Fair Play

While major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the World Cup, attract the attention of millions, and sometimes show sport at its best, growing concern over scandals and abuses in sport have increasingly raised questions about its moral standing. Stars are deprived of their Olympic Gold because of their use of performance-enhancing drugs, athletic programs of some major universities are racked with scandals, and the behavior of sports stars too frequently is violent and abusive. However, ethical concerns about sports run deeper than current scandals in today's headlines. Other concerns question the value of athletic competition itself. Does athletic competition reflect a selfish concern with winning at the expense of others? Should the role of sports in our educational institutions be significantly diminished? Does sport embody or express significant moral values? Or is it a corrupting influence, distracting us from more important concerns? Even worse, does it glorify the selfish pursuit of victory, and even violence against opponents and their fans, or against parents, referees, and opposing coaches in youth sports?Still other issues concern sport and social policy. What does gender equity in sport require? Do professional sports and the mass market corrupt the nature of sport and turn it into mere entertainment for the masses at the expense of the pursuit of true athletic excellence? Do sports organizations have good grounds for prohibiting the use of performance enhancing drugs, or are they illegitimately restricting the freedom of some athletes to pursue excellence in their own way?Fair Play is a rigorous exploration of the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their connection both to ethical theory and to concrete moral dilemmas that arise in actual athletic competition. Professor Simon develops a model of athletic competition as a mutually acceptable quest for excellence and applies it to a variety of ethical issues that arise in sport. This edition of Fair Play adds new material throughout, including revised discussions of such topics as Title IX and gender equity, the commercialization of sport, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the nature of sport, and the role of sport as a form of moral education.