What is cheating?  To a first approximation, it is the wrong of violating a rule of a cooperative enterprise for the purpose of securing an advantage that the rule is designed to foreclose.  That’s an adequate start, but not more than that.  It is widely agreed, for example, that many tactical rule violations in sports do not constitute cheating.  Furthermore, many observers believe that at least some instances of gamesmanship or loopholing that do not violate a rule are nonetheless cheating, or at least cheatingish.  In this paper, I argue that previous analyses of cheating and loopholing are unsatisfactory, and I offer a novel account of my own. 

Much simplified, I propose that cheating involves the violation of a second-order norm of a normative system—what I call a “metanorm”—that regulates agents’ conduct with respect to the system’s first-order (“primary”) norms.  In developing and defending this suggestion, the paper aims to offer successful analyses of cheating and of the kindred phenomenon of loopholing, and also to introduce metanormativity as a dimension of normative systems that promises broad explanatory power and therefore warrants sustained attention.  That is to say, I am as interested in the machinery that the paper employs as I am in the application of the machinery to the particular problem of cheating.  Finally, insofar as the paper draws liberally from sports, law, and moral theory, I hope that it may, if at all successful, encourage normative philosophers who have either not encountered the philosophy of sport, or who have dismissed it, to take the field more seriously.