Sport, ethics and philosophy; context, history, prospects

Societies and journals of applied philosophy abound these days. Any newcomer to the field of philosophy of sport might experience a certain, though misplaced, surprise. How can it be that social practices such as sports, stereotypical havens for unreflective physical action, could generate genuine philosophical interest? To what extent is this scepticism well founded? Is it mere prejudice?

When one considers the cultural practices that to a greater or lesser degree form the contours of modern living, it is undeniably true that sport is evident. Some might even go as far to say that its reach is ubiquitous. The idea that sports might not be of particular interest to the intellectually curious should in part be assuaged by the following statistics: the Winter Olympics of 2002 in Salt Lake City, USA, were broadcast by a total of 160 countries, and the summer games in Athens 2004 accumulated 34.4 billion total viewing hours by spectators, 1 while 5.9 billion viewers watched the 2006 Football World Cup final in Germany in 2006.2 Moreover, the worlds of philosophy and sport have collided at least since Plato's early foray into wrestling at the Isthmian Games (Miller, 2004) and his recommendations for gymnastics in the early education of the philosopher kings in The Republic.

As a sub-discipline of philosophy more formally, the philosophy of sport might be said to have come into existence at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Boston, USA, on 28 December 1972, where the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport (PSSS) was founded, thanks principally to the efforts of Professor Warren Fraleigh of the State University of Brockport, New York. Professor Paul Weiss of the Catholic University of America became its first president in that year. This had followed the publication of his own book-length treatment of the subject, Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry, in 1969. The PSSS staged annual meetings across the world from 1973. In the nascent studies of sport, and the many academic subject areas that grew out of it, philosophy of sport can rightly claim to be among the earliest formed. In 1999 PSSS renamed itself the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport in order to indicate, among other things, the growing regional diversity of its membership. It has published The Journal for the Philosophy of Sport annually since 1974 and bi-annually since 2001. Many of its best early articles have been collected in two editions by former editors Bill Morgan and Klaus Meier (1988; 1995).

While the subject enjoyed a strong basis in the United States of America and Canada, 3 its development in the global context was somewhat uneven. Until recently there no formally organised national associations for philosophy of sport with the exception of the Japanese Society for the Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education formed in 1978 and the philosophy of sport section within the German Society of Sports Science (Deutsche Vereinigung fur Sportwissenschaft) since the 1970s. More recently, at a conference held at the University of Gloucestershire at a meeting in 2002 a new organisation, the British Philosophy of Sport Association (BPSA) was formed, for which this journal is the official organ. In the following year it held its first annual meeting and has met annually thereafter. It has drawn presenters from around the world and has created a working group tasked to initiate a European Philosophy of Sport Association that will coexist with the BPSA and develop formal links with it in terms of this journal and associated conferences. One important hurdle to jump, before the European Association is founded, is the title. While this problem is not unique to the founding of scholarly associations, it reflects a heterogeneity of academic cultures and philosophical histories. A little more needs to be said about this in the light of the proposed development of the journal.

In Japan, as in Britain, a certain amount of philosophical scholarship in relation to sports had been generated in the philosophy of education, where philosophical thinking in physical education had found an academic home. Additionally, in Britain there had been very strong scholarship within the fledgling fields of human movement studies and leisure studies, and later sports and exercise sciences, where philosophers had played a prominent role in the very shaping of the fields themselves. In Continental Europe, a significant body of disparate literature has emerged in native languages, notably in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland and more recently in Slovenia. One term in fairly common currency in Eastern Europe has been that of ‘philosophy of physical culture’ while another has been ‘philosophy of movement culture’. These terms indicate more than linguistic differences. In the first instance, what is commonly called ‘sport’ in the West draws upon a rich history of Greek and Roman athletics, on through to the modern incarnation of educational sports in Victorian Britain and finally to the rebirth of the Olympic Games by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and others. While across Europe the paradigmatic sports we recognise as Olympic ones were practised and promoted, so too were alternative movement cultures including fitness- and health-related activities groups, and sport-for-all organisations, which bore only a family resemblance to the rule-governed and competitive activities we typically think of and classify as ‘sports’ in the West.

