Contemporary neo-liberal society is ruled by the market. Davies, Chen and Lentin and Titley show that its objectification and categorization founds a competitive notion of agency that disables subjective construction of self and intersubjective understanding of the world. As the market's rules and norms are set by white patriarchy, its competitive paradigm structurally disadvantages others. Art too is objectified and categorized by neo-liberal institutions, equally embedded in white patriarchal market structures and severely limiting democratic public access to a diverse artistic (...) field, argue hooks, Mercer and Piper. Yet, Piper's artwork shows, art holds emancipatory potential. Defined as transforming experience, its ambiguity provides a structure for constituting agentic subjectivity and intersubjective signification processes, defying objective/objectifying market workings. Photography's specific qualities allow Piper to democratize access to the paradigm she proposes. Her artistic choices may thus found the potential to publicly construct a notion of aesthetic agency as resistance to the neo-liberal market. (shrink)

Among children and adolescents, emotion understanding relates to academic achievement and higher well-being. This study investigates the role of general and emotion-specific language skills in children’s and adolescents’ emotion understanding, building on previous research highlighting the significance of domain-specific language skills in conceptual development. We employ a novel inventory (CEVVT) to assess emotion-specific vocabulary. The study involved 10–11-year-old children (N = 29) and 16–17-year-old adolescents (N = 28), examining their emotion recognition and knowledge of emotion regulation strategies. Results highlight the (...) ongoing development of emotion-specific vocabulary across these age groups. Emotion recognition correlated with general vocabulary in the younger group. In the older age group, emotion recognition was related to emotion-specific vocabulary size, but this effect only became apparent when controlling for the depth of emotion-specific vocabulary. Against expectation, there were no significant contributions of general or emotion-specific vocabulary to knowledge of emotion regulation strategies in either age group. These findings enhance our comprehension of the nuanced interplay between language and emotion across developmental stages. (shrink)

In the only two articles on the topic of which I am aware, Chad Carlson and Scott Aikin have leveled three objections against fantasy sports—namely, that participation in fantasy sports elicits...

An increasing number of small and medium-sized enterprises in the German organic agri-food sector involves citizens through different community financing models. While such models provide alternative funding sources as well as marketing opportunities to SMEs, they allow private investors to combine their financial and ethical concerns by directly supporting the development of a more sustainable food system. Due to the low level of financial intermediation, community financing is characterized by close relations between investors and investees. Against this background, we apply (...) the proximity concept from economic geography to explore spatial and relational aspects of community financing in the German organic agri-food sector. Based on a qualitative multiple case study approach, we find that the relevance of proximity is twofold. While different forms of proximity between SMEs and their potential investors are key success factors, proximity is also considered as one desired outcome of community financing. Furthermore, our results reveal that the extent to which SMEs rely on particular proximity dimensions distinguishes two different approaches to community financing. (shrink)

According to Susan Wolf's hybrid view about meaning in life, a life is meaningful in virtue of subjective attraction to objectively valuable pursuits. Recently, several philosophers have presented counterexamples to the subjective element in Wolf's view. We argue that these examples are not clearly successful and present a modified version which is even stronger in the face of them. Finally, we offer some positive reasons for accepting a subjective condition on a meaningful life.

Stress is one of the most powerful experiences to influence health and disease. Through epigenetic mechanisms, stress may generate a footprint that propagates to subsequent generations. Programming by prenatal stress or adverse experience in parents, grandparents, or earlier generations may thus be a critical determinant of lifetime health trajectories. Changes in regulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) by stress may enhance the vulnerability to certain pathogenic factors. This review explores the hypothesis that miRNAs represent stress‐responsive elements in epigenetic regulation that are potentially (...) heritable. Recent findings suggest that miRNAs are key players linking adverse early environments or ancestral stress with disease risk, thus they represent useful predictive disease biomarkers. Since miRNA signatures of disease are potentially heritable, big data management platforms will be vital to harness multi‐generational information and capture succinct yet potent biomarkers capable of directing preventative treatments. This feature would offer a unique window of opportunity to advance personalized medicine. (shrink)

In two recent articles, Nicholas Dixon has argued that the intent to hurt and injure opponents which is essential to mixed martial arts makes the sport intrinsically immoral. Although bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism also involves the intentional infliction of pain and injury, Dixon argues that it is morally permissible in many cases. In this paper, I examine the principle underlying Dixon's differentiation of MMA and BDSM. I argue that, when properly elaborated, that principle does not in fact condemn MMA (...) as intrinsically immoral, but rather implies that the attitudes and actions of most autonomously consenting amateur MMA fighters and some autonomously consenting professionals are prima facie morally permissible. (shrink)

