APPLYING MORAL REASONING TO SPORTS

Applying Moral Reasoning to Sports

Applying Moral Reasoning to Sports

Introduction

The philosophy of sport is, like its counterparts, the history and sociology of sport, a relatively recent invention, having appeared on the intellectual scene in North America, its birthplace, only in the middle to late 1960s. These, of course, were heady times for North American colleges and universities, times of economic expansion and physical growth, of political unrest and revolt, and of intellectual experimentation and development. One important consequence of this political and intellectual agitation on college campuses was that classical and revered academic disciplines found themselves under constant attack by a swelling student body of baby boozers distrustful of anything old and revered — indeed, distrustful of anybody, as the popular saying went, over the age of 35, and eager for change and alternative academic experiences. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that new academic fields like the philosophy of sport got their start during this period (MacAloon, 1991).

However, two developments in particular were crucial to the conceptual debut of moral reasoning as it applies to sports philosophy. The first was the emergence of sports studies out of the old and staid field of physical education. Whereas the traditional field of physical education was based exclusively on the medical and pedagogical study of physical activity and sport, the new, upstart field of sports studies championed a more ambitious intellectual agenda, one that retained the medical and pedagogical study of sport but ranged them alongside the philosophical, historical and sociological study of sport. This displacement of science and pedagogy as the mainstays of the curriculum made possible, then, a more abiding study of the cultural and historical contexts of sports. In this regard, the publication of Eleanor Metheny's Movement and Meaning (1968) and Howard Slusher's Man, Sport, and Existence (1967) solidified the place of the philosophy of sport in these burgeoning sports studies programs.

The second development was the long overdue consideration of sport by philosophy proper. The neglect of sport by philosophy is, alas, a long-standing one. Although there was a well-established tradition within philosophy of interrogating forms of life vital to societies and peoples (to wit, the philosophy of religion, art, science and education), sport, despite its influence on cultures as diverse as ancient Greece and modern-day America, managed somehow to avoid serious philosophic scrutiny. There were, of course, exceptions. For instance, Plato and Aristotle wrote approvingly, even at times enthusiastically, of play and sport, and modern philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger used play as a metaphor to define their own distinctive world-views, and contemporary philosophers such as Sartre and Wittgenstein employed notions of sport and game to explicate their influential conceptions of human existence and language respectively. In the main, however, most philosophers simply ignored sport, convinced that it was too marginal an undertaking to warrant philosophic attention (Cordner, 1984).

This dismissive regard for sport, and by implication anything having to do with the body, however, was not just a byproduct of philosophy's past, of its close ...