This article develops a novel theory of sport that I call ‘Confucian mutualism’. Confucian mutualism is underpinned by the Confucian Golden Rule and the Confucian conception of human dignity. It resembles the mutualist theory of sport developed by Robert L. Simon in maintaining that sport participants ethically ought to prioritize promoting sporting excellence both in themselves and in their co-participants. However, while Simon’s mutualism maintains that sporting excellence consists in proficiency at sport constitutive skills, Confucian mutualism maintains that sporting excellence (...) consists in success at achieving the Confucian virtues through sport participation. I provide a preliminary case for why Confucian mutualism’s virtue-centric conception of sporting excellence makes it better able than Simon’s mutualism to explain why sporting excellence is stance-independently ethically significant for all sport participants. I do so by trying to show that we have prima facie justification for believing that Confucian mutualism is not vulnerable to certain kinds of criticisms that have been leveled at Simon’s mutualism. (shrink)

In this paper I shall first examine an apparent paradox in Confucius? view on whether everyone is perfectible through education: on the one hand, he states that education should be provided to all, on the other hand, he says that common people cannot be made to know things. To understand this apparent paradox, I shall argue that education for Confucius is primarily moral education, as he teaches his students to become virtuous persons. So the apparent paradox is really one about (...) whether virtue can be taught. I shall argue in the last section that while Confucius? answer to the question is affirmative, he does not think that virtue can be taught in the same way as theoretical knowledge or technical skills are taught. For Confucius, the most effective way to teach people to be virtuous is through personal example. (shrink)

Eudaimonists deny that eudaimonism is objectionably egoistic, but the way in which they do so commits them to eschewing an important insight that has been a central motivation for eudaimonism: the idea that an individual must, in the end, organize her life in such a way that it is good for her. In this paper I argue that the egoism objection prods eudaimonists to make a choice between (what we might roughly call) welfare-prior and excellence-prior eudaimonism, and I make some (...) preliminary remarks on behalf of welfare-prior eudaimonism. (shrink)