Olympic Ethics and Philosophy

Mike McNamee, Jim Parry, Mike McNamee, Jim Parry

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317980506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy

This book contains an international collection of essays by leading philosophers of sport on the ethics and philosophy of the Olympic Games. The essays consider a range of topics including critical reflections on nationalism and internationalism within the Olympic movement, sexism in Olympic marketing and sponsorship, the preservation and corruption of Olympism, the underlying ideology of the Olympic Games, the inequalities of perception in ability and disability as it informs our understanding of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and comparisons between ancient and modern interpretations of the meaning and significance of the Olympic Games. This book will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of sports, as well as to the sporting public who simply want to know more about the grounding ideas behind the greatest show on earth.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

Introduction Olympic Ethics and Philosophy: Old Wine in New Bottles

Mike McNamee and Jim Parry

As we pen this essay, in mid-January 2012, the inaugural Winter Youth Olympic Games is taking place. It follows the first Summer Youth Olympic Games held in Singapore in 2010. This extension of the idea of the Olympic festival into the youth and child populations is arguably a response of the Olympic movement to a perceived reduction in young people’s interest and participation in sport – an attempt to re-motivate youth towards Olympic values, in the face of those many other attractions and distractions competing for their attention and commitment. Scholars and scientists have queried the need for and desirability of such an innovation. Worries abound that it might push children towards harmfully early specialisation, that it might lead to the commodification of youth athletes, or that it is little more than an unwelcome replication of the quadrennial global sports festival that is the Olympics.

Such a development, of course, raises again the most fundamental questions: what are the values that drive the Olympic movement and how will these be realised or transformed in the Youth Olympic Games (YOG)? In the YOG they have been distilled into the new slogan, ‘Excellence, Friendship, Respect’, but it is not clear whence this neologism has sprung, nor its relation to earlier formulations or other emphases. In particular, the ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’ outlined in the Olympic Charter emphasise the values of fair play and effort, which are missing here. In any case, the fact that the International Olympic Committee has not merely replicated its celebrated slogan ‘citius, altius, fortius’ (‘swifter, higher, stronger’) suggests that there was a felt need to ‘re-articulate’ the Olympic idea for new generations.

This mutation reminds us that the Olympic Games, and the Olympic movement more generally, is not a static phenomenon, but one that changes through time, and requires continued attention and analysis. The fact that any social phenomenon necessarily has a history, and has been ‘socially constructed’, might lead us to suppose that a historico-social explanation will exhaust our efforts to understand such a social institution. This would, however, be unacceptably reductionist. Such an assumption trades on the mistaken belief or mere bias that all explanations of the human reduce to the social. It exhibits in classic form the genetic fallacy where it is claimed that an explanation of the origins of any given phenomenon explains that phenomenon exhaustively. Such a claim – exhibiting the genetic fallacy – is often made of the Olympic Games itself, that qua its origination in ancient Greece it must be a Eurocentric phenomenon.

This collection is a timely reflection on Olympic matters both old and new. It comprises critical exploration of new practices such as the YOG, as well as ancient ones such as the Olympic Truce and its place and purpose in the twenty-first century, in which major conflicts are still ongoing and threaten international good will, which has always been proclaimed as a value by the official ideology or philosophy of the Olympic movement: Olympism The essays variously attempt to connect Olympism with deeper ethical and philosophical roots, analysing the values of the Olympics with new facts and theories, and situating this cosmopolitan modernist sporting movement in contexts of power-senstive social and political movements that celebrate diversity and equality across categories such as gender, body identity and transitory cultural and national identities.