This paper argues that recent treatments of ethics in sport have accorded too much importance to the promotion and portrayal of a sport’s excellences, and too little to the consent of participants First, I consider and reject a fundamental challenge to the idea that consent should play a central role in determining the morality of action in sport – namely, Sean McAleer’s argument to the effect that consent is incapable of rendering normally impermissible actions permissible in sport. I then offer (...) a preliminary examination of the proper relation in the moral evaluation of action in sport between considerations of consent and ‘internalist’ considerations regarding the nature and purpose of sport. Taking as my starting point J.S. Russell’s treatment of this topic, I argue that consent is the more weighty, and in many cases the more fundamental, value and that when it conflicts with internalist considerations, it is consent that takes moral priority. (shrink)

We explore the lexical choices made by authors published in Administrative Science Quarterly, a major academic journal in business and management studies. We do so via a corpus constructed from all the articles published in ASQ from its first publication in 1956 up until the end of 2018. Specifically, our focus is on lexical items that represent social actors. Our findings suggest that, compared with earlier work, recent articles typically ascribe greater status and prestige to organizational elites. Relatively contemporary papers (...) are also more likely to use language that obfuscates or ignores unpalatable aspects of organizational life, such as power asymmetries, hierarchy and control through identity regulation. We suggest that these changes in word choices can be understood to reflect a wider trend towards neo-liberal rhetoric – a rhetoric increasingly pervading contemporary social life more generally. (shrink)

In his ‘Rules and Obligations,’ Bogdan Ciomaga defends a pluralist account of moral obligations to follow sport rules by arguing that no single explanation of such obligations will plausibly apply in multiple contexts. I dispute this claim by showing that consent generates rule-following obligations in a very wide variety of the contexts in which sports are played, including each of those Ciomaga cites in support of his pluralist account. The contractualist or consent-based theory of rule normativity therefore offers a substantially (...) unifying – though not a unitary, for reasons I go on to explain – source of moral obligations to follow sport rules. (shrink)

It is plausible to think that part of what it is to be an autonomous agent is to adequately respond to important changes in one’s circumstances. The agent who has set her own course in life, but is unable to recognize and respond appropriately when evidence arises indicating the need to reconsider and perhaps adjust her plan, lacks an important form of personal autonomy. However, this “evidence-responsiveness” aspect of autonomy has not yet been adequately analyzed. Most autonomy theorists ignore it (...) altogether and the few who have addressed it have failed to give a satisfactory account. In this paper, I first examine an evidence-responsiveness condition proposed by Arneson. I argue there that while Arneson’s condition provides a valuable framework in which to examine evidence-responsiveness, there are several crucial issues that it either fails to address at all or else fails to adequately resolve. That condition is therefore in need of further elaboration and refinement. I then examine a recent article in this journal by Blöser, Schöpf, and Willaschek which develops an account of autonomy that I argue can usefully be understood as employing and elaborating upon the general framework offered by Arneson. I argue that while the elaboration Blöser and her co-authors provide Arneson’s condition is instructive, it is inadequate in several important ways which indicate the form a more satisfactory evidence-responsiveness condition will take. I go on to develop such a condition and conclude by highlighting the advantages to be gained by including that condition in a complete theory of autonomy. (shrink)