There is a deeper and more philosophically interesting difference, though. In the West (and therefore in the Journal for the Philosophy of Sport) there has been a tendency for one philosophical tradition to dominate: analytical philosophy. This is not to deny that Continental philosophy has not developed a sport philosophical literature. Indeed the labels themselves, as Bernard Williams once noted, 4 are somewhat misleading – and both, being traditions of Western philosophy, take no significant account of Eastern philosophy, which in Japan notably has spawned a significant volume of sport philosophical literature. Given that philosophical research is always and everywhere internally related to the expression of ideas, the idiom of that expression somewhat shapes the boundaries of what can be said. In contrast to the biomedical sciences of sport which represent a near universal language housed in technical rationality (‘the’ scientific method) philosophers working in the Continental tradition have largely developed research within the fields of existentialism, hermeneutics, ontology and phenomenology. Although the label ‘Continental’ is itself driven by geographical considerations (the work emanated from communities of scholars in France, Germany and Continental Europe), one finds philosophers of sport right across the globe drawing upon those traditions. Similarly, analytical philosophy, though the dominant tradition in the Anglo-American tradition of Western philosophy, is misleading in the sense that some of its founding fathers were indeed from Continental Europe. The drawing of distinctions to represent our experience of the world, however, is common to all schools or traditions of philosophical and sport philosophical endeavour.

Analytical philosophy had emerged as an essentially conceptual enquiry whose aim was foundational. It is often captured in Locke's famous remark about philosophical work being akin to an underlabourer working in the garden of knowledge. As a second-order activity, its central aim was to provide secure foundations for other disciplines by articulating their conceptual geography. Its pre-eminence was captured by the insistence that conceptual work precedes all proper empirical enquiry. Its exponents were equipped with the analytical tools of dissecting concepts for constituent criteria, drawing conceptual distinctions by their logical grammar and seeking fine-grained differences in their employment. The discipline of philosophy reduced in some quarters to the detailing of ordinary linguistic usages and necessary and sufficient conditions in order to detect the proper meaning of concepts others had to operate with and between. Despite this ‘new’ direction, there remained a strong sense of continuity here with the ancient past. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle too were concerned with marking distinctions, bringing clarity where before there was puzzlement or, worse, commonsensical acquiescence.

This approach certainly dominated the first 20 years of scholarship in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. Much of it revolved around a triad of concepts central to the study of sports (however conceived) and participation therein. One notable exception was Scott Kretchmar's work on the nature of the test-contest relationship, which sought to outline some conceptual and ethical parameters of games and sports and the playing thereof (Kretchmar 1975). The concepts of game, play and sport were themselves internally complex and worthy of critical analytical scrutiny. Work on play had taken its lead not only from classic sources such as Plato but also from more modern scholarship, notably Johan Huizinga's classic Homo Ludens (Hyland 1977; 1984). The concept of game, of course, had been no stranger to mainstream philosophical debates. In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, the concept was used as a foil against an earlier pictorial theory of language and its relation to the world. The example could be taken as a hinge of an ancient debate: could all games have nothing in common other than the fact that they were called games or was there some essence shared by them all? The latter, realist, position was attacked by Wittgenstein, as is well known. Less well known, outside the philosophy of sport anyway, was Professor Bernard Suits's challenge to Wittgenstein's thesis that all games had in common were family resemblances among the class of activities called games. Suits's earliest statement of his position, ‘What is a game?’, published in Philosophy of Science in 1967, was later developed into a classic book-length essay The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia in 1978. His position courted many and varied critical responses and seemed to occupy a vast portion of the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport in the 1980s and 1990s. In many ways it is fitting that in 2006 a second edition of the book has been published and is reviewed here twice, by one philosopher from outside the field (Steven Edwards) and one from within it, the current editor of the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport (John Russell).

For the purposes of this journal, and as a kind of very loose editorial position statement, both ‘sport’ and the ‘philosophy of sport’ will be understood in a generous and catholic fashion. The journal will seek to publish essays concerned with the conceptual task of analysis and interrogation of key ideas and issues of games, play, sports and related movement activity practices such as coaching, health promotion and education. It will also publish essays in cognate intellectual areas such as the philosophy of the body, philosophy of education and physical education, philosophy of health and medicine, philosophy of technology and so on in so far as they challenge and critically inform our understanding of sports – widely instantiated – as social practices.

This openness to the classification of ‘sports’ is extended to the divergent branches of philosophy itself. Just as more established branches of philosophy are not inured from fashion, neither is the philosophy of sport. If analytical investigations into the triad of concepts, play, game and sport, dominated the literature at one time, so too aesthetics and social philosophy have been well-represented in the literature. In the 1990s, however, ethics – and the ethics of sports – came to a position of dominance in research and scholarship in the philosophy of sport.

