On Sporting Integrity

It has become increasingly popular for sports fans, pundits, coaches and players to appeal to ideas of ‘sporting integrity’ when voicing their approval or disapproval of some aspect of the sporting world. My goal in this paper will be to examine whether there is any way to understand this idea in a way that both makes sense of the way in which it is used and presents a distinctly ‘sporting’ form of integrity. I will look at three recent high-profile sporting incidents that caused sporting integrity to be called into question. I will then examine three different ways in which philosophers have sought to understand integrity and examine whether any of these accounts can provide us with a plausible account of sporting integrity. I will argue that such an account can be given and show how this helps us to understand the three cases.     

Performance-Enhancing Drugs,Sport, and the Ideal of Natural Athletic Performance

The use of certain performance-enhancing drugs (PED) is banned in sport. I discuss critically standard justifications of the ban based on arguments from two widely used criteria: fairness and harms to health. I argue that these arguments on their own are inadequate, and only make sense within a normative understanding of athletic performance and the value of sport. In the discourse over PED, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” performance has exerted significant impact. I examine whether the distinction makes sense from a moral point of view. I propose an understanding of “natural” athletic performance by combining biological knowledge of training with an interpretation of the normative structure of sport. I conclude that this understanding can serve as moral justification of the PED ban and enable critical and analytically based line drawing between acceptable and nonacceptable performance-enhancing means in sport.     

Trash talking,respect for opponents and good competition

Trash talking, which is the North American term for verbal barbs directed at opponents during a sporting event in order to gain a competitive edge, is widely accepted by athletes and the athletic community as a legitimate part of sport. It is, however, morally indefensible. A simple Kantian injunction against treating opponents merely as objects to be overcome is sufficient to condemn this verbal abuse. Attempts to justify trash talking as a strategic ploy that implies no disrespect are disingenuous in view of the fact that its effectiveness depends on opponents' being offended by it. Nor can we defend trash talking as enhancing the goal of athletic competition, since the ability to verbally abuse opponents and remain impervious to their abuse are extraneous to the athletic excellence that contests are designed to measure. Attempts to deflect criticisms by partially immunizing sport from moral scrutiny are implausible. With few exceptions, we judge actions in sport by the same moral standards that we use in any other context. Moreover, the view that neither trash talking nor other actions in sport are fit subjects for strict moral scrutiny is inconsistent with the often-heard claim that sport promotes moral development.     

The Geopolitics of Gulf Sport Sponsorship

ABSTRACT

The names of two major Gulf airlines, Qatar Airways and Emirates, have saturated the European football scene for many years, sponsoring some of the most prominent European teams and FIFA itself. These state-backed airlines are also active in motorsports, rugby, cycling, tennis, golf, cricket, and equestrian sport, while several prominent Gulf elites and royal family members have recently taken over major sports franchises in Europe and elsewhere. How should we understand these far-reaching sponsorship agendas in the Gulf? What can they tell us about the politics and ethics of international sport on the Arabian Peninsula? Moving beyond the general readings of Gulf sport sponsorship as an exercise in ‘soft power,’ this article shows how these deals are strategic nodes for diverse actors in the Gulf and in the international sporting community to advance various interests: personal, political, financial, and otherwise. Informed by a critical geopolitics lens that questions the coherence of the ‘state’ as an actor, I ask what it means to say that ‘the Gulf’ sponsors sport, and more specifically investigate the relevant actors behind these sponsorship deals. To do so, this article examines regional and global political economy through a focus on three Gulf airline sponsors, Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, and three elite sports sponsors—the UAE’s Sheik Mansour, Qatar’s Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaïfi, and Sheikh Nasser of Bahrain. By decentering ‘soft power’ approaches to sport that unduly emphasize the ‘state’ as an actor, this article suggests a more grounded approach to the geopolitics of sport in the Arabian Peninsula, which simultaneously acknowledges the complicity of Western actors and institutions in the rise of Gulf sports sponsorship deals in the past decade.     