Der kürzlich verstorbene US-amerikanische Soziologe Robert K. Merton war der prominenteste und einflußreichste Anomie-Theoretiker nach Emile Durkheim. Seine Typologie der Arten individueller Anpassung an anomische gesellschaftliche Situationen bietet heute noch eine wertvolle Grundlage zur Analyse von Gesellschaften. Dieser Beitrag konzentriert sich auf einen dieser Anpassungstypen, den Ritualismus, der Merton zufolge beinhaltet, daß einerseits die kulturellen Ziele, allen voran das des wirtschaftlichen Wohlstands, heruntergeschraubt oder aufgegeben und andererseits die institutionellen Normen zur Erreichung dieser Ziele beinahe zwanghaft befolgt werden. Diese Definition überdenkend (...) versucht der vorliegende Beitrag herauszuarbeiten, daß innerhalb des Systems der Anpassungsformen das Herunterschrauben der kulturellen Ziele nicht das Hauptcharakteristikum ritualistischen, sondern konformen Verhaltens darstellt. Ritualisten haben den Prozeß des Herunterschraubens vielmehr bereits beendet, indem sie jegliche kulturellen Ziele aufgegeben haben, bis auf den einen Wert an sich, nämlich die institutionellen Regeln einzuhalten.Ritualistische Anpassung ist aus Merton`s Sicht für die Soziologie abweichenden Verhaltens, ganz zu schweigen von den Kriminalwissenschaften, nicht von Interesse. Im Gegensatz zu dieser Einschätzung versucht dieser Artikel die verschiedenen soziologischen und sogar kriminologischen Implikationen ritualistischen Verhaltens darzustellen, mit dem Ergebnis, daß Ritualismus sehr wohl ein soziales Problem darstellt. Der Ritualist unterwirft sich nicht nur selbst den institutionellen Normen, sondern fühlt sich auch dazu berufen, andere ständig an die Einhaltung der Regeln zu gemahnen und sie zu überwachen. Deshalb gibt es viele typisch ritualistische Formen abweichenden Verhaltens, wie Denunziation, erzieherischer Tadel oder Mobbing, die sogar in kriminelles Verhalten wie falsche Verdächtigung, Nötigung oder Beleidigung kulminieren können.Am schillerndsten ist die Rolle des Ritualisten in der Kriminalpolitik, nicht zuletzt heute in der Bundesrepublik. Repression jeglicher Art ist seine Antwort auf Regelverstöße und die Kriminalpolitik macht zunehmend Zugeständnisse an ritualistische Forderungen nach härterer und schnellerer Bestrafung oder umfassender Überwachung des öffentlichen Raumes. Ritualisten dominieren den sozialen Diskurs und die allgemeine Wahrnehmung von Kriminalität nicht nur, weil sie wichtige Nutzer und damit Zielgruppe gewisser Massenmedien sind und gerne Leserbriefe schreiben. Sie sind so dominant, weil ihre Art der Anpassung bei zunehmender wirtschaftlicher Krise die Konformität der Wirtschaftswunderzeit zurückgedrängt hat und heute die am weitesten verbreitete in der deutschen Gesellschaft ist. Daher ist auch die schon seit Jahrzehnten zu beobachtende Verschiebung der theoretischen Strafzweckbegründung hin zur Positiven Generalprävention alles andere als ein Zufall. The recently deceased US-sociologist Robert K. Merton has been the most prominent and influential anomie theorist since Emile Durkheim. His typology of modes of adaptation to anomic social situations still constitutes a valuable basis for analyzing society. This contribution focuses on one of these types of adaptation, ritualism, which according to Merton, involves the scaling down or abandoning of the cultural goals, above all economic wealth, on the one hand and to abide almost compulsively by institutional norms to attain these goals on the other. In reconsidering this definition, this contribution attempts to elaborate that within the system of adaptive modes scaling down does not describe the main characteristic of ritualistic behaviour, but first of all characterizes conformity. Ritualists, on the contrary, have already completed the process of scaling down by finally abandoning any cultural goal except the one end-in-itself, that is to comply with the institutional rules.Ritualistic adaptation, in Merton`s view, is of no interest to the sociology of deviant behaviour, not to mention criminal sciences. In contrast to this evaluation this contribution tries to delineate the various sociological and even criminological implications of ritualistic behaviour, leading to the conclusion that Ritualism does indeed present a social problem. The ritualist does not only surrender himself to the institutional means but feels competent to constantly reminding others of abiding by the institutional norms and supervising them. Hence there are many typically ritualistic forms of deviant behaviour like denunciation, disciplinary reproof or mobbing that may even culminate in criminal behaviour like false suspicion, duress or insult.Most ambiguous is the ritualist`s part in criminal policy, not at least in contemporary Germany. Repression of any kind is his answer to breaches of the rules and criminal policy more and more concedes to ritualistic demands for more severe and rapid punishment or extensive supervision of public facilities. Ritualists dominate the social discourse and general perception of criminality, not only because they are important users and therefore the target group of certain mass media, and like to write letters to the editor. They do dominate because in times of increasing economic crisis their mode of adaptation has forced back the conformity of the German economic miracle era and is now the most common one in contemporary German society. Thus, the shift in the theoretical justification of punishment towards a theory of positive general prevention, noticeable for decades, is anything but accidental. (shrink)

This article draws attention to a pattern of development within science and other intellectual research communities that has received virtually no mention. We propose that subsequent dominance of a research community by a figure responsible for significant innovation often delays progress in the field. During the period in which the revolutionary continues to influence research in a community, far too frequently the effect is to freeze progress within the limited directions which the revolutionary sanctions.

