ABSTRACT
Having argued the case for the possibility of ethical development in and through sports, I now want to argue further what this development does and does not consist in. One obvious challenge to such a claim is the sheer ubiquity of vicious behaviours in sports. Social scientific research abounds that shows how sports can be a vehicle for child abuse, misogyny, sexism and of course racism. To my knowledge, however, despite the voluminous literature on racism and sport, there has been no attempt to give an aretaic account of it: that is to say, of racism as a vice. This chapter attempts to articulate a clearer picture of the repugnance of racism as it manifests itself in sport and to develop a virtue-ethical perspective by considering racism as a vice. In particular, I explore questions of responsibility and culpability for both committed and less-entrenched racism in sports.