Nietzsche,Sport, and Contemporary Culture

The word ‘sport’ next to Nietzsche’s name may raise eyebrows among many Nietzsche readers. ‘What an odd pairing?’ one may ask. We prefer Nietzsche and arts or something from the domain of the Geist. Sport is embedded in mass culture and Nietzsche detests anything that has to do with masses; fandom, an important part of sport culture, is nothing Nietzsche would look at favourably but call it a manifestation of the herd instinct. Besides, clubs and sports organizations control this sporting culture through political and economic apparatuses. On the other hand, modern sports, far from producing higher types and the overhuman, appeal to the lowest common denominator, the person on the street and all athletes are equal. All of these objections notwithstanding, one may still speak of a sporting spirit that embodies play, ecstasy in the sense of Dionysian, inventiveness, agonism, grand spectacle, festivity, a specific type of aesthetics and a form of askesis of the body, and a specific outlet for enactment of active justice and a Gestalt of power relations. Playfulness and game-making are crucial in sports, and play is key to Nietzsche’s thought. Sport is a form of letting go, losing oneself in the game, and can be construed as a field for Dionysian forces. Agonism, a significant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, applies to all competitive sports. Furthermore, sport constitutes one of the major types of spectacles in our age. Finally, sport belongs to the regime of the body, a form of askesis, which Nietzsche would have supported as opposed to the ascetic idealism. In what ways do Nietzsche’s ideas on interpretation shed light on sport and its various aspects as listed above? What hermeneutic tools do we have to interpret sport as a field of culture? These were the guiding questions for this essay.     

“The ripples are big”: Storying the impact of doping in sport beyond the sanctioned athlete

ObjectiveThe purpose of this paper was to extend current doping research efforts by shifting the focus away from a doping-user perspective to examine the experiences of elite athletes that have been personally affected by other athletes' doping behaviours.DesignThis research works within the interpretive paradigm, adopting relativist ontology and transactional/subjectivist epistemology.MethodConversational interviews were conducted with ‘competitive’ (N = 2) and ‘retired’ (N = 2) elite Track and Field athletes from multiple countries. In order to communicate the findings in a way that captures the complexity of the issue, whilst also appealing to the athletes this issue affects, creative non-fiction stories were used to present the findings.ResultsTwo stories were created; one incorporating the ‘competitive’ athletes' experiences and one presenting the ‘retired’ athletes' accounts. The stories detail financial, emotional, and relational implications stemming from others' use of performance enhancing drugs. Critically, the impact is not ephemeral; the retired athletes detailed the long-term implications of their experiences. Meanwhile, the competitive athletes suggest that given the current state of sport, they regularly have to defend their status as ‘clean athletes’. Thus, the ripples of doping in sport appear to be far reaching and enduring.ConclusionsIncorporating a novel mode of knowledge production within the doping literature, the stories presented here demonstrate elite athletes' candid accounts of being impacted by others’ doping behaviours in sport. This study also emphasises the value of adopting novel and creative approaches to data collection and representation within the field of doping research.     

On ascetic practices and hermeneutical cycles

Sports reflection is rather locked into a binary view of narrow and broad internalists. Narrow internalists, or formalists, argue that sports are solely constituted by their rules: the ‘autotelic’ stance. Broad internalists, or interpretivists, on the other hand, reason that sport is more than just a lusory end in itself. This paper will revitalize reflection on sports as a locus of the human condition by breaking through this binary opposition. It will focus on the positive aspects of the concept of ‘agon’ (suffering, enduring). As an ‘agonal’ or competitive social practice, sport may be a means to a ‘heterotelic’ end that surpasses the concept of sport as self-referential play: seeking knowledge, understanding the human condition and cultivating virtue. As such, self-improvement through repetitive practice (‘askesis’) has always been a key theme of human existence. Our ‘ascetic planet’ is inhabited by individuals who are constantly and relentlessly training themselves for the better. This may be self-focused, but it may also have a broader scope: we train ourselves to become better humans, contributing to a just and sustainable society. Paradoxically, however, this will only work when we become aware of our exercises as forms of life that engage the practising person. A hermeneutics of endurance cycling can enrich our understanding of this sports activity as a form of asceticism. As such, it will elaborate a view on cycling as an upwardly oriented ‘spiral’ that can contribute not only to self-knowledge and self-improvement on the individual level (‘metanoia’), but also to an ‘ecosophical renaissance’ on the collective level.     

Intentionality and Action in Sport: A Discussion of the Views of Searle and Dreyfus

The article looks at sport as a form of human action where the participants display various forms of Intentionality. Intentionality may be defined as ‘that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world.’ Sporting actions are about human intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions and not to forget, movements. This means that sports typically display what we call ‘Intentionality.’ The study of Intentionality and intentional actions has previously received relatively little attention among sport philosophers, but deserves more attention. Even though there is a tension and several differences between continental and analytical approaches to philosophical problems, there is a common understanding of the phenomenon we call ‘Intentionality.’ The debate between John Searle, representing the analytical camp, and Hubert Dreyfus, representing the phenomenological camp, is instructive to see the differences, and also the commonalities between the two approaches. The article starts with a clarification of the concept of Intentionality and sketches some of the history and background of the concept. It then presents the main conceptual framework that Searle uses to distinguish the different types and forms of Intentionality and his views on sporting actions. This is followed by a presentation of the phenomenological approach of Dreyfus and the response by Searle. The article ends by discussing the possibility of a combined and enriched view where a clarification of the logic as well as the phenomenology of sporting actions is needed. It may thus be possible to bridge the gap between the two approaches.     

