The issues of morality, the morality plays, the meta-ethics of nations take centre stage at this point in the Olympics. What are the stories we are focussing on?
Whether and how the Chinese have enabled a 16 year old swimmer to smash record times and finish way ahead of her field (like Ben Johnson did).
Crowds in the fencing and badminton arenas booing and slow hand clapping at 'unsporting' tactics depriving them of the chance to lose themselves in their expectations of the theatre of sport.
We are basking in Michael Phelps becoming the greatest ever Olympian with his staggering haul of medals, and trying hard to think of a British swimmer finishing 6th in a world final as a great achievement, despite attaching to it a nagging sense of national failure.
My girlfriend has pointed me in the direction of a debate airing on the radio tonight asking whether we have over complicated sport and begun to demand too much from it. Perhaps she thinks I was getting too excited by the Danny Boyle ceremony, or too angry at some of the people questioning it's motives and agendas. Maybe the inexorable rise of these events into ever more spectacular national shows with massive budgets and expectations has struck a hollow chord.
I think, and I know she does too, that the discipline and teamwork involved, even in training for individual sports, are of huge value to young people. Veering away from the Victorian Public School sounding affiliations of shaping character, and values, it really is the taking part that counts, whoever and wherever you are.
That is the middle ground I expect a debate to settle in when it asks 'What exactly is the moral value of sport?'. Involvement, individual purpose, flow, human relationships, travel (even to the next sports field), community, fitness, and even through a well practiced competitive streak perhaps this is the the moral value of sport, if it needs one at all, to help people to connect in the image of playing the game, and lose themselves in the thrall. Questions of morality and value tend to disappear at moments like that, which is maybe all the reason we need for 'playing' anything.