To be an autonomous agent is to determine one’s own path in life. However, this cannot plausibly be seen as a one-off affair. An autonomous agent does not merely set herself on a particular course and then lock the steering wheel in place, so to speak, but must maintain some form of ongoing control over her direction in life—must keep her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel. Circumstances often change in important and unexpected ways, after all, (...) and it is reasonable to think that a crucial part of autonomy consists of the ability and disposition to recognize and properly respond to such changes. This implies, I contend, that a patient whose initial decision to undergo a given treatment satisfied plausible requirements of autonomy, but who is now unable to recognize that available evidence indicates the need to reconsider her medical situation and options has come to lack autonomy with respect to her desire to continue that treatment. However, and despite its importance with respect to both theoretical understandings of autonomy and applications of the concept to clinical ethics, this ongoing aspect of autonomy has received little attention. This paper aims to go some way toward remedying that. I first critically review two of the few theories of autonomy that do address “evidence-responsiveness” so as to identify and elaborate what I take to be the most promising way in which to account for this aspect of autonomy. After considering and responding to a possible objection to the evidence-responsiveness condition I propose, I conclude by discussing its clinical implications. That condition, I argue, is not merely theoretically sound, but can and should be applied to clinical practice. (shrink)

Voluntarist accounts of secession are those that attempt to ground a moral right to secede in autonomy. This paper argues that no such account is likely to succeed. After describing the serious problems that plague the most straightforward Voluntarist approach, I examine two recent accounts that employ novel approaches designed to avoid those difficulties. I argue that both accounts fail, shedding considerable doubt on the possibility of a plausible autonomy-based account of the moral right to secede. I go on to (...) discuss what this pessimistic conclusion implies for the theory and practice of secession. (shrink)

The time of art: Negri and Virno on kairòs, language, and creation. Negri and Virno aim to establish a concept of art that demonstrates a difference within a contemporary society that they see as completely dominated by the market. A time regime presenting the spheres of work and non-work as separate, structures human life. Yet in fact, work today stretches beyond the borders of both spheres. Labor power consists mainly in creativity, communication, and cooperation. Virno and Negri state that a (...) market-oriented time regime that perpetuates a divide between labor time and non-labor time presents itself as a dismeasure. It attempts to objectively measure and structure something that is really a dynamic and intersubjective matter, namely the immaterial traits that are also potentially productive of life in general, and that are productive of art. When Negri and Virno call the work of art a singular mode of labor power, they imply that it deploys the elements of labor power in a manner that is different from market-oriented labor, that it exploits their capacity to produce life itself in a meaningful way. Yet neither Negri nor Virno puts forth a broad concept of art that embodies the potential that they attribute to it. This article aims to extend Negri’s and Virno’s proposals and present a conceptualization of the nature of the artwork that would posit the difference in relation to dismeasure of the market as Negri and Virno conceive it. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a novel deliberation-based theory of autonomy which grounds an agent’s autonomy in her nature as a rationally-reflective being. I defend that theory against competing approaches to autonomous agency by arguing that the theory I propose is best equipped to handle two of the more troublesome problems that theories of autonomy face: the regress problem and the problem of manipulation. Sarah Buss and Peter Railton have each recently claimed that the regress problem which plagues many prominent (...) accounts of autonomy indicates the need to abandon the notion that autonomous agency is to be understood in terms of deliberation, endorsement, or any other activity on the part of the agent, and adopt instead a “passive” approach to autonomous agency. Against this claim, I argue that despite their shift to the passive mode, the theories offered by Buss and Railton also face a version of the regress problem, and that the general solution to that problem implicit in their passive theories is available also to “active” theories of autonomy, such as the deliberation-based theory I propose. I go on to explain that because the solution to the regress problem I extract from the theories of Buss and Railton requires an “unmoved mover” of autonomy, the history of which is necessarily irrelevant, it invites manipulation objections. I argue that the theory I propose offers the most promising response to such objections, and thus escapes these two prominent problems in better stead than do the competing approaches to autonomous agency. (shrink)

