Trust, Competition, and Preventive Justice: Responding to Rule Violations in Sport

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 preventive justice 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.