Sport has been an important part of human life and culture for a long time. It has been a subject of reflection by philosophers since at least Ancient Greece, and it remains central to our understanding of human flourishing (Reid, 2011).
There are many definitions for what constitutes a sports event. The closest to an international agreement is provided by the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF), which defines a sport as ‘any competitive activity involving physical activities that are governed by rules and are judged on the basis of objective standards’.
Several philosophical systems have been employed in the philosophy of sport, and a distinction can be made between’system-based’ and’system-free’ approaches. The’system-based’ approach sought to develop theories and methods that could be applied to the study of physical education.
Formalism
Formalists consider rules to be the normative cornerstone of a proper ethical analysis of sport and thereby define rightness and wrongness solely in terms of rule-following. They argue that gameplaying requires adherence to the rules and any game which does not require adherence to the rules is unruly.
Conventionalism
In contrast to formalism, conventionalists believe that rules do not exhaust the sources of normative reasons within sport, and they also recognise the importance of unwritten norms which supplement or even contradict the formal rules. They also argue that a strict rule-centric approach fails to account for a variety of other normative factors, such as’social good’.