Good games as well as fair games: developing an ethics in sport agenda

Introduction

The beauty of Olympic sports is that they typically allow more than one way of playing the game. Yet it is not clear whether it is possible to rationally decide between those ways of playing sports that are beautiful from those that are corrupt. Is diving part of soccer? Is trash talking part of basketball? Is base-line tennis better than serve and volley?

Discussion / Conclusion

Understanding fair play simply in terms of the ethos of games does not normatively justify one interpretation of the ethos of a game over another (Loland, 2002). We must not presume however that all sports ethoses are morally praiseworthy. The history of sports is littered with morally corrupt and oppressive practices such as elitism, racism and sexism to name but a few. In order to ensure an ethos has positive normative force we need to develop a method that allows us systematically and critically to view the particular ethoses which attach to every sport that are shaped by social, economic and political factors such as age, class, gender, and so on. Fair play comprises an important part of the ethics agenda yet it only takes us so far (Sheridan, 2003). We need to determine how we ought to select the criteria to justify changes that will benefit sports practices while simultaneously safeguarding their integrity. To this end I set out but dismiss Rawls’s (1971) method of "reflective equilibrium" as a possible decision-making method in favour of a tradition-practice bound decision-making model that can be used to evaluate sporting practices which is transparent, democratic, and respectful of the traditions and internal norms of particular practices. I illustrate with examples from tennis and football how a proper consideration of the internal goods of the activity can help us rationally reflect on and promote better sport.

References

Loland, S. (2002) Fair play in sport: a moral norm system, London: Routledge.
Rawls, J. (1971) A theory of justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sheridan, H. (2003)’ Conceptualising ‘fair play’: a review of the literature’, European Physical Education Review, 9 (2): 163-184.