The purpose of this article is to show that fraleigh, in "right actions in sport", has not successfully argued for the supremacy of knowledge as an inherent value in sport. this involves a discussion of how fraleigh misapplied criteria from the moral point of view (baier), why he should not have attempted to use these criteria in the first place, and how the application of nonmoral standards fails to show the putative supremacy. "challenge" and "uncertainty" are offered as potentially stronger (...) candidates to explain human fascination with sport. (shrink)

Traditionally, acts of sportsmanship have been upheld as worthy of praise. The purpose of this paper is to discern whether Bernard Suits’ Grasshopper -- in "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia" -- would share this approval. The paper begins with a conceptual analysis of good sportspersonship. From this, four action categories are identified including good sportspersonship in the forms of game desertion, changing the game, not trying, and lusory self-handicapping. A strategy for evaluation is derived from the Grasshopper’s theory. Game-playing (...) is defined as action reflecting lusory attitude acknowledgement. Game-spoiling is introduced as action demonstrating lusory attitude abandonment. Three of the four actions categories are characterized as game-spoiling including good sportspersonship in the forms of game desertion, changing the game, and not trying. It is concluded that genuine good sportspersonship is characterized solely by altruistic forms of lusory self-handicapping. (shrink)

Despite frequent calls by players, managers and fans, FIFA's resistance to the implementation of goal-line technology (GLT) has been well documented in national print and online media as well as FIFA's own website. In 2010, FIFA president Sepp Blatter outlined eight reasons why GLT should not be used in football. The reasons given by FIFA can be broadly separated into three categories; those dealing with the nature and value of the game of football, those related to issues of justice, and (...) those concerned with the practical implementation of GLT. This paper intends to evaluate these eight reasons in order to assess whether there are, indeed, any good arguments against GLT in football. (shrink)

The last decades have seen a rising philosophical interest in the phenomenology of skill acquisition. One central topic in this work is the relation between the athlete's background capacities and foreground attention as an invariant feature of skilful movements. The purpose of this paper is to examine further this gestalt relation from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological account of embodied learning and a classical notion from philosophy of sport, namely ?sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome?. In the first part we (...) will explicate how Merleau-Ponty understands embodied learning as a form of gestalt switch that allows the athlete to perceive the world more meaningfully in relation to an ongoing movement project. That is, a skilled athlete perceives more and better opportunities for actions. In the second part, we revisit the classical notion of ?sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome? developed by Kretchmar. This phrase is attributed to the indeterminate back and forth rallies between sport contestants, and to persons facing a sport situation that produces an ambiguity as to whether one will succeed in one's task. In the third part, we then juxtapose Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodied learning and the notion of sweet tension from philosophy of sport in order to draw out the relations between the two notions. In addition, in much of the philosophical work on skill acquisition (for instance in Merleau-Ponty and his much-cited commentator, Hubert Dreyfus) the distinction between everyday skills (such as walking and opening doors) and sport skills is collapsed. Our discussion aims to show that by introducing the notion of ?sweet tension? to the literature on phenomenology of skill acquisition, we are able to highlight a phenomenological difference between everyday skills and sport skills. (shrink)

This paper continues the discussion of three values of sport (safety, fairness, inclusion) that has developed around the theme of inclusion of transwomen in the female category in World Rugby, as discussed by Pike, Burke and Imbrišević. In contrast to their discussion, in which these three values have been seen from the limited perspective of the inclusion of one group of athletes into a specific category of one sport, they are here discussed in the context of the categorization in sport (...) in general, with a focus on constitutive and eligibility rules. Constitutive rules give a strong foundation for eligibility rules. From the perspective of eligibility rules, the value of inclusion is identified as the underlying main value, while fairness and safety are its functions. This view rehabilitates the value of inclusion and has implications for how we think about the inclusion of athletes in sport, and for the creation of categories. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, I will identify two key normative principles at the core of Robert L. Simon’s mutualist theory of sport, namely, the respect-for-the-opponent principle and the idea that sport is a practice aimed at pursuing excellence. The former is a Kantian principle grounded in human beings’ rationality, and the latter is an Aristotelian principle related to the development of excellences as a means to human flourishing. After having presented and analyzed both principles, I will critically evaluate Simon’s attempt to (...) combine them within his mutualist approach. To conclude, I will highlight the challenges that mutualism should face to complete such a combination more successfully.Abbreviation: Categorical imperative. (shrink)

