Speakers
Description
Amateur sport is one potential ingredient for the pursuit of “a good life” in late modern societies. However, people have diverse ways of justifying why (and how much of) amateur sport is valuable in the overall context of how one is leading one’s life, and whether pursuing amateur sport at the expense of other life domains is justified. In our study, we were interested in understanding the everyday philosophies and moral registers that amateur martial artists draw on to make sense of, and justify, the pursuit of martial arts as a life project. We used Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore the constructions of appropriate ways of engaging with martial arts in potku.net, the biggest martial arts discussion forum in Finland. Six discussion threads with 401 entries formed our primary data. In our analysis, we identified two dominant discourses, “the balanced life”, drawing mainly on utilitarian ethics, and “the committed life”, drawing on existentialist and virtue ethics, that were used to justify one’s practice. The balanced life discourse, which measured the worth of the practice by the fruits it brings, was the dominant moral register. Existentialist ethics provided an alternative perspective with the claim that the martial arts practitioner is both free and responsible to create his or her own meaning, and that the value of one’s project cannot be judged solely from the outside. The balanced life discourse was especially prevalent in more experienced practitioners' entries. The findings show that there are tensions in the moral registers practitioners draw on in justifying the worth of martial arts in their lives.
