One important limitation of the current renditions of interpretivism is that its emphasis on the moral dimension of sport has overlooked the aesthetic dimension lying at the core of this account of sport. The interpretivist’s failure to acknowledge and consider the aesthetic implicitly distances this realm from the moral. Marcia Muelder Eaton calls this distancing the separatist mistake. This paper argues that interpretivism presupposes not only moral but also aesthetic principles and values. What it sets out to demonstrate is that (...) interpretivism is an integralist, or nonseparatist, account of sport, one in which ethical and aesthetic values are not exclusive. Making explicit and specifying interpretivism’s combined moral-aesthetic approach to sport not only helps to better distinguish the whole range of values that make up sport as well as their interconnection but also encourages sportspeople to pursue more coherent sport and, thus, more enriching lives. (shrink)

Deep ethical interpretivism has been the standard view of the nature of sport in the philosophy of sport for the past seventeen years or so. On this account excellence assumes the role of the foundational, ethical goal that justice assumes in Ronald Dworkin’s interpretivist model of law. However, since excellence in sports is not an ethical value, and since it should not be regarded as an ultimate goal, the case for the traditional account fails. It should be replaced by the (...) shallow interpretivist model that I begin to sketch out and defend here. (shrink)

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)

The voluntary suspension of play is a putative fair play norm that has emerged in the last 20 years in association football, though there is no reason in principle why it is limited to that sport. It occurs in football when an injury appears to have been sustained and another player deliberately puts the ball out of play so that the injury can receive rapid attention. It is widely understood as a positive development within the sport and philosophers have added (...) their support on the basis that VSP is a way of players exercising autonomous moral responsibility. It is represented as a case of athletes putting care for their competitors before care for the contest. In this paper, however, it is argued that moral praise for VSP is misplaced. Attempts to induce a VSP almost always occur when a team is seeking to hold a position within a game. As a delaying tactic, it encourages the faking of injuries, which is all the more reprehensible because it exploits someone else's concern for that apparent injury. Conditions for the possibility of VSP within a sport are analysed as well as conditions for the abuse of VSP. VSP occurs because of a loophole, and ways in which this can be closed are presented. In an appendix, some initial empirical evidence is presented that backs the evaluative claims of the paper. (shrink)