Sport and children’s spirituality: an Australian perspective

The benefits of sport and physical activity are endorsed by a number of professionals as a means of improving children’s health and their sense of well-being, and their unity with the natural world, other people and the Transcendent. For children, sport is a spiritual source of joy and wonder. Using Champagne’s ‘spiritual modes of being’, my recent study of Victorian children demonstrated their heightened sensory awareness, enriched relationships and robust sense of personal identity, arising from active and passive participation in sport. The children in the study seemed to benefit in each of these areas from Australian culture’s high value of sporting participation and achievement.     

The Sporting Exploration of the World; Toward a Fundamental Ontology of the Sporting Human Being

ABSTRACT

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born to move. Furthermore, the homo movens is the homo ludens – an active and playful being that explores the world in different ways and in a variety of environments. The ludic exploration of the world starts with children’s play and goes all the way up to full-blown versions of rule-based sports, then on to various physical activities into old age. My point of departure is Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world which suggests that humans are never isolated individuals but are always in a deep way connected with a ‘world’. The ‘world’ of sport comes in different versions. By use of a phenomenological approach I try to show that the sporting exploration of the world takes place in four ontologically different dimensions or ‘worlds’. Here I distinguish between individual sports, encounter sports, team sports and nature sports, and I argue that the I-Me, I-You, I-Society and I-Nature relations that are exemplified in these four types of sports have different ontological characteristics. While the discussion is inspired by Heidegger’s ideas I argue that the ways of ‘worldmaking’ in sport are more ontologically diverse than Heidegger opened up for. Heidegger described the relation of Dasein to itself and to other human beings and argued that we deal with the environment in a practical and a theoretical mode. I expand on this and present a more coherent picture of four different dimensions in the human being’s sporting exploration of the world.     

Parental Goal Orientations and Beliefs About the Competitive-Sport Experience of Their Child1

We examined the achievement goals of parents' in relation to their interpretation of their child's sporting behavior, preference for certain types of performance feedback about their child, the types of tasks they prefer their child to engage in, and their beliefs about the cause of their child's performance. The sample consisted of 96 parents whose children were in the first year (mean age 11.3) at a large comprehensive school in a major city in the United Kingdom. Parents' dispositional achievement goal orientations were differentiated by their responses to the Perception of Success Questionnaire (Roberts & Balague, 1989, 1991). Whereas differences in task orientation appear to be critical in the education setting (Ames & Archer, 1988), the findings of this study suggest that individual differences in ego orientation may be more significant in the competitive sport context.     

Sport,Craft Or Technique? The Case of competitive aeromodelling

This essay takes competitive aeromodelling as a test case for certain contentious issues in philosophy of sport. More specifically, I look at the challenge it presents to prevailing ideas of what properly counts as ‘sport’, which in turn have their source in other, more basic or deep-rooted preconceptions. Among them are a range of ‘common-sense’ beliefs about the properly (naturally) human, the mind/body relationship, the role (if any) of scientific-technological innovation as a means of performance enhancement, and – most fundamentally – the distinction between nature and culture in so far as it bears on these questions. My approach is broadly deconstructionist in taking them as genuine questions and in pressing hard on those unresolved problems thrown up by any attempt to secure a definition of ‘sport’ that would pre-emptively exclude any kind of advanced technological adjunct (or Derridean ‘supplement’) that seemed to lead outside and beyond the realm of ‘natural’ human powers, capacities and skills. On the other hand I acknowledge – as against ‘strong’-conventionalist (e.g. Wittgensteinian) approaches – that the category ‘sport’ cannot be relativised or culturally contextualised to the point where it loses all determinate sense or normative significance. My main purpose here is to assess various claims and counter-claims by running them past a fairly detailed account of competitive aeromodelling – or one particular branch thereof – and the kinds of difficulty it creates not only for conservative, essentialist or naturalising definitions but also for that other reactive trend towards all-out cultural-relativist or social-constructivist doctrines. In addition, though far from incidentally, I want to make the case that this is indeed a sport on any reasonable, fair, or adequately informed reckoning and that its recognition as such might help to clarify certain obscure corners of current philosophical thinking about these issues.     