The first essays of the volume focus on historical matters. One of Heather Reid’s main academic interests is in ancient philosophy, including the philosophy of ancient sport. In this volume, she turns her attention to ‘The Political Heritage of the Olympic Games’ – to the politics of sport, both ancient and modern. ‘Keep politics out of sport’ was a popular slogan in the 1970s and 1980s, amid Olympic boycotts, disputes between the USA and the USSR, and the anti-apartheid movement – but this is a notoriously difficult position to square with the overtly political aims of Olympism towards peace, equal opportunity and inclusion, tolerance and non-discrimination, and environmentalism. Reid argues that a better understanding of the ancient games’ political achievements might increase the modern Olympic movement’s chances of realising its own political goals.

Naofumi Masumoto too reflects on an often neglected aspect of the Olympic Games, namely the Olympic Truce. The Ekecheiria, as it was known in ancient times, was a sacred truce between parties who wished to participate in the games but who might otherwise be in conflict. Masumoto accounts for its modern resurrection in the wake of the Second World War. He argues that the 1992 Barcelona games marks an important juncture of the Olympic movement’s political aspirations, since it was in this year that the IOC worked with the United Nations to agree jointly on a peace resolution during the days of the games. He notes, however, that the ongoing verbal and written agreements of leading political figures, sporting and otherwise, have been under recent threat by international conflicts in the shape of the Gulf War and the Georgian conflict. Moreover, despite the promotion of the truce at the 2008 Beijing games, Masumoto notes the lack of televisual coverage of such promotion. The extent to which, therefore, the peace movement that is exemplified by the truce is still a genuinely held commitment of leading political figures and IOC leaders is a moot point.

Continuing the theme of ancient to modern, Jim Parry addresses in his essay the most recent of innovations: the YOG. He presents some of the principles underlying the YOG and some of the practical challenges in implementing them. Among the impressive innovations and achievements was the introduction of mixed-gender and mixed-nationality competitions, new sport forms or events in basketball (three v three on a half-court, with one basket), sailing (sail-boarding) and modern pentathlon (laser pistol). Notably, the Singapore games saw the first Olympic participation by a Saudi woman. Today, the Winter YOG has seen the first Olympic women’s ski-jumping competition, and the first African medals to be won in a winter games. Parry examines some of the ethical issues arising from what might be seen as a distribution of the values of elite sport into the child population, such as immaturity and harm, talent identification and early specialisation, and the exploitation of young athletes. Other issues arising from the first edition of the YOG relate to participation and equality of opportunity, age and fairness norms, age falsification and cheating, and recurring themes such as victory and defeat, participation and excellence, and political discrimination, peace and international understanding.

Sigmund Loland discusses the central notion of Olympism laid out by its founder the Baron Pierre de Coubertin: the Olympic athlete who lives ‘a well balanced life based on ‘‘the joy of effort’’‘. He invites consideration of whether this is anachronistic hype or whether it can still represent a meaningful idea. His answer takes the form of a critical examination of Olympic ideals in terms of three different theoretical understandings of the athlete. Dualist, phenomenological and contextualist accounts are each examined for their virtues and their inadequacies, and Loland brings out those complementary features of the three perspectives which contribute to a comprehensive study of Olympic ideals.

It is well known that the French aristocrat held a highly idealised conception of sport that could be crystallised in the Olympic Games. Irena Martínková continues the de Coubertinian theme by considering a distinction he drew between two kinds of sport – Olympic sport and world championship sport. He presents them as alternative possible approaches to sport, between which we must choose, and he characterises them through the metaphors in her title: ‘Fair or temple: two possibilities for Olympic sport’. Whoever chooses the ‘fair’ (or the market-place) accepts conventional social norms and exhibits heteronomy and inauthenticity, leading to an instrumental approach to sporting engagement. The choice of the ‘temple’ brings with it a concern for the intrinsic values and internal goods of sport – and leads us to an authentic consideration of our own existence, and an approach to sport that sees it as a kind of self-development based on self-understanding. Martínková develops this contrast by presenting alternative existential possibilities for us. Drawing on the work of Heidegger and Pato[notdef]cka she explains how we must each choose our overall life direction and orientation, including how we are to live our sporting lives. Her analysis throws light on de Coubertin’s understanding of ‘amateurism’, which meant for him not the simple exclusion of working people from gentlemanly sports clubs, but rather the pursuit of sport for its internal goods, and not for external rewards – temple, not fair.

