What is it about?
This article seeks to show that sporting events are best understood as fictional presentations of virtue. The glorification of these athletes and events drive much of the drama invested in sport. This glorification also pushes up against an ironic, and truthful, understanding of these events. We cannot repeat these events in order to confirm our explanations and the vices and virtues we ascribe do not always match was has event happened. Soccer, football, is the example used throughout. This includes Zidane's headbutt of Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. The article ends with a call for fans and pundits to insist that sporting events be interpreted with ethical ends in mind. These include pleasure but also development of a sense of community and a steering of resources towards charity and justice.
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Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash
Why is it important?
There is a lot of cynicism about sport. This article shows that there is nothing inevitable about that. We need to talk about what to do with the glorification of athletes and sporting events. This article seeks to launch that discussion. Most other approaches either presume this glory or denounce it as ethically or politically bankrupt.
Perspectives
I am an ethicist and a political philosopher who derives a lot of pleasure from following soccer. I bring what I have learned from those fields to this article more than I do most of "philosophy of sport."
Dr. Jason Burke Murphy
College of our Lady of the Elms
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On Virtue, Irony, and Glory: The Pitch and the People, January 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-349-95006-5_17.
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