*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by geo321.

No, your mom is Hitler!

I posted Sandel's lecture series: http://videosift.com/video/Justice

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by vaporlock.

*promote for funzies

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 1:33pm PDT - promote requested by littledragon_79.

I have to say he's wrong on a number of points.

For one, sports rules are arbitrary. In any competitive game, the only purpose of the rules is to provide an agreed upon environment in which people can compete, in order to make scores easy to tally. For example, imagine basketball with no rules, a player takes a ball from one end of a court to another without dribbling and shoots and makes it. How many points should that be worth? How about using a ladder to make the basket, or any one of the limitless number of other ways a person might come up with on the fly while playing? By having all the competitors agree to a set of rules, regardless of what those rules are, it's possible to referee the game and determine a winner. You can take any game, make arbitrary changes to the rules, and all you've done is create a different game. From chess, to poker, golf, football, curling, or anything else, the only difference is the rule set. Take volleyball, make a few a tweaks, and you have sepak takraw. People might find one rule set more aesthetically pleasing to watch or fun to compete in than another, but that is completely subjective. There are an infinite number of possible rule sets, and if there were infinite people you could find somebody to enjoy each one of them.

Also, it's more than the essential nature of a thing that matters. Nonessential parts can have effects on the essential ones. The golf cart thing is the perfect example. Walking may not be an essential part of the game, but the fatigue it produces has an effect on swinging the club which is an essential part. It's easy to imagine a person unable to walk, but still able to swing a club with force an accuracy. So being disabled does not disadvantage this person on the essential parts of the game. This person spends most of his time on a golf cart, exerting little energy, and shaded from the sun. The other players do a lot of walking, getting tired, sunburned, sweat in their eyes, etc. That could definitely have an effect on the essence of the game.

So the question is then, which is more important: letting golf be defined as having the particular set of rules that it currently has, or being fair by letting the disabled play?
If it makes sense that the court can redefine the rules of golf so that a disabled person can use a cart and it still be called "golf", then surely it makes sense to still call it golf after you change the rules so that everybody can use a cart. And if the court has the power to do the former, it has the power to do the latter. And the court clearly chose the virtue of fairness over the "sanctity" of the rule set. And, since letting only one person use a cart would still be unfair, just to different people, the only sensible course of action is let everybody use one.