The Ethics of Sport Essential Readings

Sport is often thought of as simply "games," but it can in fact be much more. Sport can be responsible for guiding social justice movements, igniting city-wide riots, uniting countries, permanently injuring youth, revolutionizing views about race, gender and class, and producing several of the most successful global industries. Reports of ethical crises in athletics are constant fodder for popular attention, whether performance enhancing drugs in baseball, corruption in college athletics, the epidemic of brain damage among NFL players, and others too numerous to mention. As a proxy for social concerns, we naturally think of sport in inherently moral terms. Yet we can hardly define the term "sport," or agree on acceptable levels of sporting risk, or determine clear roles and responsibilities for fans, players, coaches, owners, media and health care personnel. Bringing together 27 of the most essential recent articles from philosophy, history, sociology, medicine, and law, this collection explores intersections of sports and ethics and brings attention to the immense role of sports in shaping and reflecting social values.

Arthur L. Caplan is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is the co-founder of the NYU Sports and Society Program. He has served on the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy, and the FIFA special advisory committee on the use of technology in allowing athletes to adapt to altitude and other environmental challenges. He has written extensively on topics in the area of sports, medicine, and ethics. Brendan Parent is Director of Applied Bioethics at the NYU School of Professional Studies, a faculty affiliate of the division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, and co-director of NYU Sports and Society. His current work focuses on social responsibility in sports, ethical issues in innovative transplants, and ethical issues in genetic technologies. Previously, he was special legal advisor to the New York Task Force on Life and the Law. He received his JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was given the ABA award for excellence in Health Law.