Eligibility to compete in sport is organised principally around two binary distinctions: ‘clean/doped’ and ‘male/female’. These distinctions are challenged both by steroid users who wish to...

There is a crisis of leadership in sport. Leadership as an athletic excellence is under threat from the deepening influence of coaches on in-game decision- making. To appreciate what is being lost in this shift of responsibility, it is necessary to understand the challenge of athlete leadership. Captaincy is the quintessential on-field leadership role. However, the role of captain, and athlete leadership more widely, remains philosophically untheorized. This paper initiates a discussion of leadership in sport by providing the first normative (...) account of captaincy. Rugby union is used as a case study, as this sport preserves an especially demanding and complex form of captaincy that may provide a rough template for the revival of athlete leadership in other sports. A virtue theoretical analysis of the role is developed based on a functionalist conception of virtue. It is argued that discharging the responsibilities of such captaincy requires two key virtues: ‘sporting judgement’ and ‘responsibility’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Excellence’ underpins debates within sports ethics from the nature of sport to the permissibility of doping. Despite the central role that excellence occupies in ethical reasoning about sport, it has garnered more support than scrutiny in the literature. Little has been said about how this value can be advanced or undermined. This paper addresses that lacuna by demonstrating that excellence has a complexity that has previously gone unnoticed. Specifically, excellence has four distinct elements: the ‘cluster of excellence’, the ‘quantum of (...) excellence’, the ‘clarity of excellence’, and the ‘balance of excellence’. Correspondingly, excellence can be advanced or undermined in any of four ways. This analysis yields the ‘Excellence Principle’ – a principle that provides a desideratum for any broad internalist (i.e. interpretivist) theory of sport and a normative framework with which to undertake excellence-based reasoning in sports ethics. (shrink)

While sport has been practised since pre-historic times, it is a relatively new subject of systematic philosophical enquiry. Indeed, the philosophy of sport as an academic sub-field dates back only to the 1970s. Yet, in this short time, it has grown into a vibrant area of philosophical research that promises both to deepen our understanding of sport and to inform sports practice. Recent controversies at the elite and professional level have highlighted the ethical dimensions of sport in particular. Lance Armstrong’s (...) use of performance-enhancing drugs raised new issues in the ethics of cheating, middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has challenged prevailing rules around sex classification in sport, and Oscar Pistorius’s prosthesis has problematized the distinction between able-bodied and disabled sport. While philosophical analysis may help to achieve a deeper understanding of sport, such analysis may also illuminate problems of philosophy beyond sport, ranging from the nature of skill to the ethics of altruism. -/- This entry proceeds in three sections. Section 1 introduces the philosophy of sport with particular emphasis on the history of systematic philosophical thinking about sport. Section 2 examines the nature and value of sport, and it considers the main normative theories of sport developed in the literature. Section 3 addresses a cluster of topics that are central to the philosophy of sport, including: sportsmanship; cheating; performance enhancement; violent and dangerous sport; sex, gender, and race; fans and spectators; disability sport; and the aesthetics of sport. (shrink)

Should political leaders have a right to privacy? Incursions by new and traditional media into the private lives of political leaders are commonplace. Are such incursions ethically justifiable? Prima facie, the question of ‘political privacy’ seems to involve a conflict between a politician's self‐interest in retaining a protected private realm and citizens' public interest in having access to information about their representative's private life. Indeed, this is the structure that the debate has typically assumed. I challenge this orthodox view by (...) demonstrating that there is a public interest in political privacy grounded in the relationship between privacy and political judgement. I argue that the political privacy debate should be recast to recognise this conflict between two different strands of the public interest. This conflict presents a dilemma for democratic theory: in providing voters with private information relevant to the evaluation of political leaders' suitability for office and performance within it, we threaten to undermine the conditions necessary to attract candidates of judgement and for political leaders to judge well once in office. (shrink)