The breadth of our moral experience is more extensive than has been believed over the past several millennia. There is more to morality than being honest and good, or aspiring to universal principles. In fact, in many ways the morality of our distant ancestors bears a remarkable resemblance to the moral experiences of modern athletes. In A Moral Theory of Sports, ethicist Richard J. Severson brings together stories from today's sports world and the moral practices of hunter-gatherers to shed new light on both sports and morality. Guided by anthropologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and others, Severson discusses what the moral life actually looked like for hunter-gatherer bands in the late Pleistocene epoch and argues that the championing of group success that was the epitome of their morality is the epitome of modern sports, as well. With fascinating analogies and anecdotes from football, basketball, tennis, cycling, and more, A Moral Theory of Sports offers a unique interpretation of human nature and our love affair with sports.
Richard J. Severson is an ethicist by training, earning his Ph.D. in religion and ethics from the University of Iowa. For most of his 29-year career in higher education Severson was a librarian. He also taught numerous classes in philosophy, religion, and ethics. Severson is the author of Time, Death, and Eternity (1995) and The Principles of Information Ethics (1997).
This book presents a unique yet accessible synthesis of anthropology, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and pyschosociology in the course of seeking the moral foundations of sport, providing a thought-provoking read. Following a highly personal introduction detailing his own sports biography, drawing contrasts between primates and humans based on anecdotes drawn from popular accounts of the work of Jane Goodall, Severson leads the reader on an intriguing journey through sport, in five chapters, paralleling the development of morality and ethics in sport to the imagined prehistoric experience and ongoing moral development of human beings. In doing so, the author reviews the entire spectrum of the sports experience. The various destinations (chapters) on this journey address the numerous roles through which we may engage in sport, whether as participant, spectator, coach, official, winner, loser, bully, or cheat. Interestingly, this is not an overly complex or difficult read as the title may suggest. In fact, the author does a wonderful job of weaving together captivating "analogies and anecdotes" from a selection of sports scenarios, with parallel reflections drawn from philosophical literature and common understandings of religious experience. It is the storytelling that makes this book so recommendable. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. General readers. * CHOICE * This is a remarkable and beautifully written book that conveys both a compelling evolutionary account of the origins of human morality, and a consistently insightful discussion of sport in relation to it. Players and fans, coaches and refs, competition and teamwork, winning and losing, fairness and cheating, ritual and play, authenticity and imitation-Severson's book brings all of these into a sharper and more meaningful light, and does it with a style of storytelling that gives pleasure from start to finish. Anyone who loves sport, or loves thinking about it, will love this book. -- Walter Thomas Schmid, author of Golf as Meaningful Play
