Someone who wants to imagine what Aristotle might say about the Ched Evans case had better be careful. A lot of what has been said about the former League One footballer convicted of rape has had a strained, contrived character in the Maltese context. Bringing Aristotle into the same conversation as Evans and Paola’s Hibernians seems, at first, only to add to the contrivance.

But focusing on the contrivance is a good place to start.

A week after discovering that, being a convicted rapist, it isn’t possible for Evans to work outside the UK, Malta is still discussing the case in all media.

Moreover, the arguments against Evans being engaged by a football club are being borrowed wholesale from the UK context with no adjustment for the rather different Maltese environment.

It’s one thing for the UK to debate whether Evans, if reinstated into English football – he was earning £20,000 per week before his conviction in 2012 – would enjoy the glow and privileges of minor celebrity.

He scored 29 goals (35 overall) in his last season in League One. If he recovered his form he had every chance of being regularly applauded from the stands and featured on posters hanging in children’s bedrooms.

And, let us not forget, every publicised step of his enjoyment of the good life of a footballer – goals, praise, sponsorships and puff pieces in the media – would plausibly mean further turmoil for his rape victim.

The consequences of rape are lifelong for victims. In this case, she has reportedly had to change her legal identity several times in the wake of internet exposure and intimidation by some of Evans’ fans.

It’s not realistic to assume the same scenario would play out in Malta. Is the slate wiped clean when a footballer who scored 35 goals in his last English season begins to play for Hibs?

League One is only the third tier of English football. But Malta’s Premier League is still a destiny Evans would have scoffed at in 2012. For one like him, it signifies stigma not glory.

And, while children in Malta do put up posters of footballers in their bedrooms, my distinct impression is that the hero worship is reserved for the top players of European football.

The danger of a Hibs player becoming a role model is remote. Realistically speaking, if Evans did play for Hibs, the only model he’d provide would be of a dark fate to avoid.

For all these reasons, the Maltese discussion has been unrealistic. Given the legal impossibility of Evans playing in Malta, it needn’t even have lasted more than a few hours. But it’s understandable why it has lasted rather longer than that.

Irrespective of how it might play out in Malta, we cannot resist the fascination of a case that has the makings of a moral maze. In it, individually worthy values like rehabilitation are pitted against equally laudable aims like the utter stigmatisation of sexual violence.

Rehabilitation is based on condemning the sin, not the sinner. Stigmatisation is based on casting an indelible stain.

Unless his well-funded, ongoing attempts to clear his name legally are successful (he says he was guilty of infidelity to his girlfriend but not of rape), the name of Ched Evans will indefinitely remain on a UK register of sex offenders. And, if those protesting against him being allowed to play professional football again get their way, Evans will also be professionally ostracised.

The danger of a Hibs player becoming a role model is remote

At first, it would seem that the moral maze is the result of competing ethical systems being used to evaluate the case. That is indeed how some have described the issue: an ethical system based on exemplars of virtue (role models) pitted against liberal or utilitarian frameworks.

A second glance is enough to see, however, that it’s not that simple. Virtue ethics points to both role models (held up as paramount by Evans’ detractors) and rehabilitation. And utilitarian arguments have featured in arguments both for and against him.

Indeed, while one of the reasons for the moral maze is that equally important values are pitted against each other in this case, another is this: in trying to make their respective case, each side is using bits and pieces of different ethical systems, mixing apples with oranges. The result is a case that doesn’t quite add up.

Aristotle can help us introduce a bit of sense into our reckoning, showing up some of the basic inadequacies of both sides of the argument.

To begin with, Aristotle liked to take a concrete view of roles and role models. He would never accept the argument that a footballer is a footballer only by virtue of what he does on the pitch.

A footballer serves in a club and, today, in the world of commercialised sport, a club is a firm.

A club is what it is not just by virtue of its sporting results but also by virtue of its club paraphernalia. The celebrity culture is an intrinsic part of a club’s income – and hence its purchasing power. Some footballers are engaged for their marketing power in particular niches (for example, David Beckham in Asia).

Rehabilitating Evans as a footballer would – at least in principle – involve him in a system that would have to market him as widely and strongly as possible. Only a club commitment not to do so would mitigate the consequences.

Second, however, Aristotle would also say that we have a poor idea of what a role model is.

His idea of a role model is that of someone who is respected because he makes the right choices. It’s the actual choices that make him a role model. Like sports, ethical living demands training in specific skills. Like a sportsman on the field, the role model trains himself to do the right thing effortlessly.

In our celebrity culture, it works the other way round. Role models are supermen celebrated not for their choices but for their power to choose anything they want, without much constraint.

It’s not the choices that make a man super. It’s the superman that exalts a choice (this hat, that car, this woman, that cause).

One is admired, effectively, for having the freedom to be undisciplined. It’s the freedom and effortlessness that money can buy.

I suspect one reason why Evans is attracting such wrath is because most people distrust the media and their cult of celebrity.

They see the media (though they might not put it this way) as thriving on the cult of the superman, not that of the ethical hero, or the rehabilitated fallen hero. They would rather reduce Evans’ access to the media than trust the media to act responsibly.

On the whole, I think Aristotle would prefer to live in a society where Evans could play football again.

But he would also say that’s impossible without clubs signing up to a code of conduct regarding rehabilitated players, one that would include reparations to the community and prudence and restraint in marketing.

Even so, I think he would be pessimistic about the chances of the ‘right message’ being given to society, if the media (or messenger) continue to pose as being ethically neutral while having a corrupt view of what a role model is.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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