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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2006

The Olympic games as a key moment to develop an ethical future ?

Françoise Papa
  • Fonction : Auteur
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Résumé

We suggest to address here the following issue : is it possible to turn the Olympic games into an
opportunity to build an ethical future? This notion of an ethical future is not, according to Jean-
Pierre Dupuy, the one that will or should prevail, but that which we will build considering the
present and thinking of the future.
Social sciences have clearly showed, mainly in the economic field, that publicly forecasting and
heralding a social fact often results in modifying this very fact. The notion, confirmed in various
surveys, that forecasting events may contribute to their very realisation, is highly interesting for
the present survey. Indeed, nowadays'representations of the olympic ideal's reality and future are
often negative, forecasting at worst its disappearance, at best a deep change in it.
The olympic institution, like all other human institutions, has nowadays to face deep technical,
social changes, which also implies that other things will change : for instance the relationships of
the olympic institution with its environment.
In the future, because of technical evolution and the joint influences of cognitive sciences and of
nano, bio and information technologies,major revolutions may take place like the self-
organisation or copying of living beings or, thanks to new information and communication
techniques, the individual access to information : all such things will threaten the universalist
ambition of the Olympic values.
The development of our planet entails major environmental and social issues such as the
protection of natural, cultural and social balances, the right for every person to have access to
prosperity : all such aspects which are sometimes contradictory with one another, all the more as
the choices of the olympic institution crucially depend on the environment.
The ideals that ground the Olympic games, though they are universally shared, are also
jeopardised by merchandization. Speeches against sports being perverted by money and the
media or attacks about information being used by economic and political powers become
common.
These are not new facts but they become more acute now and even lead to question the
legitimacy of institutions and the durability of their actions.
Such questions nowadays affect every sports institution and are widely debated in the press, for
as they create ambition and expectations, the Olympic Games are even more overexposed in the
media.
I would then like to address the possibility of creating an ethical future by analysing the
relationships between the media and the olympic institution.
Sports and journalism are two comparable practices in so far as they both have tight relationships
with society as Habermas put it : the media « build opinions» while sports « build values », that is
to say sports values and more generally social values epitomized by the Olympic ideal.
The Olympic Games have a universal scope dimension and are at the junction of several social
practices : are they then capable of representing the major issues our society has to face?
In other words, can the values conveyed by the Olympic movement help us think of a better
future ? This is what we shall focus on throughout this survey.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00389923 , version 1 (30-05-2009)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00389923 , version 1

Citer

Françoise Papa. The Olympic games as a key moment to develop an ethical future ?. 2006 Beijing Forum
The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All - Reflections on the Civilization Modes of Humankind
, Oct 2006, Beijing, China. ⟨halshs-00389923⟩
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