Because of the breadth of de Coubertin’s scholarship and ensuing personal and public communications over many decades, many connections can be made to established European philosophical authors and currents. In ‘Olympism, the values of sport and the will to power: de Coubertin and Nietzsche meet Eugenio Monti’, Cleret and McNamee explore the relation between the philosophical anthropology of both authors, and especially Nietzsche’s concept of theÜbermensch. A case study is conducted, based on the story of the Italian Eugenio Monti, the first recipient of the Pierre de Coubertin medal, which rewards fair play. Monti famously assisted the British two-man bobsleigh team to win gold in Innsbruck in 1964 by lending them a screw from his own bob, without which they could not have completed their final, and gold-winning, run, which consigned the Italians to third place. The subsequent analysis of Monti’s supererogation is articulated through the eyes of Nietzsche, sympathetically observed. The authors conclude that both he and de Coubertin considered that competition is not simply to be understood in terms of the domination of others, but more specifically in terms of the generating of human excellence.

In ‘Pandora logic’, Leon Culbertson considers the role of general moral principles, such as the ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’ outlined in the Olympic Charter, in the making of particular judgements on doping issues, with special reference to the case of Alain Baxter, who won (and then had to return, due to a doping offence) the only Olympic ski-ing medal ever won by a Briton. While, clearly, Baxter was guilty under the strict liability rule (that is, he was ‘responsible’ for the presence of the substance in his body), and while the point of such rules is to prevent the Pandora’s box of excuses from being opened (even such a genuine excuse as Baxter’s, on everyone’s admission), Culbertson argues that a principle-based approach is not an appropriate way to assess the case from a moral point of view. In order to explain why this is so, he employs two distinctions: one between moral judgements (the outcome of our consideration of the morality of an action) and morally-laden judgements (the outcome of our need to decide what to do about it) – the latter going beyond simple moral judgement, in deciding what action to take. The second distinction is between the moral judgement of cases, which he argues requires a particularist approach, and the ethical environment of a society where general moral principles apply. His conclusions track these distinctions: Baxter ought to be viewed as an example of blameless guilt.

Graham McFee provides a fresh slant on ‘Olympism and sport’s intrinsic value’. Whereas the usual approach (including that of de Coubertin) to the morally educative power of sport emphasises the importance of sports participation, McFee wonders about the possibly similar effects of spectatorship. Indeed, if the Olympic Games is to be seen as a kind of advertisement for ethical and educative sport, as de Coubertin intended, then such ‘spectator effects’ must be central to his vision. McFee has in mind the modern global television audience amounting to billions of spectators. Drawing on his previous work on the intrinsic value of sport and on the notion of sport as a ‘moral laboratory’, he develops an account of sports spectatorship that affords possibilities for moral education, as viewers seek understandings of sporting actions and events (at least partly) through a moral perspective.

In ‘Smoke and mirrors’, Charlene Weaving investigates nude images of women Olympians in magazines and calendars, arguing that such sexual objectification trivialises their talent and skill. Using Nussbaum’s seven-aspect theory of objectification, she develops a categorisation system to analyse the images, and then explores various justifications for nude posing, such as compensating for lack of funding, enhancing media image and marketability, showcasing strong powerful and athletic female bodies and presenting a heterosexual persona. Building on previous scholarship in the sexualisation of sports, which includes a critique of the sexualised dress requirements in the rules of beach volleyball, she raises wider questions regarding the instrumentalisation and exploitation of the female body in sport. She concludes that any suggestion that women might be empowered by nude displays relies on the smoke-and-mirrors effect of short-term attention to sexualised identities, rather than to an acknowledgement of their equal positioning in society, and respect for their abilities and achievements.