Historical accounts of autonomy hold that the autonomy of pro-attitudes depends, at least in part, on the way in which they came about. Understandably, such accounts tend to focus the bulk of their attention on identifying the historical conditions necessary for the development of autonomous pro-attitudes. As Alfred Mele has argued, however, in addition to autonomy with respect to the development of one’s pro-attitudes, full or robust personal autonomy requires as well that one be autonomous with respect to the continued (...) possession of one’s pro-attitudes, and with respect to the influence those pro-attitude have on one’s behavior. These non-historical aspects of personal autonomy have not, though, been adequately addressed by recent historical accounts. This paper aims to draw attention to, and hopefully go some way toward remedying, the need for further illumination of the two ongoing aspects of autonomy. I argue first that in order for a pro-attitude to be autonomously possessed, it is not enough that it developed in an autonomous manner; it must also be maintained in an autonomous manner. I examine two proposed “autonomous-maintenance” conditions, one by Mele, the other by Richard Arneson, and argue that, as those conditions stand, neither is satisfactory. What we need, I argue, is an autonomous-maintenance condition that adjusts and combines the requirements of those two conditions, such as that I go on to offer. According to that condition, the autonomous possession of a pro-attitude requires that the agent remain disposed and able to review the pro-attitude in the light of new and relevant evidence, and that she is capable of shedding the pro-attitude should such review issue in a rational judgment that it is best to do so. I then examine Mele’s discussion of the behavioral aspect of autonomy relative to a pro-attitude. I argue that by requiring that an agent be able to construct and execute a plan for acting on the basis of a pro-attitude that has some objectively determined likelihood of success, Mele’s treatment of the behavioral aspect of autonomy confuses the ability to autonomously pursue one’s ends with the ability to achieve them. The behavioral aspect of autonomy, I argue, ought instead require merely that an agent be able to employ her adequate self-control capacities in determining for herself whether and how to go about acting on her autonomously possessed pro-attitudes. (shrink)

Contrary to our conception of logic and science, our reality of life doesn’t shy at paradoxes which are rather omnipresent there. In fact they are to be found everywhere and are not understood as faults. Paradoxes are seen as stimulating; they attract our attention and make as laugh about the conditio humana.The book starts with a collection of paradoxical quotes from antiquity, followed in the central part by a survey of numerous examples ordered by spheres of life. This will show (...) the broad dissemination of the phenomenon of paradox. Furthermore some examples taken from literature are to follow, not to forget jocular samples.Finally the question is raised if and within which limits paradoxes can be used in a sensible way. (shrink)

This essay examines President Nixon's drug policy during the early 1970s, specifically the government's reaction to heroin use by American soldiers in Vietnam. The official response, discursively (through the employment of the drugs-as-a-disease metaphor) and on the policy level illustrated how of issues of national- and self-identity othering, and modernity intersected in the formulation and implementation of what is now termed the Drug War. Heroin using soldiers and domestic addicts, labeled as carriers of a contagious, foreign, and antimodem, dangerous disease, (...) threatened to undermine a contingent national identity an identity weighted by capitalist modernity. Unearthing how addiction's ostensibly antimodern condition contributed to the othering of addicts as a foreign danger reveals how the United States' antidrug character and policies help maintain a national identity bound to the tenets of capitalist modernity. Methodologically, this essay combines historical analysis with literary and critical theory. (shrink)

In Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together, Michael Bratman refines, systematizes, and defends his “planning theory” of shared agency, various elements of which were sketched in a series of earlier essays on the topic. The book is analytically rigorous and fairly technical at points, but organized and written with extraordinary clarity. It represents a valuable contribution to the literature on shared intention and joint activity, and is essential reading for philosophers working in that area.Bratman takes as his central (...) foils Margaret Gilbert and John Searle, both of whom argue that there is a fundamental discontinuity between individual agency and shared agency in that the resources needed to explain the latter extend beyond those that enable us to explain the former. According to those theorists, an adequate account of shared agency requires appeal to “some new and fundamentally different kind of practical element” : an irreducible “joint commitment” on Gilbert’s .. (shrink)

