ABSTRACT
The author considers why Robert Simon's interpretivist rendering of competitive sports takes the abstract route that it does in seeking to validate its key normative principles. He discusses philosopher and legal theorist Ronald Dworkin's views on this matter since Simon makes it clear that his own normative approach to sports is indebted to Dworkin's normative approach to law. Robert Simon forcefully argues that ethical decision making is a central dimension of coaching, and that the theory of sports he dubs "broad internalism" or simply "interpretivism" offers the best account of how ethical coaches should form their ethical judgments and justify them to others. The author argues that social conventions are what make possible rational discourse about the aim of athletic enterprise and reflective assessments of its value. That is because what counts as a good reason, a compelling intellectual consideration, in favor of conceiving competitive sports in one way rather than another, is itself a conventional matter.
