Sport and Moral Conflict

Bill Morgan has written a terrific book, the culmination of his career long engagement in the philosophy of sport and a work which is immediately a required read – one might say a required grapple – in our sub discipline. Sport and Moral Conflict is the fully formed and definitive version of his influential and persuasive conventionalist theory of sport, carefully articulated and defended against objections. The book has a systematic, simple and coherent structure. First, Morgan presents a case study to test ‘moral theories of sport’. He then tests candidate theories (each with a chapter) against this case. Within each of chapters two to five, there is, standardly, a presentation of the candidate theory, a set of unsuccessful objections, and then a set of successful objections. The sixth chapter gives us Morgan’s own conventionalist theory. Because the dialectic is clear and the signposts are present, it is also fairly straightforward for critical readers to engage with the discussion, albeit that the discussion is at quite a high level – this is not an introductory book. The informed and critical reader will want to ask questions like ‘Is this a fair account of discourse internalism?’ ‘Isn’t there a better response to the third objection here?’ and so on. It is to Morgan’s credit, and an aid to everyone else in the field, that he opens up the debate in this way, and makes clear how he sees the terrain. This system building is helpful to us all. Morgan starts off by giving an account of what we have come to know as The Dispute: a case study of the clash between two conceptions of sport amateur and professional in relation to football (soccer) and athletics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The test case – The Dispute – raises two questions: First, can disputes like this be resolved by rational inquiry? (can the moral theories in which they are couched be resolved by rational enquiry?) and second, ‘Can there be moral progress in sport? Or do we merely have one convention supplanting another?’ (27) So, while the dialectical structure is fairly straightforward, there is an interesting counterpoint between this and the account of The Dispute, since Morgan’s method then is, at least in part, genealogical, following Nietzsche: