Sport and Moral Conflict : A Conventionalist Theory PDF
Preview Sport and Moral Conflict : A Conventionalist Theory
Sport and Moral Conflict Sport and Moral Conflict A Conventionalist Theory William J. Morgan TeMple UniverSiTy preSS Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo TeMple UniverSiTy preSS philadelphia, pennsylvania 19122 tupress.temple.edu Copyright © 2020 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System of Higher education All rights reserved published 2020 library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data names: Morgan, William J., 1948– author. Title: Sport and moral conflict : a conventionalist theory / William J. Morgan. Description: philadelphia : Temple University press, 2020. | includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book explores the dominant theories of ethics in sports, concluding that a conventionalist model is most defensible. it roots its inquiry in the collision of sporting ideologies in the early twentieth century’s Olympic games where english and American ideas of sportsmanship highlighted differing approaches to fairness in sport”—provided by publisher. identifiers: lCCn 2019029971 (print) | lCCn 2019029972 (ebook) | iSBn 9781439915394 (cloth) | iSBn 9781439915400 (paperback) | iSBn 9781439915417 (pdf) Subjects: lCSH: Sports—Moral and ethical aspects. | Sports—History. | Sports—Sociological aspects. Classification: lCC Gv706.3 .M66 2020 (print) | lCC Gv706.3 (ebook) | DDC 175—dc23 lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029971 lC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029972 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American national Standard for information Sciences—permanence of paper for printed library Materials, AnSi Z39.48-1992 printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Bob Simon, in memoriam you ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? . . . For instance their lack of historical sense. . . . They imagine they do honour to a thing by divorcing it from history sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy of it. All the ideas that philosophers have treated . . . have been mummified concepts; nothing real has ever come out of their hands alive. —Friedrich nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols We must not begin by talking of pure ideas—vagabond thoughts that tramp the public highways without any human habitation—but must begin with men and their conversation. —C. S. peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Contents preface and Acknowledgments ix introduction: Sport as a Kind of Moral laboratory 1 1 The Fight for the Moral Soul of Modern Sport: Dueling Amateur and professional Conceptions of Sport in the early Modern Olympic Games, 1896–1924 9 2 Formalism and Sport 29 3 Broad internalism, Moral realism, and Sport: The Metaphysical version 62 4 Broad internalism, Moral realism, and Sport: The Discourse version 96 5 What a Conventionalist ethical Theory of Sport Does not look like: The Case against Coordinating, Deep, and Constitutive (Surface) Conventions 124 6 A Conventionalist ethical Theory of Sport 155 epilogue: Sport, Moral progress, and Moral entrepreneurs 193 notes 203 references 215 index 221 preface and Acknowledgments The main ideas and arguments of this book have preoccupied me for well over a decade. i have tried out initial, provisional versions of them at several conferences and invited talks and in various pub- lished writings. The book you are reading, however, is very much a new work that departs in important ways from my previous presentations and writings on this subject. it thus contains my latest, most developed thoughts on what a conventionalist ethical theory of sport rightly understood looks like and what it might offer in the way of ethical insight regarding the moral controversies and crises that continue to plague sport at all levels seemingly at every turn. i could not have written this book, of course, without the help of my fel- low workers in the philosophy of sport vineyard, who first drew my attention to the ethical questions i entertain here, made compelling arguments about how they might best be answered, and spurred me to seek my own answers to these questions that challenged their answers. in this regard, i owe a special debt of gratitude to Bob Simon and John russell. it was Bob Simon who coined the term broad internalism (interpretivism) and who first sketched out an ethical theory bearing its name in his important essay “internalism and internal values in Sport” (2007). He went on to refine the theory in several publications that helped make it the leading ethical theory in the literature. it is with profound gratitude for all his impressive work in this and other areas of the philosophy of sport that i have dedicated my book to him. i only wish he were still with us to read the finished work and offer his characteristic trenchant responses to it—always rendered, i hasten to add, in a gracious
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