A Ring, a Flute & a Piece of Candy: Thinking Tools for a Cheating Scandal

For Bill, who showed me the deep friendship between rhetoric and philosophy

When Is an Anal Bead Like a Baggins?

The late American philosopher Daniel Dennett1 (1942 - 2024) has forwarded the term “thinking tools” to impress that thinking, deep thinking, is a difficult business, and we all could use some “tools” for when we go about that difficult task. Ever whimsical in his prose style, Dennett explains, “These handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus-holders permit us to think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions” (2).

Such lively metaphors. His introductory chapter makes fine reading for anyone curious about what makes philosophy such a rich and fun way of approaching life’s knotty problems. If you aren’t sold on the tools of philosophy by the time you finish that chapter, then, my hunch is that your attention drifted somewhere!

In a video I have referenced before, Dennett calls a certain kind of thinking tool, the “intuition pump” (a thought experiment designed to get down to the bare bones of the issue and suggest a promising way forward), a “persuasion machine.” Dennett seems to have a remarkable sense of play as a way to remove psychological barriers to thinking, including lightening the cognitive load—do we not use tools for lifting heavy things?—thereby inviting us all into the work of thinking about the hard things.

In that spirit, I offer three thinking tools from the realm of philosophy, one of rhetoric’s oldest and closest friends. (On this score, I differ sharply from the reverend Plato, who was not so sanguine as I am about their relationship. I sometimes wonder how my field would have developed had he been.2)

As I write, the world at large is being invited, once again, to see and hear the story of the 2022 Sinquefield Cup cheating scandal, sometimes called the Carlsen-Niemann controversy, in Untold: Chess Mates, a title that combines (I simply must point out) two rhetorical figures in one, pun and irony (Carlsen and Niemman are not “mates,” a fact that has given YouTube content creators quite a bit of fodder).

By the time you’ve gotten familiar with the tools below, I am not saying that you will have made up your mind about the truth of the controversy. What you will have are three handy-dandy methods for isolating key issues involved in any event where cheating is possible or, in the words of a composition scholar, looks like a “viable option” for a participant.

So, in this special, three-in-one entry, I’ll show you the inventors of these tools, describe their purpose and application, and invite you to bring them with you when you watch Untold: Chess Mates. As entertaining as the documentary is likely to prove, I have a hunch it will also ask us to think very hard.

That’s why we’ll want a few tools.

A Ring: Accounting for Chess’s Perks

Why do the right thing?

The most monumental statement on justice and education ever made, just perhaps, is Plato’s Republic. A dramatic, wildly imaginative thought experiment, the Republic (Greek title Politeia3) takes place in the home of a wealthy businessman, now retired, thinking back on life and, recalling, with considerable discomfort, some of his earlier decisions. His regular religious observances, about which he is so careful, are obviously motivated by anxieties to get in good with the gods whom his Younger Self had done much to offend.

Such a change in behavior, for such clear reasons, raises questions: Why are people just? And just what is justice, anyhow? Those two questions, it turns out, may be very closely related. What justice is may determine why one is just in the first place.

On this topic, a lively conversation ensues between our host’s guests, among whom are some of Athens’s illustrious figures, including one Thrasymachus. Here representing the Sophists whom Plato despises, Thrasymachus (whose name means “fierce struggle,” so this name is meant to tip us off) forwards a view of justice that is based entirely on power. In their present, democratic Athens, for instance, collective public opinion acts to restrain the truly talented and powerful from realizing their ambitions.

Thrasymachus, it is clear, disdains most people and regards their fears and anxieties as the real source of words like “justice” and “injustice.” Justice, real justice, says Thrasymachus, is just what those in power say it is: it’s a pretty label, a cloak, they give to their own advantage. When the system is rigged to our liking, we call it “just.” When it isn’t, “unjust.” But whoever is in charge will ultimately decide, won’t they? To emphasize how words do social and political work rather than communicate a truth is a common sophistic emphasis in Platonic treatment. Justice? That’s a matter of messaging, not morality.