Interactomics aims to characterize all interactions formed between molecules that comprise our body. Although it emerged from quantitative biophysics, it has devolved into a predominantly qualitative field of science over the past decades. Due to technical limitations at its onset, almost all tools in interactomics are qualitative, which persists in defining the discipline. Here, we argue that interactomics needs to return to a quantitative direction because the technical achievements of the last decade have overcome the original limitations that forced its (...) current path. In contrast to qualitative interactomics which is constrained to charting lists of observed interactions, quantitative interactomics can also uncover answers to key questions such as the strength of interactions or how many of certain complexes can form in cells, thus providing researchers with more immediate proxies for understanding and predicting biological processes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSerene Khader and Rosa Terlazzo have each recently proposed theories of adaptive preferences which purport to both respect persons’ agency and provide an effective political tool. While Khader and Terlazzo thus share a similar goal, they take fundamentally different paths in its pursuit: Khader offers a perfectionist account of APs and Terlazzo an autonomy-based theory. In this paper, I argue first that if it is to adequately respect persons’ agency, a theory of APs should in some way include autonomy considerations. (...) If it is to provide an effective political tool, however, our theory should not be entirely autonomy-based, but include a condition addressing a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing. The suggestion is thus that it is worth considering the possibility of a ‘mixed,’ rather than exclusively perfectionist or exclusively autonomy-based, theory of APs. I outline two such theories. The first, I argue, does quite well with respect to the political efficacy aim of AP theoriz... (shrink)

Robert Goodin has usefully distinguished two models of liberal multiculturalism: “Protective multiculturalism,” which justifies multiculturalist policies, such as granting minority cultures group rights, on the grounds that such policies may be necessary to defend those cultures against oppression, and “Polyglot multiculturalism,” which positively values multiculturalism for sake of its benefits to society at large. Typically, it is the autonomy of a society’s members that multiculturalism is thought to benefit. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to several other (...) possible benefits of multiculturalism. We find in Mill’s discussion of “individuality” three suggestions as to how the social diversity brought by multiculturalism may promote well-being: through self-development, through individuals’ identification of suitable pursuits, and through social progress. While I believe that all three of Mill’s suggestions are worthy of reexamination, inthis paper I focus my attention on defending the latter. (shrink)

A common view among autonomy theorists is that a desire is autonomous only if it has the right sort of history. Usually, an autonomy-compatible history is taken to consist in the desire’s having had proper origins. In a recent article in this journal, Mikhail Valdman has proposed an alternative historical theory on which a desire’s origins are irrelevant. On Valdman’s “agent-engagement” theory, a desire is autonomous if and only if the agent has made it her own by deliberatively deciding it (...) is worth maintaining and acting on. I argue that both of these approaches are overly demanding: the history of many autonomous desires lack proper origins, agent-engagement, or both. Taking as my starting point Alfred Mele’s account, which I go on to revise and supplement in several important ways, I outline a more flexible historical theory of autonomy which recognizes multiple ways in which a desire can become one’s own. (shrink)

In the contemporary debate on the nature of autonomy, it is generally taken for granted that autonomy is to be understood as rule by the self, with the debate centring on how that self is to be identified. Garnett [2013b] has recently proposed a theory that rejects the dominant understanding of autonomy as rule by the self and views it instead as resistance to rule by others. According to that theory, an autonomous agent is one whose various ‘autonomy traits’ render (...) her sufficiently resistant to subjection to foreign wills. I argue that Garnett has not given us good reason to abandon the understanding of autonomy as rule by the self. His account is plausible only if it is understood to require for autonomy the possession of at least one trait with which the agent can be identified. And the best explanation of the necessity of some such trait is offered, not by Garnett's, but by the dominant understanding of autonomy he rejects. (shrink)

Two recent articles in this journal – one by Morris, the other by Pfleegor & Rosenberg – have revived the philosophical discussion of the ethics of deception in sport which had largely laid dormant since the 1973 publication of Pearson’s ‘Deception, Sportsmanship, and Ethics’. Morris and Pfleegor & Rosenberg both share with Pearson the view that ethical deceptive sport acts are those that relate to sport-specific skills. However, whereas Pearson ultimately grounds this view in the agreement she takes to obtain (...) amongst sport participants, both recent treatments overlook this fundamental aspect of her account and offer alternative justifications for that view. I argue, though, that in both cases the arguments offered are incomplete precisely because they require an appeal to the agreement amongst participants that lies at the foundation of Pearson’s account. On all three treatments, I argue, what ultimately determines an action’s ethical status is not its relation to sport-specific skills, but its conformit... (shrink)