ABSTRACT
This chapter questions the assumption that competition is a win-win or at worst a win-win-win-win-win-lose situation. By means of what is called the ‘Harm Argument’, the author aims to show that ‘substantially engulfing’ competitions incur distinctive and preventable harms on the direct participants, harms that don’t occur when other allocation mechanisms (such as lotteries and distributions with a fixed performance threshold) are chosen. That is, what is distinctive of competition is not simply that participants are excluded important goods that everyone has reasons to want, such as financial security, the social bases of self-respect and political influence; they are excluded: (1) because they were deemed ‘not good enough’ (psychological and emotional costs); (2) while being incentivised to invest ever more resources (opportunity costs) and (3) having strong reasons to disregard one another (estrangement). These harms provide strong pro tanto reasons against organising substantially engulfing competitions and cannot easily be justified in light of its alleged social benefits. The weight of these reasons against competition, however, depends on the stakes and scope of the competition at hand.
