Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a (...) fan of the immoral may provide support for their immoral behavior. Second, fandom alters our perception in ways that will often lead us to be fail to perceive our idol’s faults and even to adopting immoral points of view in order to be able to maintain the positive view we have of them. Third, fandom, like friendship, may lead us to engage in acts of loyalty to protect the interests of our idols. This gives fans of the immoral good reason to abandon their fandom. However, these reasons will not always be conclusive and, in some cases, it may be possible to instead adopt a critical form of fandom. (shrink)

I argue that sports clubs should be punished for bad behaviour by their fans in a way that affects the club’s sporting success: for example, we are justified in imposing points deductions and competition disqualifications on the basis of racist chanting. This is despite a worry that punishing clubs in such a way is unfair because it targets the sports team rather than the fans who misbehaved. I argue that this belies a misunderstanding of the nature of sports clubs and (...) of the nature of sporting success. Further, I argue that fans should want to be held responsible in such a way because it vindicates the significant role that they play in the life of their club. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that within competitive sport zero-sum logic and the theory of mutualism are compatible and complementary. Drawing on Robert Simon’s theory of mutualism and Scott Kretchmar’s argument for zero-sum logic, this article shows how athletes can strive for a clear-cut victory and shared benefits such as athletic excellence fully and wholeheartedly at the same time. This paper will also consider how acknowledgment of this dynamic could advance understandings for ethical theories for sport. It will then conclude by describing (...) a subjective approach that will make the affinity of zero-sum logic and mutualism more accessible for sports people. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe spiralling discourse of sport spectatorship is a compelling development within recent sport philosophy. It is argued that the conceptual foundations of the purist and partisan carry pro...

There are robust consequences of the fact that football is football and not something else. The aesthetic personality of football does not submit to a template inappropriately borrowed from elsewhere. One consequence is that beauty should not be awarded privileged status. Any just aesthetics of the game must be properly hospitable to the game’s less hygienic and agonistic features, such as stolid defence, scuffling and scavenging, heroic goalkeeping, visible toil and strain, the intrinsic possibility of failure, the visibly strenuous working (...) with materials, one’s exposed vulnerability to conditions, luck, loss of form and the injured or ageing body, and the visible realisation of a plurality of life values in a self-enclosed domain. This gives football a deep affinity with a Modernist aesthetics. However, ‘traditional’ aesthetics might also have a substantive and precious input into the aesthetics of football. Indeed, it might be that beauty is a legitimate aesthetic category and.. (shrink)

A familiar debate in the philosophy of sport concerns the question of whether fans should seek to be partisans (those who support particular teams or individuals) or whether they should instead adopt the impartial attitude of the purist. More recently, Kyle Fruh et al. have argued in defense of fair-weather fandom, which they understand as a form of fandom that involves adopting temporary allegiances in response to non-sporting considerations. This paper will add a new form of fandom to this discussion: (...) the foul-weather fan. While fair-weather fans adopt temporary allegiances or strengthen existing allegiances for teams when things are going well, foul-weather fans do so when things are going badly. We will argue that foul-weather fandom can be both instrumentally valuable, as it helps to protect valuable sporting institutions, and non-instrumentally valuable, as these fans display concern, empathy, or support for sporting individuals or teams that are going through tough times. We finish by discussing how a specific form of foul-weather fandom may be associated with a distinctive moral danger in putting people in positions where they may become complicit in a club’s immorality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After initially pitting partisans against purists, the literature on the ethics of fandom has coalesced around a pluralist position: purists and partisans each have their own merits, and there is no ideal form of fandom. In this literature, however, the fair-weather fan continues to be viewed with dismissal and derision. While some fair-weather fans may earn this contempt, many fair-weather fans, we argue, are not only acceptable, they have important advantages over partisans and purists, and as such are in (...) a better position to navigate some of the moral complexities inherent in modern sports. We develop this argument first by clarifying the nature of the fair-weather fan. We then examine challenges that fans face in many modern sports, first owing to their economic nature and, second, due to the morally tainted status of many of them. We argue that the fair-weather fan meets these challenges in ways that the partisan and purist cannot replicate. (shrink)

This paper discusses what it means to be a good sport. It offers an account of sportsmanship rooted in the proper understanding of the limited role each participant plays during a specific sporting contest. It aims at showing that, from a fallibilist perspective, although it may perhaps be logically possible for a single play to win or lose a sporting event, it makes epistemologically no sense to single out a particular game action, moment or decision as the crucial one which (...) determined victory or defeat. Our view, we shall argue, is consistent with the empirical nature of sporting activities. Since there can be no such a thing as a perfect game, and because no single known human mind is in a position to know with any degree of certainty how each act of game-playing relates to the outcome of a whole game, it makes almost no sense to assign whole-game success or failure to single acts of brilliance or failure. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Nicholas Dixon's defence of the moderate partisan as the ideal fan of team sports. For Dixon, the moderate partisan is someone who combines a partisan fan's loyalty for a particular team with a purist fan's desire to see fair and skilful play by all participants. My aim is to argue that there is no ideal fan of team sports. In particular, there is nothing specially commendable about the moderate partisan's loyalty that justifies the claim (...) to be the ideal fan. There are many other ways of being a fan than being a purist or a partisan as described by Dixon. None of them is morally superior to the other, assuming that they meet basic requirements of respect for others and for fair play. I argue that the commitment of partisan fans to particular teams is better explained by other values than the moral virtue of loyalty. A better explanation and justification of partisanship, and indeed of fan interest in sport generally, is found in the human attachment to narrative as a way of creating meaning in our lives. (shrink)

Sport is a producer of both emotional and aesthetic experiences. But how do these relate? Does a spectator’s emotional engagement in sport enhance or hinder it as an aesthetic experience? And does the aesthetic perception of sport enhance or hinder the emotional experiences? These questions will be addressed with particular reference to the distinction that can be drawn between partisan and purist watchers of sport, and making use of thinking in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of emotion. There are some reasons (...) to think that emotion and aesthetics pull in opposite directions, in both sport and wider life. Does a purist miss out on the essence of sport if they adopt a detached aesthetic attitude? If that were the case, it would suggest that the sports spectator might have to choose between the two: experiencing one or the other but not both at the same time. Emotions and aesthetics would be a trade-off but I argue for some significant exceptions to this conclusion. (shrink)