Socrates, nearly always at the center of the philosophical action in Plato’s oeuvre, is in the company of Plato’s younger brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus. Seeing great talent in these young men, whom Socrates believes will be fine leaders provided their character is well-formed, Socrates is troubled at so cynical and yet so compelling a characterization of justice. If justice is simply a pretty, prestigious label that tricks all of us into going along with some powerful agent’s or group’s will, then what’s all this fuss about morality? It’s a game.

Here is where the rhetorician in me stands to applaud Plato. He places one of the strongest challenges to “why be just?” into the mouth of these promising young men, potential leaders of Socrates’s beloved Athens (thereby raising the stakes) and puts it into an unforgettable, imaginative form (thereby lightening the cognitive load). Thrasymachus, who has made some strong statements but which had been refuted by Socrates, nonetheless is on to something, Glaucon senses. And let’s be very clear about what picture Thrasymachus is really painting: if justice is a mere instrument of power, then what if you had practically unlimited power?

If you liked that presentation, maybe you’ll like this one, too.

Purpose & Application: Who’s Just, and Who’s Just Kidding?

The purpose of the Ring of Gyges thinking tool is to remove all practical impediments to doing what is considered wrong or unjust. Its first application, of course, is to ourselves. That is, in imagining oneself as Gyges, we are being asked a serious question: imagine you would never be prevented from, detected in, suspected of, or punished for committing any crime. With the Ring of Gyges, you can bypass all the best systems so far devised by human ingenuity to promote cooperation by the rules. At the same time, with the Ring, you can enjoy all the honors and reputation of a respected, just citizen. When there are no difficulties to being unjust, and nothing to gain from being just, why be just?

Imagine you could play Magnus Carlsen. You have a “Ring of Gyges” tech that allows you to beat him and be celebrated as the player who took down the GOAT. Imagine the surprise you would inspire. Think of the interviews you’ll be invited to. The access. The fame. Would you allow the Ring of Gyges to feed you the moves?

Now, on top of this tool, Socrates and Glaucon explore just who is the most just person, the one who is just and reputed to be just, or the person who is just but who is reputed not to be just.4 For completeness, here is a table:

Reputation is important for resources; we all know this. Seeming to be just, in our more modern terms, brings “social capital,” and marketing, communications, and public relations folks know well how to manage perceptions to make those would-be leaders among us “seem just.” But, as the Baleful Wager in the Book of Job assumes, one could be just because of the perks! Take away the perks, suggests The Satan, and we’ll know for sure. God, like Socrates, agrees: that’s the only way to know.5

So, let’s review:

Chess players are social beings. Most of us prefer to play people, whether online or over the board, rather than bots or chess computers. Part of being a social creature is having some kind of social standing, and we chess players have a way of showing deference to those whose skill exceeds our own. In casual chess circles, rating is a quick-and-easy way to decide if the person you will play will present (1) an opportunity to teach someone else, (2) an opportunity to enjoy a challenging game, or (3) an opportunity to learn how your best ideas are refuted.

If someone is going to cheat in chess, look for the extrinsic, the instrumental goods. Weigh them against the probability of detection. Then ask if there could really have been some tech—some Ring of Gyges—to pull it off.

A Flute: Chess’s Purpose, A Chess Player’s Excellences

What is chess for? Who shines the brightest?

As you saw in the 8-bit video, Socrates and his young friends eventually decide that, contrary to Thrasymachus’s cynical, reductionist take, justice is a kind of harmony of the soul, one in which reason governs the spirit and the appetites. “Minding one’s own business” is the memorable, homey translation Allan Bloom gives to Plato’s definition of justice. Making precisely the same point Plato is making, we could put it like this (in words from literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish): “Do your job; don’t try to do anyone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do your job.”

Whether or to what extent Plato wrote the Politeia as a serious treatise on government is irrelevant to our point here: the philosopher-king, in the individual, is the well-trained, properly morally educated reason, governing the desire for honor and distinction (spirit) and the desire for sensual pleasure (appetites). Cheating, on this view, is failing to “mind one’s own business,” where the spirit or the appetites did not “stay in their lane.”

