Ethical Constraints In Sports: Fair Play

The individual sport games from a broader perspective and the tennis matches especially —given their characteristics—impose constraints on the player’s behavior, constraints in relation to which some actions tend to produce good and other actions harm or at least lesser amounts of good (Badminton World Federation, 2012, pp. 2-3). Many analysts ventured to tell us how we ought to act in sport, unfortunately, before analyzing the practice (and thus the uniquely constrained context) in which all these normative actions are to take place. Therefore, in the last decades there was a lot of discussion whether certain behavior should be considered Fair Play (Simon, Torres, Hager, 2015). The dominant paradigm on ethical behavior presented in 1986 by

All human thinking involves three elements: a) an ego, the person who does the thinking, b) an act like seeing, wondering about, or valuing, and c) an object like a tennis racket, and thus the racket as seen, wondered about, or valued, depending on which act intends it.

• The first element, the ego, is a language-influenced, historical, and otherwise limited source of thinking. Therefore it must fight for more or less objective views of reality without ever gaining—or having any chance of gaining—a pure or absolute perspective. Nevertheless, degrees of objectivity vary, not all stances are equally effective in thinking accurately about objects of interest, and consequently, efforts to gain better vantage points are not, in principle, misguided. In short, epistemological relativism is true, whereas judgmental relativism is not (Bhaskar,

In each case the character of the act affects the way we ‘have’ the object in question. Relative to the examples above, we have the tennis match alternately as seen (perhaps in terms of some spatial characteristics), as admired (possibly in relation to its tendency to require the player stamina and courage), as doubted (as, e.g. a thing that raises questions about the merits of the coaching involved in contemporary tennis matches), and as compared (as distinct, for instance, from badminton or table