Consent and Right Action in Sport

Abstract

This paper argues that recent treatments of ethics in sport have accorded too much importance to the promotion and portrayal of a sport’s excellences, and too little to the consent of participants First, I consider and reject a fundamental challenge to the idea that consent should play a central role in determining the morality of action in sport – namely, Sean McAleer’s argument to the effect that consent is incapable of rendering normally impermissible actions permissible in sport. I then offer a preliminary examination of the proper relation in the moral evaluation of action in sport between considerations of consent and ‘internalist’ considerations regarding the nature and purpose of sport. Taking as my starting point J.S. Russell’s treatment of this topic, I argue that consent is the more weighty, and in many cases the more fundamental, value and that when it conflicts with internalist considerations, it is consent that takes moral priority.