one’s
experiences. None of these depend on competitive success, still less on
one’s possessions. So
the indictment of competitive individualism as leading to anxiety is
correct. It is important to note, however, that it is an indictment of
defining one’s sense of self-worth by one’s competitive success, not
an indictment of all striving to succeed in competition, or of all
competitive aspects of a culture. Anxiety
and depression can also result from non-competitive striving to live up to
an ideal or to achieve a personal goal, if the effort seems likely to
fail. But emulation of this sort is more under the control of the
individual, through the adoption of realistic goals. The
critics’ final argument against competition is that the competitive
orientation poisons personal relationships: Trying to pick as our lovers
and friends those who are most attractive and most intelligent would make
it difficult to develop and sustain personal relationships of any kind.
Applying a competitive orientation to all one’s personal relationships
is unhealthy. The
arguments against competition warn us against an all-consuming desire for
competitive success, one that thrusts asides the values of personal
relationships, of personal integrity, of cooperation and community. But we
do not need to construct a competition-free society. In some areas,
competition is the best option: in admission to advanced education or
training, in hiring, in promotion at our place of work, selection by merit
in fair and open competition is superior to cronyism or a lottery. We
should however heed the warnings of social theorists that there is too
much emphasis in our culture on individual competitive success. In sports,
there should be more emphasis on non-competitive activities like the Duke
of Edinburgh’s Award than on competition, including extravagant
spectacles like the modern Olympics. We should recognize that competition
is not the best structure for many aspects of human life. As
a character trait, competitiveness may be a virtue or a vice. The ancient
Greek philosopher Aristotle tells us that a virtue of character is a mean
between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency applies. His analysis
fits participation in competitions. People
can go to excess in various ways. Perhaps they make ordinary encounters
into competitions when there is no point in doing so. Or they take
friendly competitions such as social bridge games too seriously. Or they
use unfair tactics. Or they let their desire to succeed interfere with
their moral obligations and with common courtesy. Or they have an
all-consuming intense desire to succeed in the competitions they enter.
These are all vices of hyper-competitiveness. They push competitive
striving beyond the point where it serves a positive function. People
are deficient in various ways. Perhaps they shy away from competitions
where they have a good chance of succeeding. Or they make no effort to put
in a good performance in the competitions they do enter. Or they are
absolutely indifferent to whether they succeed or not. These are vices of
uncompetitiveness. Their common fault is indifference to whether one does
well. How
should we shape our own character and that of our children to avoid the
vices of hyper-competitiveness and of uncompetitiveness. Here again
Aristotle has some wide advice. A person should steer away from the more
common vice, he says, and from the one to which they are personally
inclined. Our culture promotes hyper-competitiveness, in business, in
sports, in attracting lovers. So we should not turn every situation into a
competition. We should avoid unfair tactics. We should treat social
competition as just social, maintain common human courtesies, and so on. Competition
is good up to a point, but it can go too far. It is not the be-all and
end-all of life. David
Hitchcock is Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University. He is the
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