And now we shift a bit. Aristotle, Plato’s star pupil—and therefore Socrates’s intellectual grandchild—had a very simple definition: “Justice is giving to every person what they deserve.”

For a lovely introduction to and application of these tools, here is Michael Sandel, an exemplary communicator known at his academic home of Harvard as a highly engaging practitioner of the Socratic method.

As we can see, Sandel turns to a lovely example that appears in Aristotle’s Politics, on the question of distribution of a fine musical instrument, a flute. Sandel does not quote the passage in full, though, fine teacher that he is, he makes the point perfectly plain.

Still, Aristotle’s passage is worthy of memorization—and, the more you memorize, the more you have to draw on in a moment’s notice (we rhetoricians call it copiousness):

… consider other kinds of knowledge and ability.6

In dealing with a number of equally skilled flute-players, you should not assign a better supply of flutes to those who are better born. Rather those who are better at the job should be given the better supply of tools. If our point is not yet plain, it can be made so if we push it still further.

Let us suppose someone who is superior to others in flute-playing, but far inferior in birth and beauty. Even if birth and beauty are greater goods than ability to play the flute, and even if those who possess them may surpass the flute player in proportionately more in these qualities than he surpasses them in his flute-playing, the fact remains that he is the one who ought to get the superior flutes. Superiority, whether in birth of in wealth ought to contribute something to the performance of that function; and here these qualities contribute nothing to such performance. (Politics III.12)

Aristotle, often praised as “The Philosopher of Common Sense,” uses some commonsense example: imagine you come from a wealthy family and that you’re awfully good-looking. Now imagine the poorest person, who also is just about everyone’s idea of physically unattractive, but make them the most skilled flute player you can imagine. Now have a flute produced by the most prestigious craftsman in the world. Who gets the flute? The gorgeous billionaire heir, or the poor, ugly, masterful player?

The point is clear: the best tools are crafted to get the best results. Those who can use the tools and achieve the best results consistently acting always on and for the right reasons—the very definition of skill, a growth-mindset good and not a fixed-mindset good—theirs are the hands into which the tools must be placed. To do anything less is irrational.

In listening to Sandel, and in thinking about the flute more deeply and what you know to be true of skill development in music (it’s practice, practice, practice, baby!), you may begin to sense how Greek ideas of justice involve matters of harmony, proportionate measure, fitness, and reason as much as matters of guilt or punishment. Truth, goodness, and beauty were important concepts in the Greek philosophical imagination, and each of those lends itself to three major philosophical areas of inquiry still studied: logic (Truth), ethics (Goodness), and aesthetics (Beauty), concerns which always inform matters of art- and (yes) sports-related commentary and criticism.

Purpose & Application: Isolate the Honorable Abilities

If you are beginning to get a sense for the harmony and the long-term refinement of skill that Aristotelian virtue ethics assumes, then you are well prepared for two simple yet penetrating questions Sandel presents as an important distillation of Aristotle’s rubric for justice. Put these questions away in your box of thinking tools, because they will clarify many decisions involving justice, including over what privileges you may be willing to award even to your friends or family.

1. What is the purpose, the essential nature, of the activity?

2. What are the excellences we wish to honor and recognize as exemplified by the activity’s participants?

Go to, say, an open chess tournament where there are regulation vinyl boards and plastic sets. Then, turn to one special area, and you will find the lovely wooden sets, placed perhaps on a dais. These boards are reserved only for the highest-rated participants. Unlike the vinyl and plastic sets, these boards do not roll: they are solid, the work of careful craftsmanship and costing upwards of several hundred dollars. Why are they there?

They are there as best flutes.

Let’s turn now to our two questions.

What is the purpose of a chess game?

The answer to this question seems obvious enough. According to a 2003 publication of the United States Chess Federation’s (USCF) official rules, “The objective of each of the two players in a game of chess is to win the game by checkmating the opponent’s king” (7).

