ABOUT THIS BOOK

What is the purpose of sport, and how are ethical conceptions of sport shaped by the answers to this question? In Sport and Moral Conflict, William Morgan investigates, examining sport as a moral crucible that puts athletes in competitive, emotionally charged situations where fairness and equality are contested alongside accomplishment.

Morgan looks at the modern Olympics—from 1906 Athens to 1924 Paris, when the Games reached international prestige — in order to highlight the debate about athletic excellence and the amateur-professional divide. Whereas the Americans emphasized winning, the Europeans valued a love of the game. Morgan argues that the existing moral theories of sport—formalism and broad internalism (aka interpretivism), which rely on rules and general principles—fall short when confronted with such a dispute as the transition from amateur to professional sport. As such, he develops a theory of conventionalism, in which the norms at work in athletic communities determine how players should ethically acquit themselves. Presenting his case for an ethical theory of sport, Morgan provides insights regarding the moral controversies and crises that persist today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William J. Morgan is Professor Emeritus, Division of Occupational Science and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. He is author of multiple books, most recently of Why Sports Morally Matter, co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Sport and editor of Ethics in Sport, third edition.

REVIEWS

“Morgan is a top scholar, and he presents a fully novel and provocative interpretation of sport ethics. His cross-disciplinary approach of using both history and philosophy to provide ethical guidance is unique. The employment of essentially deep historical tradition as a warrant for defensible moral positions is bold.”— R. Scott Kretchmar, Professor Emeritus of Exercise and Sport Science in the Department of Kinesiology at Penn State University

“A full study of the moral status of sport is necessary and long overdue. Morgan looks seriously at the relative merits of the basic positions, ultimately defending one of them—conventionalism. He displays a complete mastery of the literature, an attention to detail, and a balanced approach to the subject. This work is indispensable in our field: there is no one in the history of the philosophy of sport who has presented such a thorough and challenging critique of moral realism in sport. Sport and Moral Conflict showed me how much richer and more difficult the argument truly is.”—Paul Gaffney, Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University and Editor of the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sport as a Kind of Moral Laboratory

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

2. Formalism and Sport

3. Broad Internalism, Moral Realism, and Sport: The Metaphysical Version

4. Broad Internalism, Moral Realism, and Sport: The Discourse Version

5. What a Conventionalist Ethical Theory of Sport Does Not Look Like: The Case against Coordinating, Deep, and Constitutive (Surface) Conventions

6. A Conventionalist Ethical Theory of Sport

Epilogue: Sport, Moral Progress, and Moral Entrepreneurs

Notes

References

Index

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