It would be fair to say that within the ethics of sports, deontological scholarship has flourished, taking its lead from Warren Fraleigh's Right Actions in Sport (1984) which articulated the duties of athletic contestants and coaches alike. During the 1990s more eclectic writings emerged. Inspired by MacIntyre's writings in After Virtue, many philosophers came to conceive of sport as social practices and moved away from the ahistorical/asocial analytical accounts of the elements of games and sport. And they often moved away from the deontological accounts of sports ethics – especially in terms of the constructions of theories of fair play – into virtue-theoretical accounts of sports and therefore of sports ethics. At this time there was certainly a global expansion of applied ethics and the timing of the publication of Ethics and Sport (1998) which I edited with Jim Parry was certainly opportune. In Britain, at least, the book presented a wide variety of topics and philosophical approaches, which helped to spawn new courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Critically, it also gave rise to a host of new professional appointments at universities in Britain and elsewhere. Its success also saw the launch of the book series with Routledge which comprises 12 volumes ranging from explorations of the hyper-commodification of sport to investigations of injury, pain, and risk, sexual exploitation, genetics ethics and research ethics in the fields of sport. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy is the natural extension of that scholarship in the field of philosophy of sport generally, and the ethics of sports more specifically.

It may have struck the reader that the very title of the journal betrays a conceptual tension. While the emergence of sports ethics as a field of scholarship has clearly expanded significantly in the last decade, it is important that it not be divorced from its philosophical moorings. Just as surely as ethical issues do not exist in some conceptual vacuum, so too sports ethics benefits from broader perspectives in ontology, the philosophy of the body or philosophical discussions of the economics and politics of sporting practices and so on. But the value of this connection is not merely instrumental. Seeing and setting ethical issues within broader philosophical territory is a goal worth pursuing for its own sake. The point of the title of the journal is to indicate that the specific field of sports ethics will be the dominant constituency of scholarship but not exclusively so: other branches of the philosophy of sport that have developed over the last 30 years or so are warmly welcomed too. There has to date been very little philosophising in relation to sports from ontological perspectives in Anglo-American philosophy of sport. Equally, very little work in epistemology or the philosophy of action where one might envisage ready application. It is hoped that the journal may play its part in stimulating areas of philosophical interest that have hitherto been underrepresented. The present volume in addition to four essays on ethics from some of the leading philosophers in the field (Paul Davis, Nic Dixon, Sigmund Loland and Bill Morgan), also contains essays by equally esteemed philosophers whose interests go beyond those borders, from social philosophy (Leslie Howe and Andrew Edgar) and the philosophy of science (Graham McFee).

I hope that philosophers of all persuasions, then, will find Sport, Ethics and Philosophy a worthwhile home for their philosophical work on sports. The journal will be published on a tri-annual basis. The first and third issues of each volume will publish papers under conditions of double blind review. The second issue of each year will publish a special issue. The special issues already planned are ‘sports medicine and medical ethics’ (editors: Tamburrini and Tannsjo, 2007), ‘ethics, dis/ability and sports’ (editors: Jespersen and McNamee, 2008) and ‘bodily democracy: towards a philosophy for sports for all’ (Eichberg, 2009). Proposals for special issues thereafter are invited.

Notes

1. See http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_344.pdf, 4, accessed 11 Dec. 2006.

2. See http://www.worldcupblog.org/world-cup-2006/definitive-world-cup-viewing-figures.html, accessed 11 Dec. 2006.

3. Indeed all the editors of the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport have been based in North America hitherto.

4. In praise of Nietzschean moral psychology he wrote: ‘In insisting on the importance of Nietzsche for philosophy, I mean something that cannot be evaded by a definition of “philosophy”. In particular it cannot be evaded by invoking some contrast between “analytical” and “continental” philosophy. This classification always involved a quite bizarre conflation of the methodological and the topographical, as though one classified cars into front wheel drive and Japanese, but besides that and other absurdities of the distinction, there is the more immediate point that no such classification can evade the insistent continuities between Nietzsche's work and the business of what anyone calls philosophy.’ Evidence for that avoidance in the field of philosophy of sport might be found at least in the fact that there is only one text (Gibson, 1993) in the English language that I have ever come across to take Nietzschean ideas seriously.