Let's pretend we're Judith Jarvis Thomson for a moment (merely in spirit, not in body or experience, of course):
Imagine you enjoy watching people punch themselves in the head. Repeatedly. About 40 to 60 times in a three hour period, once a week. Those who successfully recite the alphabet after three hours of self-head punching are lavished with gifts. And imagine that this exercise, namely punching yourself in the head and watching others punch themselves in the head, was social acceptable in your historically situated time and place.
Now imagine that people who have the honor and privilege to freely participate in this exercise have transparent skulls. (Why? Well why does Thomson asks us to imagine that we are magically hooked up to a violinist to make a point about abortion? Just read on, will you?) The great thing about the transparent skull is that you can see the individual self-head puncher's brain. Each punch the person delivers to his head is not sufficiently strong so as to incapacitate him. However, after the second hour, you notice a tiny, tiny bruise forming on one of the participant's brain (though not all of them, at least, not that you can tell). At first, just a small purple-blue-black mark. So small, in fact, that you dismiss it as totally unimportant.
Now every week, you watch your favorite self-head punchers with greater zeal than the week before. But every week that you watch, you notice that the bruise keeps growing. And growing. And growing. Just to wrap things up, assume that the human body in our thought experiment is the same, and functions in the same way, as our actual human bodies. Thus, safe to say, the long-term effects of brain bruises on the brains of our participants is not good for their long-term health.
Clearly I have (at least) two sports in mind with this thought experiment: football and boxing. And let me be frank - I love watching both sports. The question of whether it is morally permissible to watch football and boxing, and enjoy it, is very important to me (e.g. I'm still waiting for Mayweather to accept a fight against Pacquiao - epic!)
With regard to the thought experiment, the question is would it be acceptable to watch this activity, self-head punching, whereby a person bruises his brain even though it is (i) voluntary and (ii) he or she receives gifts. The reason it's important to specify the voluntariness and compensation vis-a-vis the activity in question is to remove two of the easier objections against the activity itself, namely, it being involuntary with no compensation. I'm granting these two conditions in order to get the argument of whether it is permissible to watch the self-head punchers off the ground. In turn, this eliminates drawing the analogy to college football or amateur boxing. Having said that, one could very well question the voluntariness of sports (e.g. sports are often a means to better socioeconomic status, as in the case of black youth in Florida, among other places, or question what it means to volunteer for an activity in which you may not understand the repercussions) and whether there is any amount of compensation that can make up for harming oneself.
In addition, the thought experiment does not necessarily extend to other contact sports, namely hockey and futbol, aka, soccer. One could easily conceive of soccer without allowing players to head the ball, and maybe even hockey with no toleration of any kind of head shots. In these cases, these sports could still be considered soccer and hockey. However, removing the type of contact that is required in football may very well change the sport so fundamentally so that it is no longer football; boxing would be in a similar boat (e.g. what would boxing be if you only allowed body shots?) Without getting caught up with this point, it seems at least intuitively plausible to argue that head contact is more fundamental to football and boxing but less so for hockey and almost not at all for futbol.
So then the self-head punchers, it seems, are most like professional football players and boxers. The participate voluntarily in their activities and they're well compensated (at least in the NFL... 'poor' CFLers). The only difference is that we can see the bruises on the brains of the self-head punchers but not the football players and boxers.
Since we're playing intuitionist-casuistry, it would seem that whether you can see someone's brain get bruised versus not being able to see a person's brain get bruised is not morally relevant. In both cases, a person's brain is bruised and bruised brains are prima facie bad for one's health.
So I'll end the post with a final question (the one you all saw coming): are you okay with watching a self-head puncher bruise his brain knowing what are the likely long-term repercussions for him? If not, how is watching football and boxing any different?
By the way, I really want to be wrong. I really want to see if the Patriots can go for 19-0 next year.
Diego
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