In their recent contribution to JPS, Gleaves and Llewellyn argue on lusory and ethical grounds that elite sporting competition should cease to be predicated on competitions between nations. From a lusory perspective, they argue that inter-national sports’ limitation on who can compete undermines some of the central principles of elite sport, such as athletic supremacy and merit. From an ethical perspective, they argue that inter-national sport is categorically unethical because the national and cultural narratives that frame such contests are inherently (...) untruthful and inauthentic. In this article, we challenge Gleaves and Llewellyn on both these grounds and argue that national identity and representation are worthy values that can be achieved through sport, and that inter-national sport, far from being categorically unethical, has the potential to stimulate meaningful cultural conversations, both within and between national communities. (shrink)

In this essay, we respond to Angelo Corlett’s criticism of our paper ‘Ethics, Brain Injuries, and Sports: Prohibition, Reform, and Prudence’. To do so, first, we revisit certain assumptions and arg...

There are robust consequences of the fact that football is football and not something else. The aesthetic personality of football does not submit to a template inappropriately borrowed from elsewhere. One consequence is that beauty should not be awarded privileged status. Any just aesthetics of the game must be properly hospitable to the game’s less hygienic and agonistic features, such as stolid defence, scuffling and scavenging, heroic goalkeeping, visible toil and strain, the intrinsic possibility of failure, the visibly strenuous working (...) with materials, one’s exposed vulnerability to conditions, luck, loss of form and the injured or ageing body, and the visible realisation of a plurality of life values in a self-enclosed domain. This gives football a deep affinity with a Modernist aesthetics. However, ‘traditional’ aesthetics might also have a substantive and precious input into the aesthetics of football. Indeed, it might be that beauty is a legitimate aesthetic category and.. (shrink)