Now, there is some room for pushback here. If you wish to object that the purpose of a game of chess is not exactly checkmate—don’t most top-flight, master-level games end overwhelmingly in resignations or draws?—but to force the surrender of the opponent or to resist such force to the point of the opponent’s exhaustion, I will say I very much appreciate this qualification, and I think is important. Since, however, both resignation and drawing conceptually depend on checkmate (resignation is the polite recognition of the inevitability of checkmate, drawing the recognition of its practical impossibility), I believe the USCF’s statement, with this important qualification, stands.

What are the virtues of a chess player?

Here are a few:

• Patience, especially patience under pressure

• Clarity of vision, penetration of insight

• Cleverness and subtlety in planning

• Creativity

• Justice, including respect for an opponent

If we wish to honor and recognize the excellences of excellent players, then there are certain obvious ways of doing that, including giving them “pride of place” and inviting them to play on the finest sets available, like breaking out the fine china for a special guest. In a real sense, The Wooden Set in a Sea of Vinyl and Plastic is a clear symbol, a form of gratitude to those players who have taken such pains to perfect their skills and maintaining the highest standards of artistic expression.

Aristotle fans will recognize at once that I have listed both moral virtues and intellectual virtues, and the inclusion of both should really surprise no reflective chess player. For those who enjoy, as Emanuel Lasker clearly did, uniting their philosophy to their chess, I encourage you to read The Nicomachean Ethics on the intellectual virtues (Book VI, just sixteen pages in my desk copy). Imagine yourself and your chess-playing friends in Aristotle’s descriptions. Sincerely, I’d love to hear what you learn in the comments.

When we take Aristotle’s Flute in hand as we watch Untold: Chess Mates, we will keep these two key things in mind: (1) the purpose of chess, and (2) the virtues we honor and recognize the game’s finest players. Review the list of virtues above: which qualities do we detect in both Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann? Are some of those virtues obvious? Do some of those virtues seem more hidden? What do their statements suggest? What do “character witnesses” have to say about both players?

Isolating both the purpose of chess and the honorable qualities we want from chess players will likely serve us well as we tune in and strive to draw our own conclusions.

A Piece of Candy: Chess’s Proper (and Superior?) Joys

Why play chess at all?

Our third and final thinking tool is the Piece of Candy, or, more precisely, 50 cents worth of candy. Happily, this thinking tool, unlike our last two, explicitly draws on our beloved game. Here, then, is the late Scottish-American philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre (1929 - 2025), from his monumental After Virtue:

Consider the example of a highly intelligent seven-year-old whom I wish to teach to play chess, although the child has no particular desire to learn the game. The child does however have a very strong desire for candy and little chance of obtaining it. I therefore tell the child that if the child will play chess with me once a week I will give the child 50 cents worth of candy; moreover I tell the child that I will always play in such a way that it will be difficult, but not impossible, for the child to win and that, if the child wins, the child will receive an extra 50 cents worth of candy. Thus motivated the child plays and plays to win.

Notice however that, so long as it is the candy alone which provides the child with a good reason for playing chess, the child has no reason not to cheat and every reason to cheat, provided he or she can do so successfully.

But, so we may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those good specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands.

Now if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself. (MacIntyre 188)

MacIntyre’s intuition pump is clear: there are goods that are proper to chess. That is, there are reasons to play chess that have nothing to do with the perks, nothing to do with anything that would make one reach for a Ring of Gyges (or anal beads). Chess, wrote Benjamin Franklin, “is so interesting in itself as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money” (281). Had Franklin read MacIntyre, he would have said, “Never for candy, either.”

So, what are the things that are interesting about chess, as Franklin puts it, “in itself”? I offer a few below. Please tell me what you think I ought to have mentioned.

• The different shapes of the pieces

• The orderly arrangement of squares within squares

• The alternating colors

• The variety and limitations of the movements

• The practically infinite playouts

• The sight of an opponent’s having to think

• The “hidden levers” of a position

• The surprise of a solution, when ambiguity resolves into clarity

• The realization that one’s skills are improving over time

• The pleasures of a postmortem discussion, arguably as tied to the game as to the playing itself

Provided one can follow the game, it should be clear that all these goods can be enjoyed by the one who plays the game, whatever the outcome, and by the spectator (see also Lasker 261).

