The Ethical Turn on the Sports Field

Abstract

The assumption of sports being a natural and fair competition area has been challenged by scholars and athlete-activists in the last decades. This article, focusing on three periods in the history of –the agones in Ancient Greece, the birth and early development of modern sports, and contemporary sports relation– offers a brief historical analysis of how fairness has been conceptualized in different ways throughout the centuries. By doing that, it sheds light on the changes in the (self-)making of sporting moral subject over time. Drawing upon the broader anthropological debates which problematize the objectivity and neutrality claims of ethics, the article calls for a non-normative and contextualized approach to ethics within the sports field so that we may reach a better understanding of how sporting moral subjects navigate, negotiate, and challenge the existing ethical codes of behavior in modern sports.