In ‘Paralympians outperforming Olympians’ Gregor Wolbring considers the developing role of therapeutic performance enhancements that might enable so-called ‘impaired’ athletes to outperform non-impaired athletes. His aim, though, is not to enter the debate over ‘relative performance’ assessments (for example, of whether the ‘cheetah’ gives an advantage over a leg), but rather to ask us to rethink our preconceptions of ability impairment. The ‘disabled’ athlete is often defined as a sub-species-typical agent. An alternative, transhumanist, approach to ability, which sees the improvement of human bodily abilities beyond species-typical boundaries as desirable, challenges this perception. This raises the possibility that the generation of therapeutic performance enhancements might lead to a paradigm shift in which ‘disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’ athletes compete together in the mastery of assistive devices, whether therapeutic devices such as wheelchairs and exoskeletons or performance devices such as bobsleighs or vault-poles. Such a potential paradigm shift might enable a corresponding shift in the ability-relationship between ‘disabled’ and ‘non disabled’ athletes, as assistive devices enable the ‘disabled’ to compete on equal terms and even out-perform ‘non-disabled’ athletes. Wolbring suggests that this might call into question the need for separate Olympic Games, or it might usher in a new division between ‘Assisted Games’ and ‘Games Without Devices’.

Where Weaving and Wolbring address political issues to do with sexual and bodily identity, the final essays of the adopt national political frameworks. The authors of ‘The moral pathologies of national sporting representation at the Olympics’ interrogate the familiar issue of sports migration, but focusing in particular on the motivations for and morality of the somehow disturbing phenomenon of ‘nation-swapping’. Hywel Iorwerth, Carwyn Jones and Alun Hardman argue for a ‘sincere internationalism’ and a ‘reflective nationalism’ and, in that context, outline three ways in which recent developments in international sporting representation might be seen as ‘pathological’: if they instrumentalise national sporting representation (using it as a means, not as an end in itself); if they undermine the point of national representation at the Olympics; and if they sustain distributive injustice by commodifying sporting talent and labour, and thus advantaging already wealthy nations. They argue that a sincere internationalism would see some recent practices as undermining the moral credentials of Olympic competition, and would push for changes in the rules. The paper draws on empirical data gathered from interviews with past sporting internationals and key figures from the sports practice community in Wales. As well as their intrinsic interest, such data are important in raising the issue for applied philosophers of ‘empirical philosophy’, currently enjoying a period of development in fields as dissimilar as philosophy of science and aesthetics.

The theme of national representation and its authenticity is also raised by Cesar Torres in his discussion of ‘Expatriate coaching, Olympism and the Olympic Games’, where he defends the notion of coaches from one country offering their services to a host country not of their birth. Much has been made of the migration of sporting labour from the countries of an athlete’s birth to another. The criteria used for justifying such moves have varied from athlete to athlete, whether in terms of the opportunity afforded to play at international level for athletes incapable (for whatever reason) of representing their own country; or for chances of greater international exposure or success; or, of course, for greater financial gain. Much less ink has been spilt on the migration of coaching labour, perhaps because it is thought to be less contentious. Torres argues that moderate patriotism does not oblige one to privilege the country of one’s birth. Moreover, he argues that the drive for excellence, constitutive of Olympism, is in accordance with the migration of the sporting labour of coaches, and that the gains from such arrangements can extend beyond the giver and receiver of coaching expertise.

It is hoped that the essays presented here show the vitality of Olympism itself. It is a rich and complex concept not exhausted by its official definition. Moreover that complexity is manifested year after year as issues regarding sport at the highest level are played out in the biannual sports festivals of the Olympic, Paralympic and Youth Olympic Games. Insofar as the Olympic movement continually renews itself in response to economic, political, scientific and technological challenges, we hope and expect that the ethical and philosophical issues that are insinuated within its structure, symbols and practices continue to be both interrogated and nourished by vigorous philosophical analysis and critique.

The Political Heritage of the Olympic Games: Relevance, Risks, and Possible Rewards

Heather L. Reid

The Olympic movement sometimes claims that sport has nothing to do with politics, yet its goal of promoting peace is explicitly political. The Olympics’ association with peace, furthermore, is inherited from the ancient version of the festival which took place in a very distant time and place. This essay examines the ancient political heritage of the Olympic Games and questions its relevance to such modern Olympic challenges as globalisation, cultural hegemony, social discrimination and environmental degradation. It suggests that these challenges are not so different from those addressed in the ancient Olympic Games, and argues that a better understanding of the ancient games’ political achievements may increase the modern Olympic movement’s chances of realising their own political goals. After all, the basic structures of sport, which underpin the political achievements of the Olympic Games, have changed little over the last 2,500 years.

Resumen

El movimiento olímpico a veces proclama que el deporte nada tiene que ver con la política, mas su objetivo de promover la paz es explícitamente politico. La asociación de las olimpiadas con la paz, además, se hereda de la versión clásica del festival que tuvo lugar en un momento y lugar muy distantes. Este ensayo examina la herencia política clásica de los juegos olímpicos y cuestiona su relevancia en cuanto a desafíos olímpicos modernos tales como la globalización, la hegemonía cultural, la discriminación social, y la degradación del medio ambiente. Sugiere que estos desafios no son diferentes de aquellos a los que se enfrentaron los juegos olímpicos clásicos, y arguye que una major comprensión de los logros politicos de los juegos clásicos puede incrementar la probabilidad de que el movimiento Olímpico moderno pueda realizar sus propios objectivos. Después de todo, las estructuras básicas del deporte, las cuales apuntalan los logros politicos de los juegos olímpicos, han cambiado muy poco durante los últimos 2.500 años.

Zusammenfassung

Die olympische Bewegung behauptet manchmal, dass der Sport nichts mit Politik zu tun habe, doch ihr Ziel, die Förderung des Friedens, ist explizit politisch. Die olympische Verbindung zum Frieden ist das Erbe der antiken Form der Spiele aus einer la¨ngst vergangenen Zeit. Der Beitrag untersucht das antike politische Erbe der Olympischen Spiele und hinterfragt dessen Relevanz für die modernen olympischen Herausforderungen wie Globalisierung, kulturelle Hegemonie, gesellschaftliche Diskriminierung und Umweltzerstörung. Er geht davon aus, dass sich diese Herausforderungen nicht besonders von jenen der antiken Olympischen Spiele unterscheiden, und argumentiert, dass sich durch ein besseres Versta¨ndnis der politischen Errungenschaften der antiken Spiele die Chancen der modernen olympischen Bewegung zur Realisierung politischer Ziele erhöhen könnten. Immerhin haben sich die grundlegenden Strukturen des Sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ROSO Series page
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Olympic Ethics and Philosophy: Old Wine in New Bottles
• 2. The Political Heritage of the Olympic Games: Relevance, Risks, and Possible Rewards
• 3. The Peace Movement on the Occasion of the 21st Century Olympic Games: Developments and Limitations
• 4. The Youth Olympic Games – Some Ethical Issues
• 5. A Well Balanced Life Based on ‘The Joy of Effort’: Olympic Hype or a Meaningful Ideal?
• 6. Fair or Temple: Two Possibilities for Olympic Sport
• 7. Olympism, the Values of Sport, and the Will to Power: De Coubertin and Nietzsche meet Eugenio Monti
• 8. Pandora Logic: Rules, Moral Judgement and the Fundamental Principles of Olympism
• 9. Olympism and Sport’s Intrinsic Value
• 10. Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of Women Olympians’ Nude Reflections
• 11. Paralympians Outperforming Olympians: An Increasing Challenge for Olympism and the Paralympic and Olympic Movement
• 12. The Moral Pathologies of National Sporting Representation at the Olympics
• 13. Expatriate Coaching, Olympism, and the Olympic Games
• Index