Is anybody even raising questions out there?

In case there was any doubt, I'm really not the only person out there trying to raise questions about the ethics of watching football. And if anything, I'm a little late to the game.

Note: some of these various sources may have been referenced in previous blog entries. That's o.k.

One of the earlier and more big-splash entries in questioning football was this piece in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, all the way back in 2009. For the most part the article does not engage in ethical argument; much of its energy is in documentation, recording the experiences of ex-NFL player Kyle Turley; early efforts by Dr. Ann McKee and Dr. Bennet Omalu, two of the principal researchers who detected chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of deceased football players; and the research efforts of Kevin Guskiewicz at the University of North Carolina, seeking to quantify and document the force of the blows football players take. However, when Gladwell begins to wonder if football is any different in a moral sense than dogfighting (the Michael Vick case was recent at the time), that's ethical judgment even in the mere raising of the question. Gladwell's conclusion -- that nothing will change as long as people continue to follow the game with their dollars -- is not new to regular readers of this blog.

With time, other ethical ponderings began to surface, sometimes in out-of-the-way places. An author by the name of Nathan Bransford wondered out loud if watching football was an ethically viable activity anymore. Citing Gladwell's essay, Bransford also notes several player suicides (Dave Duerson and Junior Seau among them) as well as the vicious injury and eventual death of Washington Huskies safety Curtis Williams in 2000 (which Bransford witnessed live); Williams lingered, paralyzed, for a year and a half after his injury. Bransford keeps his ethical query simple:

"But should we really be supporting a system that incentivizes people to destroy their brains for our pleasure?"

Indeed.

As far as I can tell, Bransford has not returned to the subject.

The blog of the Kenan Institute for Ethics posted in 2013 a starkly titled entry, "A Fan's Moral Imperative: Is Watching Football Ethical?" About a year later, the journal Commonweal put forth a similarly themed entry by its digital editor Dominic Preziosi, "What are the ethics of watching football?" Both entries are more devoted to question-asking than actual ethical argument (that's not a criticism, by the way; this was more than most corners of the ethical sphere were doing at this point). Both clearly seem to be written by authors who really didn't even want to be asking questions at that point, much less even hinting at possible answers that might damage their football-watching habits. Prizes at least performs the valuable service of asking a pertinent question and making a pertinent point:

But are there criteria for such a decision? ... but it does seem as if we're at the place where someone might need to, if people are in fact serious about challenging the role hundreds of millions [of] nonparticipants play in putting the long-term health of thousands at such great and provable risk. 

I challenge Preziosi's description of spectators as "nonparticipants" -- simply not being on the field does not equal participation in the sport, and in fact I will argue that it is precisely that "participation" of these "nonparticipants" that perpetuates the irrevocable and unavoidable damage of the game as it currently exists. Nonetheless, that is a prescient point; it's time for some criteria. While there are discussion of sport ethics on a more general plane, they aren't always good at getting down to this particular nitty-gritty question.

HuffPost Religion actually took enough of an interest in the subject to wonder if watching football was actually a sin. At least, it took enough interest to put together a podcast on the subject.

Probably after Gladwell, Ta-Neishi Coates would be the most famous non-sports person to weigh in on the subject (Charles Peirce writes plentifully about sports so he doesn't count, and Coates is probably more famous that Peirce anyway.) The death of Junior Seau was the deal-breaker for Coates; as he put it at the end of this piece in The Atlantic, "I'm out." Coates also makes the distinction between seeking to have the sport banned (a non-starter) and refusing to watch (easily doable). You will note that this blog hews to the latter position.

You will note that these entries so far take no particular religious position; some of the authors are explicitly not religious persons and others simply do not make any kind of religous argument part of their own argument or claim. Benjamin Dueholm provides an exception. Writing for the Christian Century in 2012, Dueholm begins the process of asking explicitly Christian moral questions about the game and the fascination with it, even -- or especially -- among Christians as its destructive capacity became clearer and clearer. Not surprisingly Dueholm turns to the ancients and their critique of gladiatorial spectacle in his own reflection. His conclusions are must-read;

Christians, too, need pastimes and diversions. The question is which ones honor the image of God and the call to justice and equity. 

Aye, there's the rub. "Created in the image of God," if we take it seriously, is a theological proposition that cannot help but call into question any activity that mars said image beyond repair or healing. That is one theological point of contact for Christian ethical discussion on football and its damage.

There are more yet to come.

It hasn't always been easy to find, but ethical wondering is out there...