MacIntyre could hardly be clearer: no piece of candy, however delectable, can be functional substitutes for the enjoyments proper to chess. To consider an important alternative view, Jeremy Bentham once wrote that social utility, as the standard for morality, is the determinant of a pursuit’s value. In an alliteration he hoped would make the idea stick, he boldly penned, “pushpin is the same as poetry.”

Did you catch that? This is like saying that pinochle is the same as Paradise Lost, or that Hungry, Hungry Hippos is just as good as Hamlet. The prodigiously educated John Stuart Mill—whose childhood experiences bear some fruitful comparison to that of the Polgar sisters—followed in Bentham’s utilitarian footsteps, but with a difference. Mill made it clear that it was better to be Socrates on his worst day than a fool on his best. That is, it would be better to be Socrates drinking hemlock than Homer Simpson drinking Duff. What an idea!7

To respond, then, to Bentham’s “pushpin is the same as poetry,” we might riff on a retort from Michael Sandel: “No real chess fan would talk that way.” Not only do chess players recognize the pleasures that are proper to chess, but they regard them as truly worthy pursuits for the mind that simply are not found—or not in the highly concentrated way so characteristic of chess—anywhere else.

Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, you must understand that chess players are serious about the game’s proper enjoyments, and they do not wish to see those enjoyments corrupted, at least not to the point where people play only for gain.

Purpose & Application: Locate Intrinsic Motivation

MacIntyre is not just raising a point about ethics; he is also raising a point about messaging: how do you invite the next generation of players to experience chess? Why would you feel the need to offer a promise of candy, or anything offered as an extrinsic motivator? Is that not dangerous? Does it not invite cheating? Why make learning chess into something transactional? Why assume that the pleasures of chess are so hidden that they could not recommend the game to a newcomer on their own?

As we’re tuning in to Untold: Chess Mates, we might do well to look very closely for the statements Carlsen and Niemann make that signal their intrinsic joy in the game, places where it may be clear that they would play chess even if they never earned another cent, even if they played anonymously in Washington Square Park, simply because the game deserves their full and loving attention. Are those statements there? Or do those intrinsic, proper joys get lost in the shuffle of “the facts of the case,” in the swirl of historical context, accusation and defense, and the drama that we are sure to be treated to?

To Conclude

When we are considering questions of cheating, we aren’t just considering questions of rules, or even of rule-breakers. As Oscar Martinez, The Office's learned accountant, endeavored to impress on his co-workers who thought ethics was about reasonably applying company rules, ethics is a serious discussion about the nature of The Good. That serious discussion has been going on for a very long time, and our good friends, the philosophers, have a few things to share with us, including chess players.

In full disclosure, I have not yet watched Untold: Chess Mates, as I did not want to be in any way prejudiced in my exploration of these issues by its content or presentation. Like many of you, though, I’m eager to see how this story is told, who is brought in to tell it and how, and to see if my opinion on the matter has in any way changed.

If you apply these tools in your viewing of Untold: Chess Mates, please let me know the results of your work.

“Thinking is hard,” Dennett reminds us. Thinking about ethics is a special kind of hard. Better take some tools.

References

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Roger Crisp. Cambridge UP, 2000.

Aristotle, Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Oxford UP, 2009.

Dennett, Daniel C. Intuition Pumps & Other Tools for Thinking. Norton, 2013.

Franklin, Benjamin. “The Morals of Chess.” As appearing in David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess. Vintage, 2006.

Lasker, Emanuel. Lasker’s Manual of Chess. Dover, 1947.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3^rd ed. U of Notre Dame P, 2007.

Plato. The Republic of Plato. 2^nd ed. Trans. Allan Bloom. Basic Books, 1991.

U.S. Chess Federation’s Official Rules of Chess. 5th edition. Eds. Tim Just and Daniel B. Burg. Random House, 2003.

Further Reading on the Carlsen-Niemann Scandal

Doggers, Peter. The Chess Revolution: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age. Public Wright Press, 2024.

Rensch, Danny. Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life. Public Affairs, 2025.