The question of acceptability in respect to the strategic foul in sport has provoked a rich and seemingly irreconcilable dispute with normative theorists currently divided amongst three schools of thought including formalism, conventionalism and interpretivism. In this paper, I seek to transcend the three-way intellectual stalemate portrayed in the literature via a consideration as to whether or not the strategic foul qualifies as ‘Utopian’. More specifically, after demonstrating that Bernard Suits’ theory of game-playing is fully capable of embracing all three (...) rival accounts, I seek to end the normative debate altogether via a conceptual analysis of the strategic foul as unacceptable via the higher-order point of view afforded by essentialism. (shrink)

It is customary for institutions that organize sporting competitions and events to exercise a considerable degree of authority over the participants. That authority is often manifested in the enforcement of penalties for infringements of fair play. This paper focuses on one concrete case from soccer, although I take the discussion to extend to other sports as well. I argue that not all fair play rules should be enforced by the respective organizing institutions, and that enforcing all of them indiscriminately is (...) a cause of injustice, rather than promoting fairness in sports. I propose a principled way of making the necessary distinction between those fair play rules that are enforceable and those that are not. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the role of hand goals in football and analyzes what should be considered part of the game. First, the arguments most frequently used to defend hand goals are presented and analyzed. Then, these arguments are evaluated from an interpretivist theory of competitive sport understood as a social practice. This evaluation demonstrates the invalidity of the arguments in support of hand goals.

Bernard Suits and other formalists endorse both the logical incompatibility thesis and the view that rule-breakings resulting in penalties can be a legitimate part of a game. This is what Fred D’Ag...

This paper examines footraces that are paced and unpaced, and runners who are pre-arranged, designated pacers and those who are not. Although pacesetting is commonplace in footraces today, the practice challenges our conception of sport competition, the nature of competitors and the meaning of records. For example, Bale calls paced races as ‘staged experiments’ to set world records and argues that pacers were crucial in the running career of Roger Bannister. In 2011, the International Association of Athletics Federation banned women’s (...) world records in mixed gender running events, like major marathons, because women were paced by male runners. By examining these cases and others, the authors here will claim paced footraces are qualitatively different than unpaced competitions, pacers introduce peculiar motives and intentions as competitors, women should not be denied opportunities to excel and perform at their very best, and the 2011 IAAF policy is unjustified. (shrink)

In this paper I defend an Irreconcilability Thesis, claiming that two commonly held views about athletic contests are in fact incompatible. The first view is that athletic contests are essentially...

ABSTRACTBernard Suits and other formalists endorse both the logical incompatibility thesis and the view that rule-breakings resulting in penalties can be a legitimate part of a game. This is what Fred D’Agostino calls ‘the problem of penalties’. In this paper, I reject both Suits’ and D’Agostino’s responses to the problem and argue instead that the solution is to abandon Suits’ view that the constitutive rules of all games are alike. Whereas the logical incompatibility thesis applies to games in which players’ (...) actions are perfectly controlled, it does not apply to sports. This insight not only justifies the rejection of formalism as a theory about the nature of sport but it also helps explain the greater normative complexity of sports, which in turn leads to the idea that in sports ‘cheating’ should be interpreted as a genus. (shrink)

Among philosophers, the question about strategic fouls has been whether they are ethically justified in light of our best conception of sport. This paper proposes a different defense. I argue that many strategic fouls should be excused even if we regard them as unjustified. I first lay out a partial defense of the assumptions that playing to win cannot be subordinate to playing skillfully and that winning has value that cannot be accounted for in terms of the skill that produces (...) it. I then argue that the logic of competitive play structures practical reason such that it is unreasonable to require even an ethical competitor always to subordinate the aim of winning to ethical standards within the game. Some ethical failures should be excused. The argument implies limits on the excusing conditions. I discuss these limits in some detail, showing that they fit patterns in the common acceptance of strategic fouls. I then address possible objections. In conclusion I argue that the logic of excuse rather than justification explains a common reaction to strategic fouls, resolving what might otherwise appear to be a contradiction in that reaction. (shrink)

