ABSTRACT
In 1982, the American philosopher Steven Toulmin wrote an article entitled ‘How medicine saved the life of ethics’. This chapter presents the history of sports ethics scholarship, sets out its main theoretical approaches, and explains the prospects. Little philosophical attention has been paid to the dual, and mutually opposed, functions of sports institutions to structure, administrate, promote and regulate sporting practices. The chapter briefly discusses the critical evaluation of ethics of particular sports the confluence of sports ethics and sports law; ethical critique of policy; and the rise of descriptive or empirical sports ethics. The challenge for sports ethicists with training in philosophy will be to contribute philosophical depth to ethics discussions. The dominant ethical theories that are found in the sports ethics literature have generally speaking been applied mutatis mutandis. Perhaps the most significant volume of sports ethics literature has been published in broadly speaking in the domain of virtue ethics in sport.
