Abstract

With the tremendous emphasis placed on making money and producing championship teams, the "ideal sports contest" is often compromised. Athletes are caught in a paradox between Academia's "Ideal" intentions and the actual "Perceived Real" program. Because of the athletes "coddled" environment, they are often unable to make morally reasoned choices and decisions, based in impartial, reflective, and consistent thinking. The major reasons the former problems surface and plague intercollegiate sport is due to poor or nonexistent critical thinking. ;The problem is further compounded because few trained sport philosophers are passionately concerned with the teaching or researching of applied philosophy to a profession that is in desperate need. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to: show that philosophy is living and vibrant, bridge the gap between theory and applied, and demonstrate what could be if philosophical theory is applied in intercollegiate athletics. ;Specifically, the purpose of this philosophic and experimental study was: to speculate why "doing" philosophy is the most important study imperative to the survival of physical education and sport and examine the effects of an experimental applied normative ethics intervention program on the moral reasoning and moral development of college-aged student athletes. ;Student athletes enrolled in the course scored significantly higher from pre to posttests using the Hahm-Beller Values Choice Inventory on total deontic, honesty, responsibility, and justice scores compared to student athlete controls. Gender differences were also detected in that females used higher deontological reasoning compared to males. Student athlete controls scored significantly lower from pre to posttests on the value of justice. Relative to the DIT, student athletes enrolled in the course scored significantly higher from pre to posttests compared to student athlete controls. ;Support exists that an intensive eighteen week moral reasoning in sport course teaches student athletes to better understand what they believe and how to act on those beliefs. Because normative deontological theory supports the tenets of moral reasoning, perhaps immoral actions and ethical abuses will dramatically decrease in intercollegiate programs