Hegemonic masculinity, a framework where stereotypically masculine traits are over-emphasized, plays a central role in sport, partly due to an excessive focus on winning. This type of masculinity marginalizes those that do not possess specific traits, including many women and men. I argue sport reform focused on mitigating hypercompetitive attitudes can reduce this harmful and marginalizing hegemonic masculinity in sport. I make this argument first by challenging the dichotomous nature of sport, especially in recognizing that all outcomes are a blend (...) of winning and losing, that ties are relevant and informative outcomes to contests, and that winning and losing do not always tell accurate stories of the outcome. Secondly, I contend that expanding the potential outcomes in sport can help broaden the emphasis of competitive sport to take into account playing well and improving, in terms of both the test and the contest. I conclude that these reforms decrease hegemonic masculinity, making sport better for all. (shrink)

The landscape of sport shows conspicuous discursive and material disparities between the responses to openly violent on-field transgressors and the responses to other kinds of transgressor, most notably drug users. The former gets off significantly lighter in terms of ideological framing and formal punishment. The latter—and drug users in particular—are typically demonised and heavily punished, whilst the former are regularly lionised, dramatised, celebrated and punished less severely. The preceding disparities cannot be upheld from the standpoint of morality in general or (...) from that of a Broad Internalist sport ethic. Consideration of the consequences, actions, motives and vices involved in the respective categories fails to support them. Nor is support provided by the notion that sports are tests of the physical skills and virtues that the obstacles presented are designed to foster and promote, and behaviour that threatens the opportunity to exercise those excellences or have competitions determined by them should be the subject of critical moral scrutiny. Openly violent on-field transgression does not fare at all well by the yardstick of Broad Internalism. Robust investigation of and ultimate change in the values underpinning the disparities is warranted. (shrink)

In recent years it has become increasingly the norm in football1 to kick the ball out of play when a player is, or appears to be, inadvertently injured. Kicking the ball out of play in football represents a particular instantiation of a generally understood fair play norm, the voluntary suspension of play (VSP). In the philosophical literature, support for the VSP norm is provided by John Russell (2007) who claims that his interpretivist account of sport is helpful for evaluating complex (...) moral issues in sport in general and issues related to injury in football in particular. This paper examines whether Russell's interpretivist-backed account of autonomy can adequately inform football players as to the nuanced and ambiguous moral considerations that arise in relation to the VSP norm. The paper goes on to identify the highly complex dynamic circumstances football players need to consider in order to better discharge their moral responsibilities when faced with inadvertent injuries. (shrink)

(2007). Sport, ethics and philosophy; context, history, prospects. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1080/17511320601173329.

In this paper, I defend a general theory of competition and contrast it with a corresponding general theory of cooperation. I then use this analysis to critique mutualism. Building on the work of Arthur Applbaum and Joseph Heath I develop an alternative adversarial model of competitive sport, one that helps explain and is partly justified by shallow interpretivism, and argue that this model helps shows that the claim that mutualism provides us with the most defensible ethical ideal of sport is (...) false. By replacing that view with an understanding of sporting adversarial ethics we can appreciate that the ethics of sport are more complex than has been commonly recognized. (shrink)

In this article, I first address the ethical considerations about football and show that a meritocratic-fairness view of sports fails to capture the phenomenon of football. Fairness of result is not at centre stage in football. Football is about the drama, about the tension and the emotions it provokes. This moves us to the realm of aesthetics. I reject the idea of the aesthetics of football as the disinterested aesthetic appreciation, which traditionally has been deemed central to aesthetics. Instead, I (...) argue that we should try and develop an agon aesthetics where our aesthetic appreciation is understood as involving and being embedded in our engagement in the game. The drama of football is staged but not scripted. The aesthetics of competitions like football matches—the agon aesthetics—lies in engaging in the conflict that a competition is, while being aware that the conflict is not over ordinary world or everyday life issues, but unnecessary and invented for the very purpose of having a conflict to enjoy. (shrink)

