The framework involves breaking down ethical problems into key components: affected parties, such as athletes, coaches and sport doctors; empirical facts, such as injury statistics from multiple sports; ethical and legal norms, including principles of beneficence and justice, the U.S. Constitution; and available options, including, changing rules, changing equipment or taking no action. This structured approach ensures a thorough evaluation of potential conflicts among those components.
The So Far No Objections method allowed me to present and analyze the relevant issues in a way that both scholars and readers without a strong background in philosophy could easily understand. To the best of my knowledge, this framework has not been previously applied to sport-related ethical issues, making its use in this context both innovative and impactful.
Q: What is the primary ethical question about football in the United States today?
López Frías: There are a number of highly nuanced ethical issues, but the primary tension surrounding football is balancing respect for individual autonomy and the desire to protect people from harm.
People who want others to be well and healthy might look at the harms that football players may incur and decide that people should not be allowed to play such a dangerous game. At the high school level, football players experience more concussions than other varsity athletes. At the collegiate level, football players experience the fourth most concussions of any varsity athletes. Additionally, football practices and games involve a huge number of sub-concussive head injuries that are believed to cumulatively contribute to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition linked to repeated head injuries. Despite advances in player-safety equipment in recent years, concussions and other head injuries remain common in the sport.
On the other hand, people in the United States value — and have always valued — individual freedoms. In a liberal democracy, people typically are allowed to make choices that can harm themselves, as long as they do not harm other people. The values of our society suggest that if football players know the risks and make the free choice to participate, they should be allowed to play the game.
Many football players and fans have grappled with this issue over the years.
Q: What are some of the issues that make the questions more nuanced?
López Frías: One concern is defining what constitutes a free choice. For a choice to be truly free, it needs to be made by the individual who has access to any relevant information, and that decision cannot be coerced.
If a football league were to hide evidence about the dangers of head injuries from their players, for example, then those players would not be making a free choice because they would lack information relevant to their health and safety.
Questions of coercion are even more complicated because coercion can come in many forms from many different places. As one example, if a player sees football as their only opportunity to provide for themselves and their family financially, can we say that they are making a free choice?
On the other hand, what makes football different than other sports? Concussions are common among ice hockey players, boxers and soccer players. If we alter or limit access to football, what responsibility do we have to people who play other sports? Or for that matter, what about mountain climbing or smoking? How dangerous does an activity need to be before it is too dangerous to be permissible?
Examining these questions can help us develop solutions that are fair to everyone and reflect our collective societal values.
Q: What is the value of football?
López Frías: Football is valuable in many, many ways.
Players experience very real benefits to their physical and mental health. We live in a society where obesity-related problems are more and more prevalent, and there is nothing like a sport to help people engage in — and remain engaged in — exercise. Additionally, there seems to be magic in the comradery of participating in a team sport like football that drives people to strive for athletic excellence.
Also, the United States has embraced baseball, basketball and — above all — football as the sports that are widely socially relevant. The game connects us to many aspects of life and competition that we value. Its popularity helps people feel connected to others and develop friendships and social bonds. In an era when political divisiveness is commonplace, something that can bring the whole country together — like the Super Bowl — can provide common ground for people who may not feel they have much else in common.
Q: Why are there unique ethical questions around football that do not apply to other sports?
López Frías: For one thing, during the fall and winter in the United States, football can seem almost inescapable. At the high school, college and professional levels, the sport is widely watched and discussed. Television viewing numbers show that it is the most popular spectator sport in the nation, with the Super Bowl acting as a sort of unofficial national holiday. So, any ethical questions about football take on an outsized importance because of its prominence in our society.
Fundamentally, because of the violence and injury associated with football, there have been questions about its permissibility since it was created. A decade ago, however, a series of autopsies on former professional football players demonstrated that many had suffered from CTE. The study on football players provided the largest body of evidence regarding the degenerative disease that continues to inform our understanding today. In recent years, CTE has been central to any discussion about the ethics of football and other sports where participants frequently incur head injuries.
Q: Do the ethical questions change when we discuss children playing football?
López Frías: The questions do not necessarily change, but the answers might. Children’s brains, which are still developing, are more susceptible to the injuries associated with tackle football. Additionally, children are more vulnerable to the influence of authority figures, so it is difficult to argue that children are making — or are capable of making — a free and informed choice to participate.
There are many instances in our society where we restrict potential harms from children that we allow for adults. For example, access to cigarettes and alcohol is restricted by age. We know these products can harm people, but we allow adults to make their own decisions. That does not mean that we allow children to smoke and drink, regardless of whether their parents think it should be permissible.
Q: What can be done to address some of these ethical issues?
López Frías: If parents of youth players and fans of the sport want to see changes to the sport, they can demand them.
Solutions to some of these issues — like developing more nuanced understandings of the contexts in which football players make significant decisions, such as returning to play after a brain injury or retiring — have been proposed. Many questions remain open to inquiry, which is what makes the game an interesting topic for those of us who study the philosophy of sport.