There’s been an outpouring of sympathy for the Ukrainian fencer Olha Kharlan for not shaking the hand of her Russian opponent, Anna Smirnova. Kharlan’s refusal was, of course, an impassioned protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

The underlying assumption here is that an athlete in an international competition is in some sense a representative of her government, including its very worst policies. On this assumption, every Russian athlete is a representative of Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Until January 2021, I suppose, every American athlete was a representative, whether chosen or not, of Donald Trump. Every American athlete right now represents our current immigration policies, up to and including that of pushing mothers and their children into the Rio Grande in defense of America’s southern border. Every Saudi athlete represents MBS’s evisceration of Jamal Khashoggi. Every Chinese athlete represents the repression of the Uyghurs. And so on. I guess athletes from Niger are, for lack of a government, exempt. Maybe Sudanese ones, too.

It’s not an unreasonable assumption, or one without precedent. The question is how generalizable it is. Is it a general principle to be applied across the board, or is it an ad hoc attitude devised to respond to a particular case? Is it now acceptable for all athletes to stop shaking the hands of the athlete-representatives of their oppressors (or of oppressors generally), or is this a privilege only to be enjoyed by Ukrainians vis-à-vis Russians?

The latter view, it seems to me, has nothing to recommend it. It either presupposes that Russian evil and Ukrainian victimization are metaphysically unique (indeed, worse/superior to all others), or requires us to dispense with the idea that human action should be governed by general principles. Seems a high price to pay for a spurned handshake. But then, people empty their moral wallets for the strangest things. 

The former view has its problems, as well. There’s a lot of injustice in the world. If every athlete represents the worst of her government, then most peoples’ hands are too bloody or dirty to shake. That’s a lot of handshakes to decline, and a lot of public mortification to watch and tolerate. But some people are made of stern enough stuff to handle it.

We could dispense altogether with the practice of compulsory handshaking and the like. That solves the problem in a pretty thoroughgoing way, except that partisans of “sportsmanlike” conduct might object. Sports without “sportsmanlike” conduct (to use their term) is just naked adversariality–politics conducted by other means. It seems sort of reductive and point-missing. Shouldn’t there be sanctuaries from politics and conflict? And shouldn’t athletics be one of them? Many have thought so.

Olha Kharlan, photo credit: Andriy Makukha, Wikipedia

We should perhaps give the germophobes a say. Handshaking is arguably an unhygienic practice. Who knows where the average hand has been? I learned this the hard way as a college instructor: I got sick every time my students handed in their papers. I learned, eventually, to ask my students for electronic copies of their papers, and to print them out at university expense. My health improved.

We might do just what was done in this case–permit people to decline handshakes as they wish, but uphold the conventional norm by penalizing them for doing so. That said, the conventional norm often leaves something to be desired by comparison with what it’s up against. It seems an injustice, after all, to penalize the expression of justice.

We could condemn the very idea of public expressions of justice as “virtue signaling” or “grandstanding,” a mere display of moral posturing without genuine moral intention or significance. Some have. But such condemnations often seem like instances of the very thing they’re condemning. They also lack imagination about human motives, and seem to me to beg a lot of questions. We can’t abolish all moral talk, or dismiss it all as frivolous. Grandstanding is at best a performative abuse of moral discourse. But we can hardly rule out the possibility that some public expressions of outrage will be salutary expressions of important principles, declined handshakes among them.

Finally, someone might just lay out the pros and cons of various rival positions on this topic, leaving the problem for others to resolve on the grounds that spectator sports is not one’s thing. It seems a safe, easy, and convenient position to adopt. But awfully smug.