21st Annual CRC-CPPE Fall Ethics Symposium: The Ethics of Sport

Sport occupies a powerful place in our lives: it builds communities, expresses ideals of excellence, and reveals our commitment to values like fairness, inclusion, identity, and achievement. This year we're bringing together scholars from philosophy, kinesiology, and public policy to explore some of the most pressing ethical questions in contemporary sport. Join us as we consider how athletic competition both shapes and is shaped by broader social values and institutions, and how sport matters far beyond the field of play.

Program

• 9:00 to 9:20 am: Opening and Introductory Remarks
  • Edward Bush, President of Cosumnes River College
  • Mark Wheeler, Senior Advisor to the President and Professor of Philosophy, Sacramento State
• 9:30  to 10:50 am: Higher, Faster, Stronger: Is it Time to Rethink the Ethics of Enhancement in Sports?
  • John Gleaves, Professor of Kinesiology and Co-Director of the Center for Sociocultural Sport and Olympic Research, California State University, Fullerton
  • Guest panelist: Nola Agha 
  • The Enhanced Games? A sub two-hour marathon? Athletes playing into their 40s? Sporting feats that seemed impossible to imagine at the turn of the millennium when the World Anti-Doping Agency was created now seem to be regular occurrences. Thanks in large part to breakthroughs in sport science, athletes are stretching the boundaries of human performance. At the same time, public attitudes towards enhancement in sport, or at least the moral acceptance of science in pursuit of enhanced performance in sport, indicates that it might be time to revisit the ethical reasoning that informed the anti-doping rules prohibiting performance enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids and human growth hormone. By examining the historical evolution of anti-doping across professional and Olympic sport, and the ethical reasoning used to justify prohibiting athletes from doping, this talk will consider what ethical challenges might be used to call into question current anti-doping rules and whether such anti-doping rules continue to make sense in the contemporary sporting landscape.
• 11:00 am to 12:20 pm: The Economic Impact and Public Subsidization of Sports
  • Nola Agha, Professor of Sport Management, University of San Francisco
  • Guest panelist: Chris W. Surprenant

  • Over $15 billion USD will be spent to construct major league, minor league, and college stadiums and arenas opening in 2026. Taxpayers typically cover about half of this amount. Economic impact is one of the primary justifications for these public subsidies. In the first half of 2026, over 1,000 news stories claimed that sport events, teams, athletes, and facilities generated an average economic impact of $2.1 billion each. These ubiquitous, overwhelmingly positive reports lead to an entrenched public belief in the economic value of sport. Yet decades of academic studies find virtually no support for these claims. Instead, that research regularly finds benefits accruing to private sport businesses and costs accruing to governments who must then cut services or raise taxes, both of which are regressive actions that can contract the local economy. This presentation discusses what economic impact is and why academic studies reach conclusions that differ so markedly from those of hired consultants. When pondering the political process that continues to approve generous sport subsidies, welfare economics can inform the ethical evaluation of resource-allocation that city councils and policy makers should consider.

• 12:20 to 1:30 pm: No Host Lunch
• 1:30 to 2:50 pm: Accommodating Transgender Athletes
  • Chris W. Surprenant, Professor of Ethics, Strategy and Public Policy and Director of the Urban Entrepreneurship and Policy Institute, University of New Orleans
  • Guest panelist: Rebecca Chan 
  • The challenges of trying to accommodate transgender athletes appropriately in competitive sports come from living in a society that places a high value on athletic achievement, as well as on the competing virtues of equality, individual freedom, and fairness. On an individual level, a person's participation in competitive sports confers benefits to that individual, with those benefits increasing dramatically as the person becomes more skillful and successful; that is, when they win more. On a societal level, the meritocratic nature of competitive sports, combined with our collective desire to win and to associate the winner with who is the best, has led sports to play a central role in advancing social change in the US, particularly in the areas of race and sex. This paper starts from the assumption that it is a matter of justice generally to regard a trans man as a man and a trans woman as a woman. Even given this assumption, it is not obvious that this general position should be extended to competitive sports in any and all cases, and, in particular, to the participation in women's sports by trans women or trans men.
• 3:00 to 4:20 pm: The Phenomenology of Fandom
  • Rebecca Chan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, San José State University
  • Guest panelist: John Gleaves 
  • I discuss fandom through the lens of devotion and fanaticism. I argue that fandom is best understood as a phenomenological state that involves both an existential-ish commitment and a simultaneous recognition that the commitment is trivial. Inspired by Jorge Portilla, I explain how fans are both apretados (value fanatics) and relajientos (enemies of seriousness). The former places fans in a similar position to fanatics—the object of fandom/fanaticism is identity-shaping and thus provides meaning. The latter (typically) prevents fans from sliding into the extremism associated with fanaticism, whether it be religious, political, or otherwise.
• 4:20 to 4:30 pm: Closing Remarks

For further information, please visit CSUS Practical and Professional Ethics or contact Professor Kyle Swan at kyle.swan@csus.edu. To request reasonable accommodations, please contact Professor Swan by October 23, 2026.

Employees: This event qualifies for Flex credit and meets Professional Development Guideline B.

Acknowledgements

This event was made possible by the generous support of:

• Wagenlis Foundation with support from Bank of America
• Cosumnes River College Office of the President
• Sacramento State Office of the President
• Heterodox Academy
• Sacramento Educational Cable Consortium

We also wish to thank:

• Cosumnes River College Center for Professional Development
• Los Rios Graphic Design Services