I think I know how to escape this problem partially. The same method works for courts of justice.
It might be pragmatical to give sentences to people to make them examples so new criminals wouldn't do those crimes. Exaggerated sentences. Everytime a court would dish out a verdict, they would double the numbers for jailtime, surely there will be less new criminals when this pattern is maintained. I think it is the approach the US Goverment has tragically taken on whistleblowers too by the way.
Though this logic works in the single event, it's bad policy. What is lost on the general level, from the bigger picture, is fair trials. People lose their ability to believe in a fair court. They can't trust the law, they can't trust society.
The football world cup is similar. You're giving up the fun of football competitions on largescale so that you would preserve some fun on the smallerscale. It's a pyrrhic victory.
Do you think this reasoning is sufficient to deal with the dilemma?
So you are saying that the competition wouldn't be any fun if everyone believed that one particular team winning was the only acceptable outcome - it would defeat the purpose of the competition (fun) and devalue it to the point that there would no longer be any difference in utility anyway. That's basically the categorical imperative (if everyone broke their promises, there would be no such thing as promising, so the whole concept breaks down and so the rule makes no sense) Is that what you are getting at?
The problem is that not everyone does believe that Brazil should win. So I don't think we have a good solution for an individual utilitarian reasoner in a world in which most people do not think the same way.
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