What’s Wrong with the Scrum Laws in Rugby Union? — Judgment, Truth and Refereeing

Abstract

Officiating and the role of officials in sport is are crucial and often decisive factors in sports contests. Justice and desert of sport contests, in part, rely on officiating truths (performances) that arise from an appropriate admixture of epistemic (judgements) and metaphysical (actions) ingredients. This paper provides a rigorous and original philosophical analysis of the problems of obeying and applying the rules of sport. The paper focuses on a the scrum in rugby union. The scrum has become a focus of criticism and bewilderment. Elite rugby is damaged as a spectacle because too much time is wasted setting and re-setting scrums. Furthermore, trust in the fairness of games is eroded because the scrum is a ‘lottery’. In this paper, we identify two fundamental structural problems which contribute to the scrum controversy. First, we argue that officials cannot make reliable judgements about scrums because they cannot see what they need to see. Secondly, we argue that players cannot follow the laws of the scrum even if they have a strong desire to do so. Consequently, the scrum is not only potentially dangerous, but also flawed in terms of its capacity to actualise an intended part of the game.