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Trust, Competition, and Preventive Justice: Responding to Rule Violations in Sport
John William Devine 
The Journal of Ethics
Swansea University Author:
John William Devine
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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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DOI (Published version): 10.1007/s10892-025-09531-x
Abstract
Meaningful sporting competition rests on athletes complying with rules that they can easily violate undetected. From match-fixing, where players attempt to lose by illegitimate means, to doping, where players attempt to win by illegitimate means, sport is replete with trust-based rules. How should s...
| Published in: | The Journal of Ethics |
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| ISSN: | 1382-4554 1572-8609 |
| Published: |
Springer Nature
2025
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa67864 |
| Abstract: |
Meaningful sporting competition rests on athletes complying with rules that they can easily violate undetected. From match-fixing, where players attempt to lose by illegitimate means, to doping, where players attempt to win by illegitimate means, sport is replete with trust-based rules. How should sports authorities respond to the breach of such rules? I argue that trust-based rules pose a unique ethical challenge for sports authorities, and their violation requires a distinctive institutional response. Specifically, the principal response to such violations should be preventive rather than punitive. Sports authorities should mitigate the risk posed by violators of trust-based rules to the meaningfulness of future competition rather than punish violators for past wrongdoing. This paper develops a preventivejustice approach to the most routinely flouted, and widely discussed, variety of trust-based rule in sport – anti-doping rules. This argument illuminates the treatment of other types of trust-based rule in sport and trust-based rules in certain non-sporting rule-bound competitive contexts. |
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| Keywords: |
Competition; Preventive justice; Philosophy of sport; Sports ethics; Trust; Enhancement; Anti-doping |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
| Funders: |
Swansea University |