This paper argues that striving is a cardinal virtue in sport and life. It is an overlooked virtue that is an important component of human happiness and a source of a sense of dignity. The human ps...

This essay argues that idleness as play and leisure would be recognised as an ideal over game playing in Bernard Suits’ Utopia. Idleness is unaccountably overlooked as an ideal by Suits, as is the problem that his description of game playing is an anachronism, pushing his Utopians into a pre-Utopian condition. There is room for playing games in an idle Utopia but in a less prominent and more restricted role. Idleness as play and leisure is not defended as the sole (...) ideal of Utopian existence though it is possibly that. Rather, it is presented as a compelling and preferable ideal for Suits’ Utopians, thus refuting his claim that game playing is ‘the only possible’ ideal of human existence in Utopia. (shrink)

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)

ABSTRACT‘Excellence’ underpins debates within sports ethics from the nature of sport to the permissibility of doping. Despite the central role that excellence occupies in ethical reasoning about sport, it has garnered more support than scrutiny in the literature. Little has been said about how this value can be advanced or undermined. This paper addresses that lacuna by demonstrating that excellence has a complexity that has previously gone unnoticed. Specifically, excellence has four distinct elements: the ‘cluster of excellence’, the ‘quantum of (...) excellence’, the ‘clarity of excellence’, and the ‘balance of excellence’. Correspondingly, excellence can be advanced or undermined in any of four ways. This analysis yields the ‘Excellence Principle’ – a principle that provides a desideratum for any broad internalist (i.e. interpretivist) theory of sport and a normative framework with which to undertake excellence-based reasoning in sports ethics. (shrink)

The work of Bernard Suits continues to be discussed in the sports philosophy field, over forty years after the publication of his brilliant book, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Much of t...