Mike McNamee

In the formation of the multi-disciplinary field that investigates the participation of disabled persons in all forms of physical activity, little ethical and philosophical work has been published. This essay serves to contextualise a range of issues emanating from adapted physical activity (APA) and disability sports. First, we offer some general historical and philosophical remarks about the field which serve to situate those issues at the crossroads between the philosophy of disability and the philosophy of sports. Secondly, we bring brief but critical attention to the contestation of key concepts such as ?ability? and ?normality? and the recent criticisms of polarisation of the medical and social models of disability. Finally, we show how these conceptual issues are implicated in the whole spectrum of contexts of APA and disability sports from the ethics of research with and for the disabled, to coaching, rehabilitation and teaching, and sports administration, that are predicated on key ethical concepts including empathy, entitlement and equity

The potential of physical activity to improve our health has been the subject of extensive research [38]. The relationship between physical activity and well-being has prompted substantial interest from exercise psychologists in particular [3], and it seems, is generating increasing interest outside the academic community in healthcare policy and practice inter alia through GP referrals for exercise. Researchers in the field have benefited from a rich tradition within psychology that investigates subjective well-being and its antecedents [7]. We argue that the exercise and health psychology research suffers from this intellectual ancestry specifically in the form of two significant conceptual limitations. First, short-term pleasure and enjoyment which are associated with exercise induced well-being may mask activities that are doing us no good or even harm us [18]. Second, focusing on pleasure entails unacceptable methodological reductionism which undermines the validity of such research by excluding other ways in which our well-being may be enhanced in non-hedonistic terms.