How does match-fixing, or other unfair manipulation of matches, that involves under-performance by players, or refereeing and umpiring that prevents fair competition, be thought of in ethical terms? In this article, I outline the different forms that match-fixing can take and seek to comprehend these disparate scenarios within Kantian, Hegelian and contractualist ethical frameworks. I tentatively suggest that, by developing an ethical opposition to match-fixing in sport, we can give much greater substance to popular phrases such as ‘respect for the (...) game’, encompassing the value of sport itself and respect for other players, fans, sponsors and organisers. Arguing that match-fixing denies recognition to these ‘others’ demonstrates how fundamentally match-fixing ‘hollows out’ sport because a fixed match is of no worth: the whole value of the game has literally been evacuated. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to argue that Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophy should work together within the arena of the philosophy of sport. To do so, the concept “communicative community”, which is found in Habermas’ and Apel’s discursive ethics, will be analyzed and applied to sports. As several authors, such as Raúl Sebastian Solanes, Robert L. Simon and William J. Morgan, have done this task before, I will critically analyze their proposals. In so doing, I will show (...) that in order to make sense of contemporary sports we need a more integrative communicative sporting community than the ones proposed so far in the literature. (shrink)

In this article, we examine philosophy of sport as a field of study in Japan, its history, characteristics, and future prospects, as part of a contribution to the international development of the discipline of sport philosophy. The Japan Society for the Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education has been holding an annual sport philosophy conference every year since its inception in 1978. Nevertheless, the trends of sport philosophy in Japan have not been conveyed abroad. The language barrier between Japanese and (...) English as an international communication tool makes it difficult to spread our work on the philosophy of sport throughout the world. The question arises as to whether the philosophy of sport in Japan has the same trends as those in the Western countries. Is it reasonable to assume that it has different aspects and interests than philosophy of sport in English-speaking countries? We will also try to address these questions for our audience. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSport is the locus of varieties of athletic experience. In this paper, I focus on anxiety as a felt experience in sport. Anxiety is often experienced as a form of psychological distress. It...

En este artículo, defendemos que se ha producido una inversión del platonismo a la base de la filosofía del deporte, similar a la acaecida en el ámbito de la filosofía occidental. Para ello, exponemos a qué nos referimos con el platonismo en la filosofía del deporte. Más adelante, explicamos qué significa invertir el platonismo a raíz tanto de Nietzsche como de Heidegger. Tras ello, identificamos cuáles son los autores que han provocado tal cambio en la filosofía del deporte, a saber: (...) los filósofos dionisíacos. Por último, mostramos cómo con sus propuestas dionisíacas producen un acabamiento de la tradición internalista, para defender que éste es el paso inicial en la tarea de proponer una hermenéutica del deporte. (shrink)

In this essay I endorse Gaffney’s paradoxical analysis that supports the right over the good, ‘horizontal commitments’ to teammates over ‘vertical loyalties’ to the cause of winning. However, I attempt to present two friendly amendments—by adding a second factor to the vertical element and by showing that a virtue ethics approach is needed in certain situations. I conclude that Gaffney’s deontological stance serves him well in the Hope Solo case, but might not be as effective in other circumstances.

Horse racing has begun to enter an economic decline in many countries, notably represented by a decline in revenues in betting volumes. A number of reasons may be attributed to this: the success of...

(1984). Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Sport: The Ethical Issue. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 23-28. doi: 10.1080/00948705.1984.9714410.

Stimulated by Hugh Upton's recent article in this journal, in which he argues that there can be a moral duty to cheat in games, I attempt to examine his claims. Much of what he writes revolves around examples from two sports, cricket and rugby, and with differing connections to those games' rules. While the example from cricket is said to involve a breach of the spirit of that game, it is contravention of the written rules of rugby on which the (...) latter part of Upton's case focuses. Given limited space I concentrate on the cricketing example, but several of the points I make about that apply also to when rule-breaking itself is involved. My conclusions express doubts about whether a case for a moral duty to cheat in games has been established. (shrink)