The use of certain performance-enhancing drugs (PED) is banned in sport. I discuss critically standard justifications of the ban based on arguments from two widely used criteria: fairness and harms to health. I argue that these arguments on their own are inadequate, and only make sense within a normative understanding of athletic performance and the value of sport. In the discourse over PED, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” performance has exerted significant impact. I examine whether the distinction makes sense (...) from a moral point of view. I propose an understanding of “natural” athletic performance by combining biological knowledge of training with an interpretation of the normative structure of sport. I conclude that this understanding can serve as moral justification of the PED ban and enable critical and analytically based line drawing between acceptable and nonacceptable performance-enhancing means in sport. (shrink)

Danto, in a somewhat Hegelian manner, argues that art is an alienated form of philosophy. My contention is that sport, too, is an alienated form of philosophy. In making his argument, Danto (1981,...

UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations represent the most restrictive regulatory intervention European club football has ever seen. Put simply, it demands from clubs to operate on the basis of their own football-related incomes. While the policy has attracted considerable attention from the economic and social sciences, very few contributions systematically investigate it from a philosophical-ethical perspective. The present paper fills this research gap by posing questions on FFP in relation to fair play as a normative concept. We draw on (...) sport economic assessments concerning potential outcomes of FFP and argue that the policy should go beyond the mere pragmatic goal of promoting financial sustainability and truly aim for creating a level playing field, otherwise it should not be labeled ‘fair play’. (shrink)

UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations represent the most restrictive regulatory intervention European club football has ever seen. Put simply, it demands from clubs to operate on the basis of their own football-related incomes. While the policy has attracted considerable attention from the economic and social sciences, very few contributions systematically investigate it from a philosophical-ethical perspective. The present paper fills this research gap by posing questions on FFP in relation to fair play as a normative concept. We draw on sport (...) economic assessments concerning potential outcomes of FFP and argue that the policy should go beyond the mere pragmatic goal of promoting financial sustainability and truly aim for creating a level playing field, otherwise it should not be labeled ‘fair play’. (shrink)

We argue that sport in general, and association football in particular, are activities that invite spectators and players alike to talk about them. Using a Wittgensteinian approach, we argued more...