Contemporary Art and Contemporary Sport in the Arabian Peninsula

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between the development of art and sport in the Arabian Peninsula. In particular, it will be argued that both sport and art can be understood in terms of a trajectory from the ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary’. Modernity and modernism are introduced through an interpretation of Paul Delaunay’s series of paintings ‘The Cardiff Team’ (1912–22) which may be read as an expression of modernity. The content of the paintings documents core elements of European modernist culture, including technology and science, leisure, consumerism and advertising, and crucially (international) sport. Delaunay’s work provides a background from which to reflect upon the development of sport into something like its contemporary form, in early 20th Europe. By drawing on Terry Smith’s analysis of the difference between modern and contemporary art, and applying this to sport, in order to suggest that there is a distinctive contemporary form of sport, the core tensions within both artistic and sporting practices are argued to lie in the movement from a conception of sport as an expression of modernity, where this is conceived as a universal movement, exemplified by Western humanism, towards a conception of sport as something particularised, expressive of local cultures. The promotion of art institutions and sports events within the Arabian Peninsula highlights the resultant tensions between the neo-colonial influence of Western culture and the reinterpretation of that culture, locally, in order to reflect upon and articulate communal identity within the contexts of globalism and transnationalism.     

E-sports are Not Sports

The conclusion of this paper will be that e-sports are not sports. I begin by offering a stipulation and a definition. I stipulate that what I have in mind, when thinking about the concept of sport, is ‘Olympic’ sport. And I define an Olympic Sport as an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill. The justification for the stipulation lies partly in that it is uncontroversial. Whatever else people might think of as sport, no-one denies that Olympic Sport is sport. This seeks to ensure that those who might wish to dispute my conclusion might stay with the argument at least for as long as possible. Secondly, the justification for the stipulation lies partly in its normativity—I have chosen an Olympic conception of sport just because it seems to me to offer some kind of desirable version of what sport is and might become. Thirdly, I give examples which show how prominent promoters of e-sports agree with my stipulation, as evidenced by their strenuous attempts to comply with it in order to join the Olympic club. The justification for the definition lies in the conceptual analysis offered—an ‘exhibition-analysis’ which clarifies the concept of sport by offering ‘construals’ of the six first-level terms. The conclusion is that e-sports are not sports because they are inadequately ‘human’; they lack direct physicality; they fail to employ decisive whole-body control and whole-body skills, and cannot contribute to the development of the whole human; and because their patterns of creation, production, ownership and promotion place serious constraints on the emergence of the kind of stable and persisting institutions characteristic of sports governance. Competitive computer games do not qualify as sports, no matter what ‘resemblances’ may be claimed. Computer games are just that—games.     

‘Heart-talk:’ Considering the Role of the Heart in Therapy as Evidenced in the Quran and Medical Research

The emphasis on scientific approaches and evidence-based therapy has been a key force in developing and refining existing models of therapy. While this has been unquestioningly invaluable, it has similarly restricted the development and so implementation of those models that do not lend themselves easily to current research methodology, since the lack of evidence-practice research means they are not considered as ‘legitimate’ therapeutic practice. That the mind and body have an inter-dependent relationship is readily evidenced in numerous religious texts, but the lack of acknowledgement of that relationship in contemporary therapeutic approaches means that patients are not able to benefit from its use in sessions. Ironically, it is current developments in medical research that have discovered the reality around this relationship that have enabled such models to be further explore within an accepted context of evidence-based practice. This paper highlights the relationship between the heart and brain function as evidenced with brief reference to Quranic verses and medical (namely, neurocardiological) research. Further, it raises questions around the implications of this information for therapists working in both physical and mental health. The concept of ‘heart talk’ is an extension of the term ‘heart brain’ coined by Dr Armour (Professor of Pharmacology) in 1991 and is suggestive of its use in the world of psychological therapy. It relates to those cognitions which patients suggest come ‘from the heart’ which though previously dismissed are now suggestive of having some scientific basis and are potentially a legitimate source of information in understanding patients experiences.     

Libertarianism,Climate Change,and Individual Responsibility

Much has been written about climate change from an ethical view in general, but less has been written about it from a libertarian point of view in particular. In this paper, I apply the libertarian moral theory to the problem of climate change. I focus on libertarianism’s implications for our individual emissions. I argue that (i) even if our individual emissions cause no harm to others, these emissions cross other people’s boundaries, (ii) although the boundary-crossings that are due to our ‘subsistence emissions’ are implicitly consented to by others, there is no such consent to our ‘non-subsistence emissions’, and (iii) there is no independent justification for these emissions. Although offsetting would provide such a justification, most emitters do not offset their non-subsistence emissions. Therefore, these emissions violate people’s rights, which means that they are impermissible according to libertarianism’s non-aggression principle.